YEARS ago in this column, as the new Millennium hove into view, I named two activities of the 20th Century that I believed would be looked upon with disgust and amazement by its successor.

The first was smoking. We’re almost there. The habit has been pushed to the margins of society. Among the diminishing numbers that smoke today perhaps the majority recognises it as both filthy and unhealthy – and wishes to quit. Certainly few of us would welcome a return to the days when everyone was obliged to tolerate reeking cigarette smoke, in workplaces, restaurants, pubs and on public transport, with even non-smokers taking the vile odour home on clothes, and risking damage to health through passive smoking.

Yes, smoking has just about expired. But that other activity I was confident would be consigned to history has marched onward. Women have joined the ranks of boxers. From the background build up to the TV coverage of last weekend’s Boat Race I learned that the Oxford v Cambridge sporting rivalries now include women’s boxing. No dawn of enlightenment, then, at these great centres of learning and culture.

Just hours earlier came the news of the appalling head injuries to boxer Nick Blackwell. Inflicted in his British middleweight title fight with Chris Eubank Jnr, they left him with bleeding to the brain.

The circumstances in the two rounds before the fight was stopped were grotesque. Blackwell’s head injuries were obvious enough for Eubank’s boxer father to be urging his son to land only body blows. Oxygen had to be administered when Blackwell collapsed.

On Radio 4’s Today programme, I heard a boxing authority (sorry, I missed the name), defend the sport. “It’s man’s nature to fight…women too now.” He dismissed the wearing of headguards. “They create more vibrations. They’ve removed them at the Olympics.” The suggestion that punches to the head should be banned was ridiculed. “Nah,” he scoffed.

Why is it not commonly recognised that setting two people up to fight each other is uncivilised? Celebrating one person’s brutal conquest of another gives violence, even bloodshed, an honoured place in our culture. As events in the wider world increasingly demonstrate, there’s more than enough violence and bloodshed without perpetrating it as sport. Maybe we’ll put this ghastly spectacle behind us in the 21st Century. But only maybe.

THE other day the Radio 4 consumer programme You and Yours broadcast an item about private medical insurance – the benefits, the pitfalls, the costs etc. Doesn’t the very fact that this is now regarded as a suitable subject for a mainstream programme prove that the NHS has not been “safe in their hands” – “their” being every government since the time of Margaret Thatcher?

It seems a shame – returning to the hundreds of Darlington Civic Theatre supporters the personalised brass plaques fitted to the seats they funded back in the 1990s. The theatre spins this as a considerate gesture. “With a large restoration on the horizon, we felt the time was right to reunite people with their own part of the theatre.” Really? The plaques should be displayed at the theatre. Part of its history, they are tokens of a help without which the Civic might not have survived for its new renovation.