Sign of the Times

In an interview in today's Telegraph Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire states, when bemoaning the modern, touchy-feely, wimp culture:

"The disaster of someone dying was talked about for a bit and the person was mourned, but you didn't go on about it and take pills and have to be counselled.

Money and illness and sex were not talked about in those days and they are the only thing people talk about these days, aren't they? Self-pity and self-esteem, which are now the key things in schools, were not allowed."

Contrast that commonsense approach to the following, which appears in the same newspaper:

"Postmen have been told they do not have to deliver to homes on cobbled streets in bad weather, because rain makes them too dangerous."