Sir, - I must take issue with aspects of your leading article entitled "Wide-eyed, legless" (D&S, Dec 14) in which you rightly criticise the prevailing cult among so many young people of drinking to obscene excess.

One of the prime difficulties today in curbing bad behaviour is that shame, as an emotion, is in danger of becoming extinct. Thanks to crass misunderstanding of the term "free society," increasing numbers of inhabitants in these islands no longer feel any shame in, for example, displaying bad manners, in marital infidelity, in lack of patriotism, in abuse of public property and so on, so why should drunkenness be in a different register?

Where I feel your leading article is furthest from the mark is in suggesting we mainly look to our schools for a solution to collapsing social standards.

Almost incredibly, you then go on to make an astonishing claim that schools "prepare our children for the world of sex and......drugs". You've got to be joking! In what other period in our history has the situation regarding teenage pregnancies, promiscuous multi-partner sex among children and school-age drug taking been worse than it is today?

Are you aware that, typically, children nowadays spend more hours in front of an unsupervised TV in their own rooms that they do in their classrooms?

No, the nub of problem lies in the fact that Britain has become a nation of orphans. By that I mean the handing down of the principal moral, cultural and spiritual norms of society is less practised as a parental duty.

Instead our children, like orphans, are increasingly left to absorb their values from wherever. From one another, from dumbed-down sex-obsessed TV, from the corrosive influence of teenage magazines, from the corrupting lifestyles of in-the-news celebrities. Come back Fagin, we forgive you! You were as a Sunday school teacher by comparison.

Of course schools must assist in every way they can to inculcate sound personal standards. In good measure they already do, often in the teeth of parental and political opposition. Morals are caught not taught. No, the only true remedy for the ills your leading article describes is for parents once again to take up their proper role and themselves see to the moral, spiritual and cultural welfare of their children. Editorial suggestions as to how this might be brought about, I dare say, would be welcome.

R NEVILLE TATE

Yarm Road,

Eaglescliffe.

Forum is coming

Sir, - I am writing to correct an unfortunate misunderstanding, reported in your town and parish news (D&S, Dec 14). In your report of the Aysgarth Parish Council meeting, a councillor was reported to have said that a local access forum for the Yorkshire Dales national park had been established under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act.

This is not the case. The local access forum for the Yorkshire Dales national park will not be established until the new year, after the authority has received the final guidelines for the forum's constitution from the government.

To update your readers, the role of the forum, when it is established, will be to advise the national park authority on providing the new right of access on foot to mountain, moor, heath, down and registered common land in the national park.

Further, it is envisaged that the forum will comprise representatives of landowners, occupiers, access interests - walkers and the like - and other interests relevant to the area, such as people to represent the interest of nature conservation and tourism; not just farmers and ramblers.

The purpose of the seminar, at which the parish councillor was present, was to update various interest groups on the progress that had been made to date on the implementation of the act and how the forum would be developed in the new year.

When we are in a position to set up the forum, we will be advertising for applications from people who would like to be considered to become a member and at this time we will be encouraging as many people as possible to come forward, including parish representatives.

JON AVISON

Head of park management,

Yorkshire Dales National Park

authority ,

Grassington.

Bound to happen

Sir, - It was going to happen sooner or later, two elderly people in hospital (D&S Dec 14) because of the work done in Ripon market place.

I hope those who dreamed up this scheme are going to pay the compensation bill when it comes. I have a feeling it will be Joe Public that will pay through taxes.

The spanking new taxi rank is the next accident waiting to happen. Some passing motorist will take evasive action to avoid hitting a car reversing off the parking bays of the market square into the path of passing vehicles and smash into the taxi rank. Little wonder the taxi drivers were up in arms about moving.

What do our yes men, sorry, city councillors think? Well what you would expect, they think it's wonderful.

On the day the shambles opened, somebody gloated on Radio York that this scheme would really get visitors to come to Ripon. Visit to see what may I ask? Traffic lights (there is no shortage of them)? Charity shops? Building societies? Estate agents? Take away shops? Boarded up shops?

But I suppose there is the new picnic area that takes up car parking spaces. For God's sake, wake up the chosen few, picnics happen in the countryside not in a market square.

Heads should roll for this mess. £1.5m for what? As for the brick set road, have a good look round the cathedral and at Duck Hill. It's not a pretty site with holes appearing. Let's have our tarmac back please.

MALCOLM RAINFORTH

Southfield Avenue,

Ripon