Call me heartless if you like, but the complaints of a Watford student about finding her father's gravestone propped up with wooden stakes and rope at Vicarage Road Cemetery, as reported last week, cut little ice with me.

Alleging that Watford Borough Council were thoughtless and insensitive, the girl also accused the council of being "devoid of any sympathetic, thoughtful or smart actions" - a reaction, frankly, I thought slightly hysterical and OTT.

And any sympathy I might have had went right out of the window when I noticed that neither the student nor her mother were prepared to put their names to the allegations.

Perhaps I was brought up in a different era of reporting, but I believe that if people go running to a newspaper to make a fuss about something, then they should agree to have their names published.

Whatever the accusation, it doesn't have the same credibility when the complainant hides behind a cloak of anonymity.

In this case, I could see no reason for the girl and her mother refusing to be named, especially if they expected to be taken seriously.

Didn't it occur to them, anyway, that anyone wandering round the graveyard could discover their identity merely by observing the name on the tombstone?

However, that is by the way with regard to the main issue here.

I am usually among the first to condemn over-fussy health and safety measures, but in this particular case Watford Council has a point.

There have been several fatal accidents around the country, a number involving children, when unsafe gravestones have toppled over and killed somebody.

Safety in graveyards, which often fall prey to vandals, is a thorny topic and different councils have dealt with it in different ways.

Some have either laid the dangerous stones flat on the ground or cleared them away altogether, provoking complaints from relatives and also from family historians who need the information on the inscriptions.

Watford Council has chosen not to do this, but it seems to me it is in a no-win situation. It is legally obliged to make these dangerous headstones safe, for if one fell over and maimed or killed someone, the council could be sued for heavy damages.

The girl and her mother also seemed to think the council should have made special efforts to contact them.

But unless Watford Council has a team of expert genealogists on hand to trace descendants of people in the graves, I fail to see how they can be expected to know all the relatives of those buried at Vicarage Road.

As a genealogist myself, my principal concern for graveyards is in ensuring the information on monumental inscriptions is recorded for posterity.

I realise people react to death in different ways, but personally I don't attach too much reverence to the graves themselves, which after all only hold a pile of bones.

I prefer to remember lost loved ones as I knew them, rather than see their graves as sacred shrines.

Iwas interested to note that Watford councillor Sheila Smillie, who acts as official consort - if that is the appropriate term - to Watford Borough Council's civic chairman, Councillor Rabi Martins, apparently calls herself Lady Chairman. Now that is a term I thought had more or less disappeared from the English language altogether, banished forever into the dustbin of history by the loopy PC feminists.

How refreshing to know that Councillor Smillie is not known by the appendage of Lady Chairperson or the even more ridiculous Lady Chair.

Thankfully, there's still a bit of common sense left at the town hall.

Who on earth would want to be a writer of job advertisements these days?

I learnt from a recruitment and careers feature in this newspaper last week that employers now can't use words like "energetic", "dynamic" and "trendy", since this implies they want only young people and breaks the new anti-ageism laws.

Interestingly enough, on the opposite page was an advert for sales people with enthusiasm and energy while another one appealed for "mature" sales executives.

Hang on a mo, couldn't that word, mature, be said to discriminate against youth?

And wouldn't job ads demanding experience also be regarded as being positively hostile to school leavers just starting out on a career?

Employers must be scratching their heads in bewilderment, wondering how to phrase their "sits vac" advertisements.

If anyone spots an advert for a "boring old fart in his mid-60s with few skills wanting to earn buckets of money for doing very little work", do let me know, would you?

Finally, here's this week's despatch from the You Couldn't Make It Up department: the Metropolitan Police has been banned from using the word "yob" in case it upsets and offends, well, yobs.

A barmy woman deputy chairman of the police authority says the term is alienating and causes a "self" and "other" feeling.

Where do they find these people?

I wonder what words she would accept to describe the feral thugs who are infesting our streets and making life hell for decent citizens?

I can think of a few - like "scum", "vermin" and "dog excrement".