Editorial: Let the kids hurl their pine cones

Back in Standard One, oh all right then ... Year Five or whatever, I built a rifle. It was modelled on the Winchester bolt-action job I'd see John Wayne threatening the entire Cherokee nation with every Saturday afternoon.
In the cupboard in the wash-house, where Dad stored his tools and things like old hinges and brackets, I found one of those small sliding-latch things you bolt on to doors as an extra lock.
It looked just like the bolt-action thing on the Duke's rifle.
So on it went, courtesy of four nails, and it looked a picture.
When my two mates turned up to play after school they were most impressed, and with it I more than held my own against their Colt .45s.
Apart from yelling "bam!" for gunshots the other most commonly used phrase was "no ... you missed!"
We played Cowboys and Indians and when we tired of that we stormed German and Japanese-held garrisons.
The 10-year-old cries of "banzai!" and "achtung!" rang out
We never thought anything of it. It was just playing. After all, we'd see it on the big screen and the small screen. Cowboys and Indians and war ... all activities carried out by grown-ups and re-created for the screen, by grown-ups. So it must have been all right then.
Fast-forward now to 2011, and a school in Warwickshire, England, where a rift has developed between the school heads and some parents.
Because two 7-year-olds were caught playing war games and making noises with their imaginary guns. One teacher insisted the boys' parents "reprimand" them and tell them not to play games with imaginary guns any more.
Basically, their freedom to play had been curtailed.
So I daresay all they can do now is sit quietly and discuss climate change or go home and sit at a screen and play harmless, and approved, computer games ... hour after hour ... day after day.
It's rubbish, but the tip of a growing iceberg, I suspect.
For another school banned real footballs - allowing playtime football only when a big, soft sponge ball was used so that possible injuries were avoided. Another school banned the grand old English tradition of conkers ... someone could get hit in the face.
Absurd. Wrap them all up in cotton wool and make sure the television screens don't show the kids what the grown-ups invented and do every day. Start wars and fight them. But they don't go and do such things because they learned it at school. No, quite the opposite ... more than likely they were repressed.
It is, indeed, political correctness gone mad and I hope it does not spread Down Under.
When my lad was little, I helped him knock out a few enemy bunkers using grenades ... made from pine cones. That fixed them!