IT’S the most tragic and futile waste of all. The waste of young lives like those seen recently in the television documentary The Trouble With Girls, which followed the stories of three 16-year-old girls on a Rochdale council estate as they faced up to adult problems. During 12 months of filming there were three pregnancies.

An earlier BBC2 program looked at two more youngsters, trapped in a cycle of booze, drugs, petty crime and custody. Girls under 18 commit nearly 40 per cent. more crimes than seven years ago and we have the highest teenage pregnancy figures in western Europe.

When you see the drab, aimless lives of these young girls in a town where unemployment is rife, teenage pregnancy is above the national average and there is poor housing and racial tension, you have to wonder how we can ever call ourselves a civilised society.

We are truly a broken society and, as more teenagers bring more children into this feckless void, it can only get worse. It makes you wonder what these drifting youngsters, with their diet of crack and Special Brew, will be like when they are 40. That’s assuming they live that long. And what kind of world are they bringing their children into? A world in which their own hopeless lives are perpetuated by the next generation.

My generation has a lot to answer for. We have to take our share of responsibility for a society which produced Sharon Matthews, the mother implicated in her own daughter’s disappearance, and we can’t just blame inadequate and under-resourced social services for cases like Baby P.

It’s all well and good naming and shaming those responsible. But there’s one certainty, and that is it won’t be the last case of its kind.

The depressing aspect is that nothing really is ever done about the issue of Britain’s underclass. It’s easy to listen to Becki, Stacey and Vanessa, those three Rochdale teenagers, and their foul-mouthed railing against the world at large. To feel loathing for their squalid lives. To get angry at the ignorance.

But although these girls might have abandoned education and see nothing good ahead of them, there is a glimmer of brightness. Given opportunity they might make something of themselves. Yet it all seems so bleak and until a government comes along that really wants to grasp this enormous nettle, our society continues to be fractured.

And as we worthily collect for overseas charities and other good causes, the unappealing plight of a generation of lost kids right here in our gang-ridden towns and cities seems to come a poor second.

DIDN’T WE DO WELL!

I never think self-congratulation sounds like the best form of recommendation. Households across Cumbria, and by some strange quirk of the post code lottery homes as far north as Hawick in the Scottish Borders, have just received copies of a nifty little brochure headed “Safer Stronger Cumbria”, which is the local police summary for 2009.

Not for one moment do I dispute the claim that Cumbria is one of the safest places in the country, with the lowest levels of serious violent crime and a good detection rate. But whenever local councils and the police send out these flashy little magazines reminding us how good they are, I can’t help wondering how much, in these belt-tightening times, they have cost to produce and post. And how much more effectively the money spent on PR could be dispensed on doing the job they are really there for.

The majority of folk bin these booklets anyway. The most they are given is a cursory glance over the breakfast table. League tables and pledges are all very well, but for the police the proof of the pudding is in the reality of response times, visibility on the streets and how individuals are dealt with.

We are more concerned about staffing levels, and why some police stations are rarely open in the daytime, than we are about some cosmetic exercise in reassurance. So, I suspect, is your average paperwork-buried bobby.

FORGOTTEN LEGENDS

THERE’S a page in my battered old autograph book containing the signatures of Gordon Pirie and Arthur Rowe, who competed in the now defunct Keswick August Sports in the early 60s.

Gordon and Arthur who? Glory is truly transitory in sport and life. I don’t suppose many kids today could tell you who these athletics legends of their day were or what they achieved. In Pirie’s case an Olympic silver medal in 1956, the year after he was voted only the second BBC Sports Personality of the Year.

My memory was jogged when I saw that Ambleside sports had a couple of celebrities, Rory McGrath and Paddy McGuinness, in tow this year. I imagine the result of their attempt at Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling will be a typically clichéd television slot later in the year.

Celebrity appearances at Lakeland sports are nothing new. I recall seeing Jimmy Savile come to Keswick to run the fell race round about the same time Pirie and Rowe were rather sadly doing the rounds at the tail end of distinguished careers as track world record-holder and field events star.

There was also one year when Derek Ibbotson, another great British track runner, ran at Rydal giving away huge handicap starts to the rest of the field. It all seemed rather humiliating really.

I spotted Pirie in Fitz Park, recceing the circular grass track on the Saturday evening before the event. Both he and Rowe, the champion shot putter who later became a distinguished Highland Games athlete, had by now renounced their amateur status and were trying to pick up a few bob at sports gatherings.

Pirie was a giant of his time. A runner who inspired the likes of David Bedford and Brendan Foster. A rebel by nature, he never got on with the blazered powers in his sport. Nowadays top athletes are financed to train. Pirie worked Saturday mornings in a bank before rushing off to places like the White City to take on the best of the world.

He died of cancer aged 60 in 1991. In an obituary the writer Russell Davies referred to Pirie’s appearances at country sports events and said: “Nobody knew what to do with a professional runner at that time. He was a sort of shabby novelty.”

Rowe, who had a brief unsuccessful flirtation with rugby league, also died of cancer. But for one schoolboy fan now grown old, their names and achievements live on, if only on a yellowing page in an autograph album.

WASTING RESCUERS’ TIME

ONE Lakeland mountain rescue team says that some walkers think that it is a guiding service, ready and waiting to be called out to put them on the right path.

At the weekend, a group of 23 young people were escorted to safety after putting themselves in peril on the fells after dark. Rescue officials say that teenagers from the same North East college have come to their attention at least half a dozen times in recent years.

There’s an offence of wasting police time. Perhaps we need to think in terms of a similar offence relating to rescue volunteers in order to discourage the cavalier and selfish attitudes of people who stupidly put themselves in jeopardy and expect others to come and bail them out at risk to their own lives.