SOMETIMES we newspaper columnists paint a bleak picture of life in modern Britain as we rail against injustice, wrongdoing and the sheer greed and stupidity of many of those who govern us.

But thankfully there are still people out there, men like Penrith railway worker Tomas Sepetkowski and my local postie, who go that extra mile in the cause of serving the public.

Tomas was the helpful chap who featured in the Herald recently, when he was presented with a bottle of bubbly by a regular traveller impressed by the way he handled delays and passenger frustrations during the big freeze.

The grateful businessman said that Tomas made cups of tea for a group of stranded passengers and regularly kept them informed about the delays.

I don’t know what Tomas gets paid, but I imagine it’s nothing compared to rail bosses, MPs who rip off taxpayers over their expenses, bankers who aren’t in the least bit contrite and still expect huge bonuses for losing our cash, and a host of non-producing bureacurats.

But isn’t it so often the case that the less well off in society are the ones who turn up trumps when the going gets tough, while the wealthy movers and shakers skulk off into the shadows at the first hint of trouble?

Health and safety — yes, those terrible twins — so often rear their ugly heads nowadays as an excuse for doing nothing.

I happen to think that dear old H&S has been a licence for every town hall jobsworth in Britain to cause the maximum annoyance.

Royal Mail recently instructed postmen that it was too dangerous to deliver to houses on a cobbled street in the town of Bideford, Devon. Now all the mail is left at one house.

And a Dispatches investigation for Channel 4 this week revealed a sorry saga of damaged mail, late deliveries and sloppy practices which made you wonder if you would be better off getting in the car and driving your mail to the destination and delivering it in person.

Yet my postie presents the other side of the story. During the recent freeze, he trudged through snow and skated up icebound garden paths — I should know because mine was one of the worst — and cheerfully got the mail out.

Even the bins were collected, not always on the intended day, but the council staff got round to them once the roads were relatively clear.

Yet in Coventry dustmen have been banned from emptying wheelie bins if lids are only open by a quarter of an inch. It’s health and safety again, you see. The rubbish might jump out and injure them.

Citing health and safety, refuse collectors use tape measures to check whether lids which appear firmly shut are open by even a fraction. They aren’t men and they don’t even deserve to be compared to mice.

Granny Doreen Stubbs put it succinctly when she said: “If little old ladies can drag their bins then surely men can use a bit of common sense and compassion.”

Bureacracy knows no bounds in some of these local authorities. The clear impression I get is that health and safety is more a matter of interpretation than of hard and fast rules. You can employ commonsense or you can be as petty-minded and awkward as you like. It’s your choice if you are one of these jobsworths with a clipboard and a huge chip on your shoulder.

If more people were like Penrith station’s “snow hero” and my local posties, we’d all rub along together a heck of a lot better and health and safety wouldn’t be the province of small minded nitpickers with too much power or the bête noir of a large and frustrated section of the British public.

EGGS AND BACON

AT first I thought it was an April Fool joke — until I checked the calendar to make sure it really was still February. A survey of more than 1,000 children discovered that two thirds of them thought eggs and bacon came from sheep and butterflies produced cheese.

Young people, raised on a diet of processed food and ready meals, are unable to connect the food they eat with its source. More than half the food consumed in the UK is produced on British farms yet kids haven’t a clue.

Back in the 1950s older television viewers will recall the spoof April 1st story claiming spaghetti, which was then relatively new in this country, grew on trees in Italy.

Now it’s no joke. Not when Britain’s roots as a farming nation are so shrouded in ignorance that kids think bacon sarnies come straight from sheep. Herdwicks will be running for their lives if they see a school party marching into view over the horizon.

I guess mothers no longer cook with their youngsters and very few kids have been down on the farm to find out the real origins of their food.

The Government is always coming up with some new educational gimmick. Another form of testing. Another fashionable addition to the curriculum.

Instead of the periodic nonsense, a bit of good old DS — that’s domestic science as we old-timers used to know it — wouldn’t be a bad idea, for girls and boys.

FLUSHED TO DEATH

IF writer Martin Amis gets his way and they start installing suicide booths in the high street, some of us older folk who, apart from eccentric waterworks still have a bit of life left in us, had better watch out.

Just imagine mistaking the self euthanasing unit for one of those modern super loos. One tug of the chain and you’re en-route to a tricky meeting with St. Peter who isn’t expecting you and is therefore not in the best of moods to hear your plaintive appeals that it was all a terrible error and you were really only hoping to reach the drop-in centre fully continent.

WE’RE SO CUTESY

READING a travel supplement in one of the national newspapers the other day I came over all queasy after seeing the Lake District described as “cutesy”.

I imagine some tourists already think of us as a glorified theme park anyway. A situation not helped when television presenters and travel writers adopt that whimsical look while banging on about our curiosity value.

But cutesy? Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, twee touristy gift shops and Hunter Davies have got a lot to answer for. More’s the pity Alfred Wainwright wasn’t still around to dismiss this faux romanticism with a bit of crotchety plain speaking. One thing’s for sure, they never called A. W. cutesy.

A “REAL” CELEB

THESE days the words celebrity and notoriety seem to go together. So isn’t it grand to have a “real” celebrity to cheer — and a local lass at that.

Blue Peter presenter Helen Skelton has broken records with her daunting kayaking adventure along the Amazon and raised the profile of Sport Relief.

Sporting stars dominate the headlines for all the wrong reasons. So well done, Helen, for showing us the other side of the coin. As Crocodile Dundee might say, “Now that’s a real celebrity!”