ON the first day at the grammar school, 90 fresh-faced boys with blazer cuffs reaching down to fingertips – your mother had said you would grow into your uniform – assembled before a headmaster of frighteningly imposing appearance to learn what would be expected.

I glanced nervously about the oakbeamed portals of Big School. We all seemed to look the same, give or take a couple of lads whose growth hormones appeared to have gone into overdrive.

There was something else, too… a couple of fatties in our blue worsted ranks.

I wonder – if we fast-forwarded nearly half a century to a modern comprehensive, would the picture be all that different?

Yes. Obesity is the scourge of modern life and is, for some unfathomable reason, always linked with deprivation, yet another example of the topsy-turvy logic that now prevails.

How can deprivation – being prevented access to the basics of life, presumably – produce end results that indicate the very opposite has occurred? It appears that instead of fruit and vegetables growing in some people’s backyards and allotments, only fries, pizzas and hamburgers sprout and flourish.

There also appears to be no evidence of healthy drinks either, as a merely cursory examination of the litter in certain areas will reveal only plastic bottles that once contained fizzy, waistline-enhancing concoctions.

This profusion also throws up another question. If these people are so poor, how can they afford to buy all this rubbish that will inevitably balloon them to such repulsive dimensions?

The answer is reliance culture.

Millions of Britons are now clients of the state which allows them to redirect all that unearned money into the coffers of the junk food producers. One relies on the other.

Yes, it’s poverty all right, but not of the fiscal kind. This is deprivation of the senses.