Oo-er!

There's a perfectly respectable gardening term called "bastard trenching".  Also known as double digging. Alan Titchmarsh referred to it on BBC's Breakfast programme the other day.  So what's the story? Well following him using this term, Louise Minchin, one of the presenters, and apparently under instruction from "up above" apologised to viewers for "some of the language" that had been used.  So is "bastard" bad language?  Are there really people likely to be upset if they hear the word? Well, Mary Whitehouse would probably have been outraged, but then she went out of her way to be outraged and hardly spoke for the common man or woman. What makes this story even more silly is that put "bastard trenching" into your search engine, and the top site that comes up is - wait for it - the BBC's own gardening site!  Complete over-reaction I feel.