Sarah Todd: Let's hope for a new era of saying what we really think

Whoever settles into 10 Downing Street has plenty on his plate and if he can do anything about our namby-pamby state of affairs where nobody dares raise their head above the parapet and complain, he gets my support. I did complain this week to a local authority department about something we'd filled all the forms out for back at Christmas.

Politely telephoning and "just reminding" over the intervening four months had done no good. This red-head let rip. We were straight away promised immediate action by the top man. Full stop. As it should be.

"I'm sorry to bother you, but …" is something that's always passing my lips. It's no longer going to be uttered. Tony Blair's legacy has been that false niceness where we're all so pleasant but never really say what we think.

Maybe, in this new forceful mood, a letter of complaint should be rattled off to the BBC. Last weekend's Badminton Horse Trials attracted about 200,000 spectators – more than double the number who attend the FA Cup Final – making it the second-biggest attended event in the world (the first is the American car race Indianapolis 500). But was there any coverage of Saturday's cross-country day on BBC1 or 2? No, you had to have a digital box and "press the red button". There were some highlights on Sunday, but nothing in comparison to the hours that were devoted to the snooker.

Is it because the BBC has a chip on its shoulder that anything horsey is elitist? Try telling that to Yorkshire milkman's son Oliver Townend who won Badminton in 2009. Or Mary King, who cooked, cleaned and delivered meat for the local butcher to fund her riding career on a string of borrowed horses.

The French are good at complaining. Just the other week more than 10,000 French farmers marched and drove tractors through Paris demanding urgent government action to boost cereal prices and stem a fall in income. Good for them. The Husband won't drink French wine or have a Citron or a Peugeot because, as he puts it, "they burnt our lambs". He's referring to the riots of 1990, when the French farmers fumed about cheap British imports. While admiring his loyalty to the Brits, the French passion for their own appeals to me in our boring, beige world.

To finish on a lighter note, all the children's hens seem to have gone broody at once. The young poultry farmers have declared they'd like to raise some chicks and have already drawn up a plan to keep females and sell any cockerels at the farmers' market. So long as there's no cheap, foreign competition all should go well.

CW 8/5/10