THE other evening on The Archers there was talk of supplying “the local food bank.” Now there’s something that would never have entered the scripwriters’ minds when the celebrated soap was launched in 1950.

Just before learning of Ambridge’s, or perhaps it is Borchester’s, food bank, I had been skimming through the “Festive Season” issue of our local advertising magazine. Seven pages compete for wining and dining custom. Top of the bill, perhaps is a “New Year’s Gourmet Extravaganza” - £130 per couple. Meanwhile, elsewhere, breakfast is now being served “until 2 pm”.

In 1950, I venture to suggest, few people dined out at Christmas, New Year or indeed most other times. Except on holiday, none breakfasted away from home, certainly not at 2.30 pm.

But the restaurant ads are beaten for space by those for beauty salons. One offers “bikini-line laser hair removal” at “£80 per treatment”. Or the lady might have a “Pumpkin Peel”, a treatment that acts “on the deeper layer of the skin to really rejuvenate and enhance”. A finishing touch could be “St Tropez Tanning”. Back in the 1950s this was the stuff of Hollywood.

All available in the modest settings of Stokesley and Great Ayton, these signs of ample wealth are not a million miles from food banks galore – on Teesside. Our society is now less equal than at any time since the 1930s. Too much emphasis on food banks in The Archers will drive away listeners in droves. But that is the least cause for alarm at the trend.

ONCE pilloried for his “on your bike” advice to the unemployed as Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of British industry was throwing thousands out of work, Norman (now Lord) Tebbit has gained respect as a man of courage and dignity. None who saw it will forget the image of him being levered, badly-injured and grimacing, out of the wreckage of Brighton’s IRA-bombed Grand Hotel, where he and his wife, Margaret, had been trapped for three hours, all the while holding hands to comfort each other.

Paralysed from the neck down, his wife remains, as Lord Tebbit puts it, “sentenced to life imprisonment in a wheelchair”. Thirty three other people were injured, and five killed, in the blast. But the terrorist who planted the bomb, though sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 35 years, spent just 13 years in jail.

In line with that mind-blowing clemency, perhaps it should have been the terrorist, rather than Lord Tebbit, who unveiled a plaque on the hotel last weekend, the 30th anniversary of the outrage. As Lord Tebbit pointed out, while the terrorist hasn’t repented, for him (Lord Tebbit) and his wife “there is really nothing to celebrate or mark, it just goes on”. Deeply sad.

A report highlights a growing problem of loneliness among elderly men. In a large survey 1.2m reported suffering medium or high social isolation. Thirty-one per cent of those living alone go more than a month without any contact with a family member, compared with just 20 per cent of older women. Appropriately it was a man, the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, who wrote the most piercing words on loneliness that I’ve ever come across: “Loneliness – the word is life endured and known.”