lAN old friend from the distant past contacted me earlier this year. And I mean distant - the last time we had met was during the late summer of 1975. For some reason, our paths diverged and we walked out of each other's lives.

Then, out of the blue, he contacted me earlier this year. He'd found one of my articles on the internet and decided that maybe after nearly a third of a century, there might be a bit of catching-up to do.

A few e-mails were then exchanged and before you could say 'cyberspace' we were swapping memories over a drink and a meal in a restaurant near his home in Exeter.

During the evening, I mentally reviewed the last three decades. Punk rock had come and gone, the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the USSR, Margaret Thatcher had risen and fell, The Falklands invaded and re-taken....the list, if not endless, was certainly very great. Yet a bridge spanning all this had been created via electronic pulses on a visual display unit. Ee, science ain't half wonderful.

lTHE main reason why people are becoming aggressive is because of overcrowding.

When the first census was conducted in the early 19th Century, the population stood at just over eight million. There are now 60 million people living in Britain. Within 200 years, our numbers have increased more than seven-fold. So, by the year 2206 there will be 420 million souls competing for space on an island that will probably have shrunk in size due to rising sea levels. I imagine there will certainly be a few frayed nerves then