Last week there was a wedding in my family in the UK.

The wedding duly took place, there was a reception afterwards and everyone had a great time.

Ages ranged from young babies to grannies and grandfathers.

The younger adults all work hard at both their jobs and responsibilities and are a credit to their parents and themselves.

Unfortunately, there were no fights, no drunks – in fact no trouble at all, so it was not reported in the newspapers.

Now, I don’t mention this to say how wonderful my family are as they are no different to most other families.

However, if you are to believe the majority of UK newspapers and television the country is overrun with drunks, teenagers armed with knives, drug-pushers, wife-beaters, incompetent politicians, greedy bankers and so on – you know where I am coming from.

I read somewhere that tourist numbers are down. Are we surprised?

I arrive in UK myself, usually with some trepidation, and am always pleasantly surprised to find that it is more or less, the same as always. Not perfect, but definitely not the picture painted by the media.

I’m aware that bad news sells and good news doesn’t but I have to say that from the outside looking in a false picture is being given to people from other countries and at times it can be quite embarrassing.

There are problems, thats for sure, and I don’t want to sweep them under the carpet but I think that a sense of proportion would be better all round.

This problem is not peculiar to the UK but sweeping generalizations can be made with any country.

For example, California is not full of hippies, Chicago not full of gangsters (Hollywood what have you done), Australia full of Crocodile Dundee look-alikes, the Middle East full of terrorists but as with everywhere else ordinary people just getting on with their lives.

What is the point of all this?

I have lived in numerous countries and I have met and know a lot of very nice people and I believe that we should just take people as we find them and disregard the hype and half-truths put out by most media.

I always remember an old sailor advising me once that we should believe nothing of what we hear and half of what we can see, then we might be getting near the truth. Something in that.

Rant over.