CHILDREN playing by railway lines, running on the tracks, into tunnels, leaving litter, stealing coal, approaching strangers, bringing home random foreigners, waving their underwear…

I’m amazed The Railway Children is still allowed to be shown.

AND they’re taught at home by their mother without a hint of a national curriculum…Ban that film immediately!

Driven in by the rain on Sunday afternoon, I watched The Railway Children for the umpteenth time – but with fresh eyes.

The BBC is tying itself into knots at the moment over Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons – changing a character’s name from Titty to Tatty for the sake of modern sensibilities . Whether the Swallows and Amazons will still be allowed to sail without life jackets, helmets , non-slip deck shoes, adult supervision and a proficiency certificate, we wait to see.

The Famous Five, of course, roam the countryside utterly unsupervised. They ride bikes without helmets, sail without life jackets, explore caves without hard hats, swim in seas without lifeguards and are incredibly patronising to the lower classes.

Even though they tangled with burglars, smugglers, jewel thieves and spies, their negligent parents never learned – but still casually packed them off again next holidays, with nothing more than a few ham sandwiches and bottles of ginger beer. And a horse and caravan to look after.

Can you imagine what Social Services would make of that? Or the RSPCA come to that.

And actually, even I frowned in The Railway Children when the grammar school boys have a hare and hounds race. (a) because it’s daft to run into a railway tunnel and (b) because scattering paper for the “hounds” to follow is just plain littering.

These books – and the tv and film adaptations – must seem like the wildest shores of science fiction to today’s protected children. In a way it’s almost cruel to let children read them. It just gives them a tantalising glimpse of the freedom they are never going to have.

The irony is that when the books were written they eventually hammered home a highly moralistic message. But now they’re positively subversive. Titty is the least of the problems.

So let your children read them - but only under supervision, of course.

THE good thing about Christenings is that they are one of the few occasions on which both sides of a child’s family are all gathered together in one place – so you can all eye up the opposition. The next time might be a wedding, by which time numbers may well have dwindled a bit.

Unsettling though it can be, it’s a good reminder how every child is a sum of its ancestors – all of them, not just the ones you like.

However much the Duchess of Cambridge may dress young George just as his father was dressed thirty years ago, he’s still half a Middleton. Prince William, quite rightly, honours the memory of his mother – but he is equally his father.

And as the Queen looked benignly on great grand-daughter Charlotte, you’d have to remember the baby’s other great grandmother, Dorothy, the shop assistant daughter of a former Durham miner.

It’s a great mixture and everyone is equal in it. Even if you can’t stand your mother -in-law or have no time for your in-laws’ parents – tough. They’re all part of the mix that make up your child.

All those genes in one small baby. Bound to be interesting, isn’t it?

MEANWHILE the Cambridges’ Norland Nanny was wearing a uniform that looked as though it belonged to the time of Call the Midwife – if not earlier. It made even my sister’s 1950s school uniform look positively stylish.

Then I read that the Norland outfit was actually updated two years ago.

Presumably before that they were wearing crinolines…

WIDOWS are a dying breed.

Far fewer women are now outliving their husbands in a long and lonely widowhood - partly because the narrowing gap in life expectancy between men and women. And partly because the women left behind might be equally bereft but are not technically widows.

More elderly couples are choosing to live together without being married. Up by a third in the last decade and by 11% in the past year alone.

Well of course. This is the generation who invented the Swinging Sixties. They’re hardly likely to go all respectable and conventional at this stage in the game.

SOME women get roses. Some of us don’t.

When we lunched at the splendid Vane Arms in Thorpe Thewles this week, landlord Tom Wade gallantly presented me with a bunch of radishes.

A bit unexpected but wonderful – and at least they tasted a lot nicer than roses.