GPS tagging devices are being used to keep track of people with dementia. If only this enlightened scheme had been operating in the days of the great GK Chesterton. When he was a reporter on The Evening News he once sent a telegram to say: “I’m in Huddersfield. Where should I be?”

Some have protested against this use for tagging, calling it “barbaric”. Well, if keeping a concerned eye on granddad is barbaric, what words are left to describe the battles, murders and violent deaths which afflict humankind every day?

I wouldn’t at all mind being tagged. I have no secrets. All those close to me know very well that I can always be found in or on the way to church, the pub or the bookies.

Though I confess my CV also includes occasional stopovers at the butchers and rare visits to a barber’s shop.

Think of the time, the money and, most of all, the anxiety that will be saved by tagging these lost sheep. It makes me want to ask why there is always hysterical objection to the implementation of something sensible and considerate?

We are used to hearing similar objections to good things such as nuclear power stations and new, cleaner, coal mines.

Tagging those likely to go astray is not barbaric.

It is not even demeaning. It is useful, helpful and compassionate. But we must get the technology right.

For example, on no account must these GPS tags be allowed to offer directions to the aged lost, stolen or strayed. There are too many stories of a sat nav dumping its innocent users in a lake – or halfway up Skiddaw when they only meant to pop round to our Annie’s for the afternoon.

Thinking about the, shall we say, late-middle- aged – and I speak as someone who inhabits this territory himself – I reckon there are plenty of ways in which we are offended already.

What height of condescension licenses strangers to whom I have never been introduced to call me by my Christian name upon first acquaintance such as the TV repair man over the phone and the doctor’s receptionist?

And why do they shout at us old-timers as if we were deaf? Surely instant intimacy is a prime symptom of the coarseness of modern times?

And it’s not just your Christian name they make a grab for. Next thing, they shorten it.

No sooner am I Peter than I have become Pete – which I abhor.

And if everybody is immediately on bosom-buddy terms with everyone else, what manner of salutation remains for when we do actually become friends? This pernicious over-friendliness in the way we are addressed is a sort of syntactic rape.

Okay. Rant over. There are compensations in getting old. Incipient geriatrics, such as I, have a lot to be thankful for.

I’m touched and delighted when a lady young enough to be my granddaughter offers her seat in the tube train.

And on the tube or the bus I still have the well-bred-in instinct to stand up for a lady, old and stricken in years as I am.

And I find I don’t actually mind being called “love” in Yorkshire, “pet” on Tyneside or “darling” when on daring expeditions into deepest Essex. It’s affectionate without the intrusive personalisation you feel when strangers call you by your Christian name.Where do I apply for my tag?

  • Apologies to our esteemed columnist for tinkering with his name at the top of the page We couldn’t resist