This is LBC from Global, leading Britain's conversation with James O'Brien.

Hello, three minutes after ten is the time. You are listening. I hope this doesn't come as a major surprise to anybody.

You are listening to James O'Brien on LBC, where, well, not for the first time in the last 12 months or so.

I wonder whether the programme should begin, as a certain Bill Murray film does, with the opening bars of I Got You, Babe, by Sonny and Cher, because it is, too, the vexed question of quarantine that we will return and it is

the continuing questions surrounding vaccines that where we will begin. I am still, I know it must be

quite frustrating for you when I don't slavishly stick to the suggestions I make at four minutes

after 10 in the ensuing two hours and 55 minutes.

But I do want to talk about unreported problems, which is always a bit risky, and with

particular reference to schools.

So I keep hearing really troubling tales of, and, you know, from my social circle, as it were, as opposed to from my work

insights. Just things that we probably won't register until it's all over and possibly

disappearing in the rearview mirror. I'm hearing that older children are losing the ability to listen,

i.e. to concentrate for long periods of time. Don't snigger because I know that attention spans

are probably much shorter now than they were when we were young, given that there are so many

distractions upon your time. My children find it

impossible to contemplate a world in which there were only three television channels and no means

of recording programs that were on them. How many times have we giggled together about the excitement

I felt in 1980 when for my eighth birthday I received a Cassio watch that was not only digital, but had a light.

A button you could press and the watch face would light up. That to me in 1980 felt like the future.

So, you know, the idea of spending six hours, painstakingly typing out a computer program from your copy of Your Sinclair magazine.

Could you imagine younger children today just doing that and then making a mistake and having

to spend all day Sunday doing it all again to try and find the one single character that

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