Should the Schonrock kids be allowed to cycle to school?

It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong

When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains. I would walk the half-mile or so along Clifton Road by myself and camp out — usually on the southbound platform — well away from the occasional adult trainspotters with their flasks, anoraks and notebooks. I think we all recognise today that adult trainspotters are invariably paedophiles, but this was something I knew, at the time, only instinctively. In any case, they were interested only in writing down the serial numbers of the trains, whereas my interest was in the monster Deltic diesels with their serious-looking sloping windows and alluring smells of electricity and hot metal, their dark warning growls as they were about to pull away from the station.