MY parents used to keep a few livestock during the 1950s and I was entrusted with feeding these creatures, a ritual that took place without fail twice a day, come rain or shine.

One particularly freezing January evening, I complained to my mother that my hands were cold. This literally cut no ice with her, which is what you’d probably expect from someone who still had vivid memories of the Coventry blitz.

“Stop whining boy. And get up that garden path to the hovels…”

The hens were allowed to peck about in a run during daylight hours but were taken in at night into a permanently illuminated pen. This was to encourage the urge to lay eggs.

Once in situ, they would be quite content scratching the peat that covered the floor of the pen or settling down in a nest box. After all, hens are pretty much like the rest of us – they prefer the simpler things in life.

Those fowls lived like royalty.

They got handfuls of weeds whenever a vegetable patch was dug over, plus all the juicy worms and other invertebrates that might be lurking in the leaves and roots.

We even kept pigs at one stage. I can still recall how my sister and I both wept bitterly when they were taken off to market.

I may have dearly loved bacon and eggs but the thought of poor old Gert and Daisy as finely sliced rashers was just too much to contemplate.

The garden itself was about a third of an acre and half of this was given over to growing vegetables.

With a little bit of planned rotation, that dark, crumbly and highly fertile soil yielded food all the year round.

This was green sustainability long before middle class faddists discovered such wisdoms. Back then, many people just took it for granted.

But I do get the feeling that we will have to seriously start returning to basics and quite soon, too. For I keep reading reports of impending catastrophic global food shortages that will not necessarily be confined to the Third World.

We should therefore take heed of the warning signs, begin ripping up all that decking, lifting the concrete on the patio… and start planting again. For who knows? It might just make all the difference at some stage in the not-so-distant future.