Doctor Rashford and memories of school dinners.

Doctor Rashford and memories of school dinners.

Sometimes football makes the right decisions at the right time. There are times when football gets it absolutely right. Today football rightly rewarded a young man whose best years still lie far into the future and may one day win the game's most glittering trophies. He is 22, fitter than he's ever been before, vastly talented and a paragon of virtue. He is a  man with a social conscience, an awareness of the game's morals and a valuable insight into how football ticks.

His name is Marcus Rashford and he plays for Manchester United. He also happens to play for England which makes today's ultimate honour all the more worthy. Rashford was accorded the ultimate honour, an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. Now in the ordinary scheme of things such an award would never have attracted the publicity it so richly deserved because his act of charity and warm hearted benevolence should have been expected from a man of such vast wealth and status.

But Rashford did something that those of a thoughtful disposition might have overlooked in their day to day living. He bandied about the idea of giving school children free school meal vouchers because he knew exactly what they must have been going through at the moment, the struggles to keep a roof over the head of poverty-stricken families on decrepit inner-city housing estates. Poverty is the watchword and Rashford can strongly identify with their often despairing plight where the children of today have no idea when their next meal will arrive on the dining room table.

Today though Rashford will step up onto the stage of the University of Manchester, a honoured citizen and exemplary ambassador at a time when football needs some kind of boost to its battered morale. There are of course no fans at our football stadiums and we do acknowledge the reasons why. But Rashford took the time out to perform an unsung act while the rest of the footballing community were more obsessed with wage deferrals to their players, holding out for hugely lucrative contracts and then wishing the days, weeks and months away in the hope that someday the Premier League would finish off the tattered remnants of a broken and decimated season.

So step forward Dr. Rashford. Your doctor is an immense credit to his surgery because he's offered society the chance to make good of itself, of eating a healthy and well-balanced diet, feasting on nutritious food and three good meals a day. The caring and altruistic in Rashford stopped for a while, conducted his TV interviews and confirmed something we may have known anyway. Marcus Rashford is a warm, compassionate footballer, a striker of intelligence and street-wise know-how.

Mention of school lunchtime dinners brings back a whole photographic album of memories of school dinners from many moons ago. In the mind's eye you can still see the somewhat ancient hut that housed our youthful school lunches. When you cast your mind back now it almost feels as if it belongs to an entirely different age when diets were non -existent, nobody worried about the beneficial or damaging properties of every calorie you were adding to your waistline nor were you acutely concerned about something that would become known as junk food.

Still, this was cholesterol heaven for many a teenager from the 1970s generation. And so it was that we would all scramble into this Nissan hut that quite literally looked as if it had accommodated  prisoners of war rather than prepubescent children with high spirits and voracious appetites. We ran frantically towards the table that always seemed to be the first to be called. We pushed and shoved, jostled and lunged towards that top table like ravenous kids who hadn't eaten since nursery school let alone secondary school.

Our dinner lady had brunette hair and looked like one of those matronly nurses you tend to find in hospitals with an anglepoise lamplight at night and a pile of notes on her desk. The aforesaid dinner lady would wait patiently near the serving hatches, fingers gently clenched and ready to bellow out a loud command to highly energetic and restless young boys. Then the first table would be called out quite emphatically and some of us had to be content with one of the last tables. So close but so far but we tried.

This became a very structured ritual, the steam pouring from hot potatoes and vegetables, thick gravy turning your lunchtime meal into a work of art on your plate. Then we would make our cautious way to those huge metal tureens groaning with mashed potatoes that would be carelessly lumped onto your plate. The first hatch provided you with whatever meat happened to be the choice of the day. The potatoes, which at first sight probably came directly from the Irish famine from many decades ago, were promptly scooped out with what looked like a spatula rather than a spoon.

That whole lunchtime period still sends a cold shiver down your spine. At no point had you ever eaten so excessively at lunchtime since you were always content with the egg mayonnaise sandwiches your mum had made for you at primary school. But we ploughed through these heavy troughs of desperately unhealthy food, grateful in a sense because it was rich and well cooked.

However, after five years of constant carbohydrates and mountains of stomach bursting calories we knew that we'd leave our secondary school at least twenty stones heavier than we were before entering the hallowed school gates. By the evening we were reluctant to commit ourselves to our parents main dinner although it was warmly received. We were full up, bloated now and had no more room for anything else of substance but thanks for asking.

But we shall always treasure the honey cake with apple strudel, wince at the horrendous semolina that always came with that disgustingly stodgy skin that should have been dumped in a bin immediately rather than given to impressionable young lads. Then there were the never ending bowls of rice pudding that increasingly took on the appearance of wallpaper paste rather than something mouth wateringly edible.

And so we return to Dr Marcus Rashford, a genuine crusader for all seasons, a powerful campaigner on behalf of children who may not have been given the ideal start in life. Rashford is still one of the Premier League's most potent of strikers, a pacy, lightning fast athlete with a perfect eye for goal. His England career has already been well established and an FA Cup Final appearance beckons. Sadly Rashford, if United do reach the Final, may have to pretend that the United supporters are there but then you can't have everything. Dr Rashford. It has a ring to it.