Right, this is how you do it... left foot up, down, right foot up, down, left foot again... Is walking really so difficult?

It must be, because fewer of us are doing it. The latest survey shows that the average distance walked in a year is 186 miles. Which is about half a mile a day. Which is about from the back door to the garage and from the car park to the office. Exhausting.

Half a mile a day? You could walk that much going round Sainsbury's. Twice as much up and down all those corridors in any hospital visit. Which means most of us hardly walk at all.

And I don't mean walking for pleasure, but walking as a means of getting from A to B.

Now the Department of Transport is coming up with a new National Walking Strategy - which is a posh way of saying that they want us off our bums in our cars and onto our feet so we'll stop clogging up the roads.

Many of us don't walk because of all the traffic. But if more of us walked, there wouldn't be so much traffic. Think of the school run, for a start.

Dutch friends think we're mad to take the car for short journeys. They walk or take their bikes for anything up to five miles or so. The car is just for the infirm and the bone idle.

If all those who were capable of it left the car at home for any errand of less than a mile, we'd see an immediate reduction in traffic in our town centres. Meanwhile, the bigger the town, the likelier it is that walking's quicker than driving. It's certainly the quickest way of getting around the centre of London, or any congested city.

But so many people prefer to sit in a queue of traffic or wait 20 minutes for a bus, instead of striding out and getting there in half the time. They will drive round and round supermarket car parks to get as close as possible to the entrance. In beauty spots and national parks, most people will not walk more than 200 yards from their cars.

And all the time we're getting fatter and unhealthier and spending a fortune on diet foods, when the answer lies at the end of our legs.

Our mothers and grandmothers walked miles back and forth to the shops pushing prams or carrying heavy bags of shopping. They didn't need designer Lycra and gym membership to keep fit. To them, walking was as natural as breathing and they were a lot fitter for it.

Much, of course, needs to be done to make towns more pedestrian friendly. Better, wider pavements, improved sign posting, lower speed limits, more crossings, cleaner streets, safer streets.

But before we start expecting other people to make things easier for us, we should start putting our best foot forward. You only appreciate how wonderful it is to walk when you can no longer do it.

So if you have feet and legs that work, then use them while you can, and make the world a better place.

ONE of the most depressing items in the weekend news was that three-year-olds in London are receiving specialised coaching in reading and writing so that they can get into the right pre-school and the right pre-prep and ultimately the right school and university.

Mad, isn't it?

But I'd like to think that any self respecting child hot-housed into playing the violin at two years old, reading at three, learning French at four and playing chess and advanced gymnastics - probably simultaneously - at five, will one day rebel.

And at the age of fifteen, instead of achieving a great string of A* GCSEs will drop out and spend their days making mud pies and sandcastles instead.

NEW research has shown that women live longer than men because women cope better with sleep deprivation.

Excuse me?

How many women have staggered out of bed in the early hours to feed a baby, or to see to a sick child whose fretful crying has woken her instantly while the man at her side has snored on, serenely untroubled and undisturbed?

As far as men are concerned, the only question is "What sleep deprivation?"

In recent years, on other pages, we have criticised much of the food aimed specifically at children. Among our pet hates have been Sunny Delight, Kraft Lunchables and Kelloggs Real Fruit Winders.

No surprise, then, to find them top of the list of foods most criticised by a jury of parents for the Food Campaign Group. They thought they were pretty rubbish too.

Demos, the think tank, recently suggested putting a "fat tax" onto unhealthy foods to encourage us to eat more healthily. More evidence of the patronising nanny state, I thought.

But if it means parents think twice about stocking up on rubbish for their children, then let's have that tax now.

Students from poorer families are to get £30 a week to study for their A-levels.

That's good. Maybe they can use it to pay for private tuition.