COOKERY classes are to be back on the menu in England's schools. Every child, 11-14, is to have an hour's cookery teaching a week.

Common sense at last.

Only for one term at the moment. But it's a start, a taster, an appetiser that might at least show them that food doesn't have to come wrapped in cellophane on plastic trays.

We now have a whole generation that cannot cook. Actually, it's probably nearer two generations, who not only cannot prepare a meal but seem to have no idea of the connection between food as it's grown and reared and a meal on the plate.

While the wealthy agonise about free range, organic and food miles, the other half are pumped full of fat, salt and Enumbers in a diet that does them no good and costs them a fortune, while many Food and Technology lessons have been doing little more then teaching them how to design pizza boxes or ice cakes.

Look at all those pictures of young villains you see in the papers. Even allowing for the unflattering light of the police mug shot, none of them ever looks healthy, do they? You can't believe that they have spent their lives eating nourishing wholesome food, lovingly prepared.

If they had, they would look very different.

And they might have turned out differently, too, and not just because of the loving family background that implies.

A number of experiments in prisons have shown that giving people decent food reduces bad behaviour.

We are what we eat - which sometimes doesn't bear thinking about really.

An hour a week for a term isn't much, but it might at least teach children to recognise a vegetable, which seems to baffle even checkout assistants now.

Runner beans were the last "exotic" vegetable to flummox the girl in Sainsbury's.

Having rediscovered the point of cookery lessons, the Department of Children, School and Families is also keen to re-introduce sport in schools as another way to tackle obesity.

Compulsory cookery? Compulsory sport? Those of us who were in school before the 1970s are allowed to smile.

Uniforms are already making a comeback, as is the phonic system for learning to read. Talk about re-inventing the wheel... We now look forward to the chanting of tables, the learning of grammar and strictly enforced rules of manners and behaviour.

But just in case you think we have too rosy a view of the past, we'll pass on the forcefully flung blackboard rubber, thank you.

IAM intrigued by the BBC's language in their accounts of the Ipswich rape trial, when they describe all the victims, not as prostitutes but as "working as prostitutes".

Presumably, they re doing this so that the women aren't defined entirely by their trade, which might seem a bit demeaning or belittling.

But as they never talk about the rest of us as "working as journalists" or "working as teachers" or "working as the Home Secretary", the end result is somehow to draw even more attention to what the poor, sad girls were doing to turn a trick and earn a living.