DNA tests prove paternity of a child, but they can leave a lot of sadness in their wake.

SO is David Blunkett a hero - or a selfish cad? The Home Secretary apparently wants to know if he is the father of his former mistress's children. He is prepared to take a DNA test to be sure. Not because he wants to deny paternity, but precisely because, if they are his, he wants to have contact with the children and be involved in their upbringing.

He had a long and publicly acknowledged affair with a married woman, Kimberley Fortier, who has a two-year-old son and is expecting another baby.

But the affair is now over. She has returned to her husband, Stephen Quinn, who has accepted both children as his. Just to underline the point, Kimberley has started using her married name.

You get the picture.

But Mr Blunkett seems unable to let go.

It's ironic when so many feckless fathers are delighted to abandon their children, that here we have someone who is desperate to take responsibility. It should - given the basis of an affair - be admirable and honourable.

But is it?

Since the dawn of time men have, wittingly or not, brought up other men's children. If one of the children looked more like the milkman than its supposed father, the possibility was best left unsaid. Even in the long and glorious family tree of the Royal Family - where there were entire kingdoms at stake - there are at least two strongly suspected by-blows, which have altered the subsequent course of British history.

In the past, all we've had to go on is looks and the mother's word. But now we have DNA and what a can of worms that has proved to be. Every week there are new heartbreaking stories of loving fathers and devoted children who have discovered they are in fact biological strangers. Disruption and unhappiness invariably follow.

If Kimberley Quinn's children are happy with their mother's husband - whether he's their father or not - maybe they should be best left there. Knowing their father is someone else could be a recipe for disaster. And David Blunkett's desire to know for sure that he's their father, is little more than self-indulgence.

And yet... children, however happy where they are, also have a right to know who they are and all that entails. Especially as they might well find out in years to come and feel doubly cheated.

There is no easy answer.

Sometimes don't you just wish that DNA tests had never been invented?

A TERRIFYING programme about pre-teen children revealed them raking through the racks of designer labels, knowing exactly what they wanted, while their fond mothers stood back quite happy to pay for it all and wondered why their children were turning into greedy monsters.

The children had gained an awful lot of over-priced clothes, make up and electrical gadgets but seemed, somewhere along the line to have lost a childhood, a priceless commodity that cannot be bought by the snap of a credit card.

What were these mothers thinking of?

Then we have the story of a 13-year -ld girl who weighs 20 stone and eats astonishing amounts of crisp, cakes and Mars bars every day.

Her mother spends £90 a week on food for her daughter and says she's at her wits' end about what to do.

Well, for a start she could just stop filling the cupboard with crisps and biscuits.

And maybe, as soon as we get the results of the pregnancy test, we should all start practising saying "No", very clearly, very firmly and very often.

NEW luxury loo paper is apparently blocking loos as it takes so long to dissolve and break down. So much for luxury.

You never had these problems when it was just newspaper squares stuck on a nail.

LAST week I spent a few days near Oxford where in another life I lived and worked. But now all the once pretty villages of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire run into each other, large gated houses and vast housing estates with barely a blade of grass between. Narrow roads are solid with nose to tail traffic, broken only by speed bumps, yellow lines, cameras and roadworks.

It is a very rich and very crowded part of the world where there are so many people and cars that at times you feel you can hardly breathe.

Gosh, it was good to get back home.

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