Soil is a dirty word in land of de-skilling

Mind you, it's a different slant on an old theme. And it does seem to fit, too. So forgive me, dear reader. Let's improvise.

Anyway, the nights are drawing in, the conkers have long been scooped up and become the champions or vanquished of many a schoolboy battle... and nearly all the harvest festivals have been held in schools and church halls up and down the land.

All around us, leaves are dancing to earth... pirouetting oaks, porcupine-backed beechmast and helicopter sycamore fruits, all competing to see who can reach terra firma first.

However, let's stick with harvest festivals for a moment. And what a sorry sight they are these days, mere pale imitations of what they used to be.

When the children were small, despite the fact that our garden was the size of a roasted peanut, we always made sure the monsters took items of produce that were recognisable as such.

A couple of grandad's cabbages, a spare marrow, some surplus runner beans... maybe even a few tomatoes that had somehow prospered in the pot by the fence.

You see, even then, the trend of taking tins to harvest festivals was starting.

More and more, cans were turning up and gracing the benches and tables, while the vicar proudly inspected the goods on offer, smiling bravely in the face of that spreading oil slick we call progress.

I must admit you'd be hard-pressed to find a baked bean field or condensed milk tree in the heart of rural Worcestershire, but there you are.

However, there is a serious side to this, and that is the growing gap developing between the people who grow things to eat and those who quite happily sit back and consume it without a thought to where their daily bread originated.

This ignorance manifests in many ways. At one end you have the junk food revolution that will surely be killing millions in a few years' time, just as cigarettes once wiped out entire middle-aged populations.

And at the other, you have the new vegetable-free garden, all plastic, paving and decking. This is the open, ceiling-less room where you won't find a bird, let alone a slug or an earthworm.

No hedgehogs come visiting and netting protects the water feature from passing herons.

This is the new dead back yard. Soil has become a dirty word.

In between this wasteland is a modern educational system that teaches everything there is to know about every culture under the sun, yet fails to instruct its charges in something as basic as what a person should eat to keep body and soul together.

This is why the streets of Worcester and other centres of population up and down the land are full of fat, pasty, stupid-looking teenagers. They wobble down the streets with exposed midriffs, a mass of rippling tattoos surfing waves of flab, all blank expressions and vacant eyes.

Why? Because many of them are products of equally stupid parents who also never learnt the difference between pig muck from pudding. Where we once used to rotate crops, we now have a monoculture of prairie-farmed morons.

Years ago, in the "bad" old days of selective education, children were subjected to a kind of apartheid at the age of 11. The so-called top lot went to a grammar school, in-betweens ended up in technical schools, and the rest went to secondary moderns.

Forgetting the stigma that might last a lifetime, the one good thing about the mockingly-named "sec mod" was that you were actually taught something useful.

Yes, you never discovered the past pluperfect of the verb to throw a dart at the slave on the battlements, but you did find out how to do basic carpentry.

And more to the point, it was possible to gain a real insight into horticulture.

Growing things, like many other disciplines, is a skill, and cannot be done by just anybody with a packet of seeds and a few square feet of available ground.

I must confess that I can't recall a single fact about the Repeal of the Corn Laws, yet remain convinced that a quick course in pruning, potting, clipping and other activities ending in "ing" all those years ago might somehow have lodged forever in the potato banks of my mind.

I'm not saying that the War of Jenkins' Ear isn't important. And it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that knowing the co-victor of Waterloo, Field Marshal Blucher, believed he had been impregnated by an elephant, is not without its conversational advantages.

But can such information guarantee successful 12-month crop rotation in an urban garden?

Before my best pal Mick Lucas and I had been parted by the caste system that was inevitably created by the 11-plus, we'd climb aboard the school bus every morning and plan what we'd be doing that evening.

This all soon came to an end. After a day's graft looking up the girls' frocks in the potting shed, he'd be free as a bird once the final bell had rung.

Me? I was stuck with the coefficient of linear expansion, Pythagoras' theorem, the principals of evaporation and wondering whether I would be thrashed to within an inch of my life if I failed to understand logarithms. Homer definitely wasn't where the heart was...

But let us be serious for a moment.

The Government wants 50 per cent of school leavers to go to university.

Within a short time they will be unleashed on to a jobs market in which the value of a degree is falling fast, a marketplace that has been seriously undercut by Asian and East European competition, and the whims of global capital.

Many of these young people will have qualifications in just about everything under the sun. But what will their skills be?

The old system may have been flawed, but across a wide sector, youngsters were actually taught how to perform vital tasks... to build, make and grow things.

Years ago, it was not necessary to rob the Third World of key workers to fill posts in British hospitals. There were apprenticeships, too.

Whatever happened to them? De-skilling killed them off, that's what.

This country will at some stage have to realise that we cannot live by service economy alone.

At some stage we will have to become a manufacturing country again, a land where people actually make goods that others want to buy.

It might only be a small step, but we could start with learning how to cultivate plants once more.

For by eating properly again, we may not only feel better, but also more content within ourselves.

And maybe then, there would be no more tins turning up at harvest festivals.