This friend is a great reader of newspaper columns by medical writers - qualified doctors all, you assume. He seems recently to have been exposed to the thesis, in more than one article, that it is possible to bring up children in surroundings that are too hygienic or sterile, and that a little contact with some grubbiness, some dirt even, prepares them for life more realistically. Or so he says. Whether he has got it right or not, he takes his own childhood on the outskirts of a city as therefore being a model of preparation for life.
"We were never," he says, "my pals and I, for long out of contact with Mother Earth. Building huts, for example, with every bit of timber we could find around sheds in our big garden or in the fields around. Or damming a lovely little stream that ran nearby, using sods we cut and the stones of the stream itself. We could then hold back the water long enough to be sure of catching in our hands a few stranded sticklebacks or an occasional tiny trout left flapping on the exposed bed of the stream. Soon we let the water flow again and released the fish. If we were not feeling energetic enough to shoot (always in unison) at birds with bow and arrow, we would have a war with our neighbours or among ourselves with balls of clay which we fashioned with our hands and launched from the end of pointed sticks.
"There was a pond not far away which held frogspawn in season. It was long out of use and indeed had become more of a marsh. The bold would step gently, jam-jar in hand after the precious jelly. Often the surface would give way and water and mud came in over your rubber boots. Water and liquid mud. Then there were fires. Somehow a lot of the ash got on to your hands and even face. Picking blackberries from the roadside, dusty though they often were, left more black around your mouth. In a shop nearby, the front room of a scruffy terrace house, toffee apples could be bought - impaled on a splinter of firewood."
And then you ask our friend if they were all very healthy. "Ah well, the usual: chickenpox, measles, mumps, whooping cough - the usual." Seems a long time ago. Y