Mobile phones: that's why our kids are getting rickets again - Clive Smith

We have just had the half term break.

The weather was OK and we had a few sunny days. But as I drove past the park where I used to knock about when I was younger, not one kid was to be seen.

Back in the day there used to be loads down there, playing football, messing about in the woods and making rope swings that eventually snapped meaning you fell in the stream.

But nowadays it seems like the great outdoors has become the great indoors.

My kids are just as bad, sitting indoors looking at their phones all day.

If they’re not taking selfies on Snapchat or Facetiming their friends (rather than actually going out to meet them) they’ll be on Instagram liking everyone else’s lives rather than living their own.

It seems you’ve got to create some fun for them or go somewhere for them to get off their lazy backsides and do something. 

And I suppose this is convenient for those bone idle parents who can’t be bothered and will let little Johnny happily play Fortnite all day in his room rather than take him to a farm or something.

And the fear of paedophiles roaming about the place hasn’t helped matters.

I’ve no idea if it’s worse now than it used to be.

Obviously, you hear about it more now.

Yes, I’ll pick up my kids from friends when they’re just down the road as opposed to when I was younger when I’d walk much longer distances to see my mates.

And you also see parents plastering their kids in factor 50 sunscreen at the first sign of the sun.

You don’t want them baking outside and coming home slightly charred. Surely there needs to be some middle ground?

A little bit of sun is fine. It’s a case of more sun, less X-Box. They’re not vampires (most of them anyway).

You know what, they really won’t combust into dust at the first sign of the sun's rays.

D-Day heroes: they don’t make them like that today

The words ‘hero’ and ‘legend’ are used far too much these days. But the D-Day 75 commemorations really did highlight people who fitted those descriptions.

We saw that after all these years those men and women still have that courageous spirit. Just look at the two former paratroopers Jock Hutton and Harry Read who parachuted into Normandy with the Red Devils display team last week.

Imagine doing that in your nineties and all the memories it would have brought back too. It really took some guts. And after landing Jock, 94, put on his regimental beret and saluted.

They don’t make people like that any more. They were cut from a different cloth.

Are these England football chants really xenophobic? 

There’s been lots in the papers about England fans abroad. Apparently they’re more like stag-dos than watching football.

In particular people like to point out the songs that are sung. Ten German Bombers being a favourite, a song about the RAF shooting down, well, German bombers. Apparently, it’s xenophobic and racist.

Humans have sung songs about their achievements for hundreds of years. This is really not that different except there are no minstrels playing fiddles or camp fires being danced around.

Football is a tribal. Hundreds of boozed up England fans aren’t going to sing about the time the pound was at its highest against the Euro are they?