*THERE are some very brave and high-principled people in Worcester who stand in city centre streets every weekend ready to help revellers in distress.

The Street Pastors are a Christian group whose members sacrifice their leisure hours to go to the aid of drunks, fight victims and the other detritus of our 24-hour drinking culture.

If you want to get some idea of what this entails, try walking along New Street, Friar Street or Angel Place on a Saturday night at around 11 o’clock.

And then, once safely into Sidbury, try to imagine what enduring six or seven hours of almost constant noise and aggression must be like.

When I was a young reporter in a northern town, there was a single pub that had to be avoided at all costs.

Unless, of course, you didn’t mind running the risk of being glassed or otherwise disabled.

There are those who pretend that things are no worse than ever they were. They are either liars or deluded, because believe me, our towns and city centres were not always as bad as this.

The tragedy is that we now regard the abnormal as normality. But thank God for the Street Pastors, all the same.

*THIS column recently drew readers’ attention to the insidious and ubiquitous use by the media of the term ‘UK’ rather than Britain.

There’s always one person in the class who can’t keep up, and this materialised in the form of a letter writer who lectured me on the definition of the ‘UK’, maintaining that I didn’t understand what it defined.

My original point was that regardless of the land mass being referred to, the growing use of ‘UK’ rather than Great Britain – where applicable – was a form of political correctness that was more about dogma rather than geographical borders.

What’s so awful about saying ‘Britain’?