AS ANYONE of my generation and older will tell you, the chances of us ever being allowed to spend time with our parents in a pub were slender in the extreme.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that there was more likelihood of finding a non-alcoholic beer in the pubs around our home near Manchester than groups of youngsters running round.

While my mum and dad rarely visited pubs during my own childhood, there are few children of the 50s and 60s who have not sat outside a pub with a bottle of lemonade and a packet of crisps while their parents were enjoying a drink inside.

It was, quite simply, the done thing. Children did not enter pubs and the first recollection I ever have of being anywhere in the vicinity of one are faded colour photos taken in the beer garden' of a pub in Christchurch when we were on holiday one summer in the mid-Sixties.

I very much doubt that major pub chain Wetherspoons have cited nostalgia as the reason why adults with children will only be allowed two alcoholic drinks with a meal to limit their stay.

This country should not be proud that its children have grown up around pubs and alcohol given the number of them that go on to boast easy access to drink and sometimes binge drinking as hobbies.

While many European countries possess a culture that encourages wining and dining as families, we are a long way from being able to embrace such Continental ideals.

As a business decision, there will be those who will say Wetherspoons are being foolhardy.

As a decision that strikes at the very heart of what is going wrong in this country, I salute them.