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MY WAY
I inherited my father’s love of food. My father is Italian and food has always been a very important part of my life. He did all the cooking at home for us when we were children and I used to watch, fascinated. He worked in the food industry – at the Savoy and the London Metropole as manager – and my holidays were spent working in the kitchens of various hotels and restaurants.
I am trying to hand down the passion for food to my three kids. You do have to think about food a lot when you’ve got children and we’re probably eating more as a result. My wife Alice and I are trying to pass our love of food on to our three kids – Ella, Josie and Enzo.
Apart from food, sport should play a big part in the development of young children. I got involved with Premier Sport because I feel very passionately about the lack of sport in certain parts of the system – particularly in the primary school state sector. Sport is obviously a huge part of life. Every child should have access to all the facilities.
Hopefully my involvement with the Premier Sport project will help Britain produce a new generation of sporting greats. The project brings qualified coaches into the schools to promote and enhance a variety of sports across the board. Rather |
like when Jamie Oliver highlighted a real problem a few years ago with nutrition and school dinners and how that was contributing to create a society of unhealthy and potentially obese children. I think sport is another issue and there are problems with it in certain schools. There are other initiatives going on that are successful, but with the Olympics coming up I think it is important that we talk the talk. It is important that we create an opportunity for children to play all levels of sport. 45 minutes a week is not acceptable and why we want to promote children’s education and want people to become doctors and nurses and all sorts of professions in the future. I think sport should be given a far more important role than it is in certain schools at the moment. I think certain schools will do that and I think we need to raise awareness. I think I’ve learnt that sport has implications later on in life.
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To play sport you have to deal with other people, you are communicating and involved in teams. You have to follow a set of rules, so it helps you to understand and learn on the pitch and off it how to conduct yourself and behave. So that has implications in later life going forward and might have an impact on the way a child behaves as an adult. Everyone has a level in sport – I’m not suggesting everyone should become an elite level sportsman.
But I don’t think anyone should be denied that opportunity to flourish at sport. The awareness needs to be there that we have enough facilities in this country for children to excel at sport.
I want my children to be active and play a variety of sports. I’ve got three children under 10 and they swim once a week. They are out there playing netball and tennis. I don’t think at that age you need to specify what they do. I think it is about what you are exposed to in life and for them it is football, tennis, swimming, tag rugby – a whole cross section.
But not every child has parents who have the opportunity to do that. Therefore they are relying on what is offered at schools and a lot of schools – as this initiative is aiming to highlight – could do that a lot better. |
