WE live in a cynical age. You snort derisively, thereby proving my point, which will hopefully come to me during the course of this improving lecture or homily.

Here’s the gist or nub: researchers at the universities of Cologne and Tilburg have found that cynicism can make you ill (and, more understandably, that being ill can make you cynical). If your Asda has a decent magazines section, you may have read about this in the European Journal of Personality.

The researchers suggested that stable social networks could break the vicious cycle of cynicism and poor health, but this is to close the stable door after the horse has legged it. For, these days, cynicism underpins our society.

It is rife, spread by social – that word again; the root of all our ills – media, where everyone’s motives are relentlessly questioned. Everyone deconstructs everyone else. We’re deconstructing ourselves to the point where everything lies apart in pieces.

You may say there’s nothing new in this, and I’d agree, but it used to be the prerogative of properly qualified people called journalists, who did it all for you, interrogating power on your behalf. Now you do it yourselves, which is pretty rotten if you ask me.

When I had to tail around with the Holyrood hack-pack, just before the time when social media started ruining everything, I noted how they took nothing on trust from politicians. This was understandable, even commendable, but was taken to ridiculous extremes.

The most straightforward statement was treated with suspicion. What was really behind it? In truth, the problem lay with the hacks’ fear of having one put over on them, but the effect was entirely corrosive, which was fine while limited to rusting old hacks, but now everyone’s at it.

As I’ve remarked before, nobody used to be interested in politics. Now everyone is. We have so much democracy that it’s undermining democracy. And the politicians are playing their part. I will be candid with you here and confess that it’s sad to become your dad. But that’s what I’m becoming. Even his bewildered, glaikit expression is now mine.

Decades ago – when he was alive, like – he used to say that all politicians were the same, and I’d say, with the unearned authority of youth: “Shut up, you.” But, gradually, my faith has been peeled away.

Those of you who cut out and collect these columns in scrapbooks will be able to use the index systems therein to find recent efforts of mine defending politicians as being superior to ordinary persons. But now they’re just as bad.

Whether it’s Ruth Davidson supporting both Brexit and Remain, or the SNP being both horrified by Project Fear (when applied to getting out of one union) and in favour of it (when defending another union that’s even more opaque), or Labour promising to do in office what they never do in office, or the Lib Dems pledging not to be so treacherous next time, how can one not be cynical?

Mind you, cynicism isn’t what it used to be. In ancient Greece, it was espoused by fellows seeking a simple life of virtue who were, perforce, skeptical – so to say – of conventional society. The problem with this being that, rather like adolescents, they had to have something against which to rebel. They needed the thing they deplored.

And Diogenes, one of the philosophy’s founders, ended up living in a ceramic jar, which was never going to impress anyone. There, now I’m being cynical about cynicism. I think I will lie down. For, all of a sudden, I am feeling unwell.

Rab McNeil: When Trump meets the Royal family

Aggressive swimmers

WHO on Earth goes swimming in this day and age? Well, nearly everybody, if a survey commissioned by seafood canners John West is to be believed.

The survey was actually reported in shock-horror terms with the news that one in three adults hadn’t been to the local pool in a decade. One in three? My arithmetic is rubbish but does that equate to the 95 per cent that the answer must surely have really meant?

For the truth is that hardly anybody goes swimming apart from a tiny minority who do it instead of proper exercise – on land.

I think it’s 12 years since I was in a pool, and I cannot pretend I enjoyed the experience. There’s nothing to do except swim. No goals to score, no peaks to ascend.

I also fell foul of one of these typically British intense exercisers, splashing aggressively down a racing lane and shouting at me to get out of the way after my legs had bobbed up to the surface and wouldn’t go back down.

Apart from that, at some gyms I might see people in a nearby pool swimming back and forward in a seemingly vegetative state. Something distinctly fishy about that.

Rab McNeil@: An extra 31 hours of leisure time sounds like it could be too much hard work

High streets down the Swanny

THIS is getting ridiculous. Now, 200 Boots stores up and arguably down the land could be closed.

The high streets that we all knew and loved, and didn’t care much about, are going down the Suwannee. Must say I’m never in Boots much. It’s not really a man’s place.

You go in and stand looking bewildered because you don’t know where anything is, until eventually you approach the counter and say in a loud voice: “I’d like to stop farting, please.” Or ask if they still sell home-brew kits.

Same with Debenham’s and BHS, as was. You might not go in much but it was good to know they were there. What if Markies goes? Or John Lewis? It would feel like civilisation was crumbling.

Topshop is also in difficulties, though I haven’t been there for years, since changing tailors to Asda’s George range. Supermarkets aren’t helping high street shops by muscling in on their territory.

Fact is it’s easier to hide your haemorrhoid cream in a big supermarket trolley-load of stuff than to risk taking it to a counter where the assistant might shout across the shop to her supervisor: “How much is this cream for the gentleman’s Nobby Stiles?”