Sarah Todd: What to do when the lights go out at home and the candles are lit

The children were asleep just after 7pm as they couldn’t see to read and The Husband came through for his tea the second it was announced as there was no blessed computer to check or television channel to flick.

There was a novelty factor of course and it was actually quite pleasant to eat by candlelight. There were no rude comments about what was served up either, as the actual look of the meal couldn’t be determined.

Talking of food, the television normally doesn’t get switched on during the daytime as it’s too easy to end up getting nothing done, but something made me press the switch while waiting for the kettle to boil.

Yorkshire chef James Martin was on BBC1 with a programme called Operation Hospital Food, in which he was re-educating kitchen staff and budget makers at Scarborough Hospital about the ludicrous amount of waste and poor quality of patients’ meals.

He stopped them buying battery eggs. Maybe it was misheard, but it sounded like the milk was coming from abroad. Wherever it was from, it wasn’t local and the TV chef soon put a stop to this silliness.

It was a really brilliant, interesting programme.

So much better than the reality rubbish we get served up for prime-time evening viewing.

Children’s television is even worse; a national disgrace really.

Take a look down home-from-school offerings and almost everything is a repeat.

If you can find yesterday’s television guide have a nosey down BBC1s offerings. There is only John Craven’s old programme, Newsround, that isn’t a repeat.

Everything else in the schedule has an “R” after its listings. No wonder children go around like zombies, with nothing new and stimulating to watch on the television when they get home from school.

We’ve had a birthday boy and one of the topics his father and I did find to chat about when the electricity went off was how you learn sense as you go along.

Over the years we’ve had a disco, magician and more children than you could fit in the Newsround studio.

For this latest celebration he had just five friends and did nothing more than an assault course made up of welly wanging, goal scoring and general running around.

There’s a lot of peer pressure on children, however young they are, to keep up with their classmates and do the same as everybody else.

It’s great to see them developing personalities and deciding to do their own thing, whether or not it’s what others expect.

Sounds like those hospital menu makers after the talking to they got from James Martin.