AS age creeps up, you do find yourself trying hard not to keep referring back and claiming that things were better in the past – because in general they weren’t.

When it comes to bringing up youngsters, it is particularly important that someone like me keeps his mouth tightly shut because this grandad never played the sort of hands-on role as a father that so many of today’s new men do as a matter of course.

But I can’t keep quiet about last week’s report for the government which urged schools to ban packed lunches. Already some heads are saying that they can’t, because parents won’t stand for it.

Such statements beg a question of who runs our schools – the heads of the parents?

I can see that many pupils might think it ‘uncool’ to have school lunches but the only way to change that is to make everyone have them.

People of a certain age will remember things like sago puddings, horrible greens and meat that tasted like lumps of leather. But we ate it and all lived to tell the tale of how horrible some of it was.

Today’s lunchboxes filled with the sort of junk marketed gleefully by some supermarkets have about as much nutritional value as cardboard.

The sad thing is, quite a lot of parents may not realise this and anyway genuinely think they are doing the best by their child because it’s what he or she says they want.

The trouble is, something has to be done about the dreadful childhood obesity problems this society has – and making school dinners compulsory could be a good start.

The next step on the road to healthier youngsters would be to get them to actually walk to school.

As well as making them fitter, it would also cut out the need for the sort of police appeals we had in Darwen last week for parents to stop jamming up streets as they jostle to drop off sons and daughters within three feet of the school gates.

While we are at it, perhaps we can also turn the clock back and see some children doing paper rounds before they go to school – just like their parents and grandparents used to.

That will have to come last, though, because they just wouldn’t have the energy to walk or cycle on a paper round until their diet improves.