[West Ender]

My granddaughter's school does excellent dinners. They produce a menu every month, to be brought home, and Laura is allowed to choose whether she has packed lunch or school meal. It works out about half and half. When she has packed lunch it is usually a sandwich (tuna or cheese), cucumber wedges or carrot sticks, a yoghurt and a fruit. The school dinners are healthy and there's always a choice of fruit for pudding.

When I was at primary school, St Mary's on Moscow Mill St., the dinners were, on the whole, revolting. They were prepared in the kitchens at Moor End school and delivered, in huge canisters, by van so they were invariably nearly cold before they arrived on the plate. By the age of 8 I'd started to go home for lunch, which meant running hell-for-leather from Moscow Mill St. to Church Commercial to get the Blackburn bus to West End. I must have been quite a runner as I made it home in 20 minutes. Mum always had lunch ready as I walked in, always a cooked lunch, and there was time to eat it and chill out for a short while before getting the Ribble bus back (12 minutes past 1 from Spread Eagle St), off at the Palladium and hell-for-leather again back to school for 1.30.

You could say that it was school dinners, or at least avoiding them, that kept me very slim and very, very fit.