Recently I was puzzled by something I read in the paper - all about child poverty and how many children, in these tough times, were trapped in that direction.


Poverty? I wonder what poverty means in 2011? Is it that children can no longer have their own TV or DVD? No Playstation or X-Box - or have to put up with last year's model? No £80 trainers or £30 football shirts? Can't afford the latest mobile phone, or latest street fashion? Have to eat boring food at home because there's no money for the chippy or kebab house?


Let me run over some of the things we did and didn't have when we were kids. And before you do, remember that we weren't regarded as being in poverty.


Clothes. Handed down from uncles and aunts and then from sibling to sibling. When my brother got a new (second hand) jacket, I got his old one - and so on. We usually had to scrabble for the under pants or vest! Our shoes were worn until they dropped off! Literally. I have walked to school with cardboard inside my shoes to cover the holes worn through the soles and the toe cap flapping around where it had come away from the upper.


 Food. We were always hungry. We ate what was put in front of us. Crusts were never wasted and were given a smear of Marmite and baked in the oven - like home-made Twiglets! We scrumped apples, ate acorns, dog biscuits and hawthorn berries - anything that wasn't poisonous! 


High Tech. Crystal sets were as near as we could get to a DAB radio - and they mostly didn't work very well. No phones, of course. No TV. No Playstation. We got a torch one Christmas, made by our Dad from a tobacco tin. The battery was inside and he had threaded a bulb in one end. You pressed the lid and on it would come. No mountain bikes with multiple gears for us. If the money was available, we would get a redundant ex GPO bike for 10 shillings. It weighed  a ton and had no gears but kept us fit!


We made our own entertainment, dug holes and caves, climbed trees, swung from ropes, swam in rivers, joined youth clubs, played table tennis. Anything else our fertile imaginations could dream up, was a bonus.


So were we in poverty? I honestly don't know - but we were happy enough. We could transform anything, from a cardboard box to a wooded copse, into anything we wanted. We had imaginations that were unpolluted by the world of TV and videos. The world was full of adventure and exploration. No chance of any accusation of obesity with us kids. Just our legs to get us anywhere and never quite enough to eat, saw to that!


Yes, times have changed - but is it too late to take a long look at the life style we follow....and maybe think again?