WE’RE all babies now. I really must get on and write my book The Infantilisation of Britain. It’s everywhere you look and in every sound you hear, throughout public space. It’s even got to the gee-gees. Yes, they really are applying mascara and eye-shadow to horses in gymkhanas.

And no, I am not pulling your leg.

Then the schools are letting little boys pretend they’re little girls and wear skirts and the girls can make out they’re really lads and put on trousers. Teachers are being told to stop calling children “he” or “she” and to use the “gender-neutral” so-called pronoun "Zie” instead. Children as young as five are being arraigned for sex abuse crimes when they’re caught playing doctors and nurses.

Are we mad? What a way to bring up the next generation. No wonder they’re all mixed up.

At the other end of the age range, women in their sixties are being allowed to bear children by in-vitro fertilisation, with the likely result that the offspring will be bereaved of its mother while still in its teens.

The Goddard inquiry into historic child sex abuse has collapsed – losing not one but all three people appointed as its leader. Dame Lowell Goddard, the most recent of the three leaders, was paid more than £300,000pa and has reportedly been awarded £90,000 on her resignation. This inquiry never stood a chance of doing anything worthwhile. How can anyone be sure that accusations of sexual abuse going back 40 years and more are verifiable?

Worse, those making the accusations are referred to as “survivors” of sexual abuse. They may be “survivors”, but how do we know this until the supposed act of sexual abuse has been proven – but that’s the very matter that is at issue? No doubt there have been shocking incidents of abuse but, human nature being what it is, for every genuine case, I would say there are a dozen coming forward to say: “Teacher patted my bum 35 years ago – give me £10,000 compensation please!”

Now I read that adults without children are holidaying in Disneyland. And there they will no doubt eat the same mush and baby food they stuff down themselves at home: burgers in which the meat is so slushy it might have been pre-digested, and cardboard inedibles called “pizzas”. All scoffed without the aid of knife or fork. Sugar in everything, even baked beans. No wonder there’s an obesity pandemic. And, while they’re eating, they’re still gawping at their electronic toys.

Baby talk everywhere. No one says: “I said and she replied.” No, it’s: “I was like, and she was like.” Even the broken buses are made to join in the baby talk: “Sorry – I’m not in service!”

The universal obsession with taking “selfies”. This combines infantilisation with narcissism. This is the “me” generation. And not just taking pictures of faces but of their private parts – then sending the pics to their friends or posting them on any one of half a dozen idiot “social media” sites. We used to do something similar in the school lavs when we were seven. We called it “show us yours”, but we’d grown out of such silliness by the time we were ten. Those sending mucky pics of themselves these days are in their twenties and thirties. This is, in Chesterton’s phrase, “to stretch the folly of their youth to be the shame of age”.

This infantilised generation needs to heed old St Paul: “When I was a child, I spake as a child…but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”