Colour madness

SO scientists say food colourings are bad for children. Well, what a surprise. We've known this. We've known it for 20 years or more. Ask the mothers who used to go to Hurworth Grange Mother and Toddler Group near Darlington back in the 1980s. We knew then - from bitter experience.

For the first half of the session, give or take the odd incident, the toddlers always toddled happily. And we could get on with the important things, like catching up with our lives. Then we'd have a coffee and give the children squash and a

biscuit.

And that's when the trouble started. For the second half of the session, they were like mad things.

Big boys raced around on tractors mowing down little girls. Little girls came to blows over the pink pram or whose turn it was on the slide. There were tears, tantrums, pet lips and foot stamping and I once caught Senior Son, then aged about three, swinging gleefully from the curtains. My bellow for him to stop reduced the entire room to frozen silence for all of a second.

Then one of the mums suggested we try a different squash, one with more fruit and less colour. Frankly, it seemed a mad idea. What difference could squash make? The new one cost a lot more and was very pale - not the vivid orange we were used to. We went through an awful lot of it at first because we couldn't tell how strong it was.

But, amazingly, it made a difference. The children could still be naughty - a roomful of terrible two-year-olds was never going to be peaceful - but they were consistent. There was no longer that marked difference after half time, they were no longer so obviously wired up and manic. And Senior Son never swung on the curtains again.

We didn't need scientific research to prove the point to us. All it took was a couple of bottles of squash. We could see, quite clearly, the difference those colours made.

So it seems incredible that for the last 20 or more years, these colours have still been routinely added to children's food.

Many of the food colourings have already been banned in many countries - any coincidence, do you think, that other countries' children are better behaved, slimmer and happier than ours? - so if other sensible countries can manage without them, then we should be able to as well.

It's not just children who are affected but adults too. Additives in anything from cheap wine to biscuits and ready made sauces can trigger off major migraines for me, so I have long been forced into an incredibly natural and healthy diet.

Until the dodgy colorants are banned, here's a tip: if the list of ingredients goes on for half a page and is full of things you can't recognise, can't pronounce and can't spell, the chances are that your kids will be better off without it.

And who knows? The playgroup curtains might be safer too.

IN the latest wizard wheeze from government, mothers to be are to get £120 in their 29th week of pregnancy to enable them to buy lots of healthy food.

Or anything else, they fancy really - chips, booze, illegal substances - because there will be no checks at all on what the money is spent on.

Never mind healthy food. When I was in the 29th week of my first pregnancy all I wanted was custard, huge bowls of it. And cheese. Pounds and pounds of cheese.

The plan, worthy enough in its intent, is to try and help bridge the gap between rich and poor from the very beginning. Certainly there are problems - as Bishop Auckland MP Helen Goodman proved last year when she lived on benefit and tried to buy the food that a pregnant woman should have. Even with her education, grown-up experience and native cunning, she found it a struggle.

The scheme will apparently cost around £90m a year and there are still better ways of bridging the gap between rich and poor than by willy nilly scattering fivers across all the bumps in Britain.

For a start, £90m would buy an awful lot of old-fashioned cookery teachers, who can show children how to shop for proper food, cook and prepare it.

It will help them learn healthy lessons for life and not just for one or two weeks pregnancy. And be of far more long-term benefit to their children.

Not glamorous or exciting, nor headline catching but in the long run would do far more good for far more people.

A lot more good than a £120 splurge on cheese and custard.

AND while we're re-inventing the wheel. In a desperate bid to stop students going out and buying junk food in town, some schools are apparently now locking them in at lunchtime.

Well, well, didn't they always? In my school only sixth formers were allowed out, the rest of us being trapped inside the building until going home time. Rather like the machine gun emplacement in prison camps, the staff room was a many windowed room on the first floor, with a viewpoint over every school gate. The only way to walk through those gates unchallenged was if you had a music lesson in town.

There was, I remember, a great trade in borrowed music cases. One of those and an air of confidence and you could gain an hour's freedom, usually spent in the record shop or sampling the lipsticks in Boots.

I'm not sure how much locking us in improved our nutritional health, but it certainly made us very practised in deception.

IN a bid to balance the competition between huge supermarkets and smaller town centre shops, the Tories are planning to make supermarkets charge for car parking.

Equally logical, of course, would be to give all town centre shoppers two hours free parking. Dream on.

THE number of people drowning in debt grows ever higher. Recent interest rate rises are making the problem much worse.

Last year more than 1.7 million people turned to the Citizen's Advice Bureau for advice on how to cope with money problems. The CAB is free and impartial.

If you're scared to open those brown envelopes that are piling up on the doormat, then you're certainly not unique. So stuff them all in a carrier bag now and get yourself off to the CAB. The sooner you start dealing with the problem, the sooner it will go away. CAB staff say that just making that first step makes people feel better as the load starts lifting from their shoulders.

So what are you waiting for?