I’m sure I’m not the only parent who’s relieved that today’s children are growing up in a cotton-wool bubble, protected from any form of danger. When I think back to my infancy in the 1970s, I begin to wonder how any of us survived. All those teddy bears with spikes for heads, and big trousers presenting a clear tripping hazard, not to mention those vinyl LPs with their fearsomely sharp edges. (Or was it just my dad who sharpened them up on a grindstone then gave them to us to play with? Anyway, I digress.)

The point is, today’s kids – our kids – will never have to know of these horrors. They are part of a charmed generation, where even getting them to carry their own juice into the living room is so fraught with the threat of litigation from the authorities that we just daren’t.

And then, this morning, what do I find in my daughter’s school bag?

A skipping rope.

That’s right, a skipping rope.

Hell’s bells, I felt like Cinderella’s father must have when he spent all that time banning needles from the kingdom, only to find a ruddy great spinning wheel at the top of the highest tower (i.e. angry and betrayed, not to mention in the wrong fairy tale). I mean, just imagine: small kiddy… length of rope. Surely I’m not the only one who can see the danger there? Just imagine if she’d been skipping in the playground, and there was a cement mixer there, and a meteor had landed just next to her and thrown her to the ground… but her hand had landed in the cement mixer!! She’d have been condemned for life to go around with a barrel-shaped cement block for a hand, which she would have needed to transport on a little specially-made buggy. And that’s just one obvious example I can think of: I’m sure you can think of many more, specific to your own circumstances. The point is: my child took a skipping rope to school. The school knew. My wife and I knew. And yet nobody did a thing to stop it.

For God’s sake, we must stop this child carrying own skipping rope madness now!