Crisps and cigarettes for children’s breakfast

I felt it most palpably on my first venture into supply teaching in a local town school in 1988.

It was a two-site school and pupils had to move between the two schools.

I observed when crossing the windswept playing fields fragile, skinny, diminutive Lowry-like figures.

I wondered then what had their morning nourishment been.

I surmised a packet of crisps.

I observed subsequently, more intimately at another location, driving along the road as pupils meandered to school, their breakfast seemingly a packet of crisps bought along the way, and a couple, the more pretentiously advanced, puffing away at their daily dose of fags – all seemingly related to the skinny figures I had seen elsewhere.

Yet, on the other hand, TV documentaries lament the obesity of young people - the documentaries say “the most obese in Europe.”

Something’s wrong somewhere!

Robin Parker

St Chad’s Avenue, Chatburn