Duvet first, then the world

A cookery school in Surrey is charging £175 for a course for students to prepare them for university.

Nothing to do with studying, but things like putting on a duvet cover, doing the washing, boiling an egg.

Good grief. You could wonder and weep how intelligent youngsters managed to get to 18 without mastering these skills already. And how on earth have their mothers got time to wait on them hand, foot and finger?

Have they no lives of their own?

Even Princes William and Harry – with a couple of hundred staff to tend to their every need – are now sharing a house while they’re doing their helicopter training and seem to be coping with the cooking and washing-up.

Any man who can fly a helicopter can cope with a cooker. And any boy who can get to Level 9 on a computer game, can also work out the washing machine. When it came to food, when I was busy or away, my boys either cooked or starved.

True, I had limited success with their belief in the Toilet Fairy, but I did at least introduce them to the lavatory brush and the Domestos. It was a start.

It would be laughable – especially the thought of those parents with £175 to waste on such things – if it were not for the problem of gap years.

A third of all gap years now end in disaster or even death.

Of course, many of those incidents are tragic accidents, that could happen to anyone anywhere. In other cases, teenagers are victims of organised crime. Again, difficult to prepare against.

But in a lot of cases, many of these 18-year-olds have led such sheltered lives that they simply haven’t a clue.

If they’ve never boiled an egg, washed their clothes or got themselves home from a late night gig without Mum’s taxi service, how on earth do you think they’re going to cope all alone in Cuba or Laos, Machu Picchu or Bali?

The Famous Five would be able to cope all right – but they’d been looking after themselves since they were ten years old. That generation did.

The more freedom you have, the more you learn to cope with things.

You can’t learn without experience and previous generations had built up a huge amount of experience by the time they were 18.

The more you learn to cope with simple things, the more you can cope with the tricky stuff.

But if the current crop have been wrapped in cotton wool all their lives, you can’t suddenly throw them out to the ends of the earth and expect them to take it in their stride.

That’s just cruel – and dangerous.

So this is the summer your teenagers learn to fend for themselves.

Start off on duvet covers and work your way up through washing, cooking, first aid, complicated trips on public transport, chip pan fires, flooded washing machines, blocked loos and how to cope with food poisoning.

One day, when they’re coping with a crisis in Kathmandu, they – and you – will be grateful that you did.

WE’VE gone off strawberries.

Apparently we’re eating far fewer than we have in recent years.

Hardly surprising. Most supermarket strawberries taste either of wood or wet cotton wool. They are grown for their looks and to travel well, not for taste. Unless you grow your own or seek out the unusual varieties and not the dreaded Elsanta, you don’t stand a chance.

There’s probably an entire generation which doesn’t know what a strawberry tastes like. They’ve never bitten into a proper strawberry and had that brilliant explosion of tangy sweetness.

Strawberries, however, still rule at Wimbledon. They’re meant to be quintessentially English.

Time for a change.

It has been a brilliant year for gooseberries and elderflowers.

Gooseberry and elderflowers are a match made in heaven. Swirl them in cream or crème fraiche and you have food for the gods.

Forget the strawberries and cream – maybe Wimbledon should give people gooseberry and elderflower fool instead.

Game set and match to the goosegog.

Not much of a welcome from the tykes

IRECENTLY rang Welcome to Yorkshire, the Yorkshire tourist organisation. All its operators were busy, but if I would like to leave a message, they would come back to me as soon as possible.

I left a message. They didn’t come back.

I tried again the next day. On each occasion all their operators were busy, but if I would like to leave a message, they would come back to me as soon as possible.

I left a message. They didn’t come back.

After three days of frequent dialling, I never once talked to an operator.

I left three messages. That was two weeks ago and they still haven’t come back to me.

Frankly, not very welcoming at all.

They recently launched a big new campaign to entice more visitors to the region. The chief executive said they would have digital technology at the heart of its strategy. “This is set to turn heads here and overseas,”

he said.

Not if they don’t answer their phone it won’t.

Mrs Beckham

VICTORIA Beckham has said to have had her breasts reduced to something more modest than their previously enlarged Wag-style proportions.

She is, apparently, going for a more natural look.

Gosh, who’d have thought to see Mrs Beckham and “natural” in the same sentence...

Not sure which is worse

IDON’T know which is worse really, the really huge sums that MPs have made over cheating on their expenses – or the tiny ones, such as Alan Millburn’s £3.99 beer glass or Frank Cook’s fiver for the church collection.

They reveal such a dreary pettiness, depressing out of all proportion to the money involved.

Backchat

Dear Sharon,
IHOPE that Madonna’s new daughter Mercy will have a happy life with her new family.

I don’t know why she wants another child as Mercy will be brought up by nannies.

But Madonna has apparently given millions of pounds to help orphans in Africa, so has done a lot more than any of her critics have.

Jeff Stocks, Bishop Auckland.

And positively the last world on recycling...

Dear Sharon,
MY parents married in 1944 and the family story always was that much of my mother’s trousseau was made from parachute silk.

Where she got it from I do not know, but her brother Billy was in the RAF.

Would they really have used parachute silk? Wouldn’t that have risked lives and been unpatriotic, or was it just a perk of the job?

Lisa Duncan, Darlington.