HOW anyone could want to punch the gorgeous freckly face of 10-year-old Haydon Flanagan is beyond me.

His sad little eyes gazing out from the pages of this newspaper must have made every mum and dad in town want to give him a hug and help soothe away his 18 months of misery at the hands of a gang of bullies.

What can you say about a group of children kids barely into double figures in age who can terrorise one of their peers in this way?

Brief flare-ups in the playground will always happen, the odd bit of name-calling is nothing new but, if Haydon's distraught parents are to be believed, these baby-faced bullies had some very grown-up tricks up their sleeves hitting out with sticks, threatening to break his legs and even to stab him.

If thoughts like that enter their heads at their age, what hope is there that they will turn out to be pleasant and balanced teenagers with a sense of fair play?

As the mum of a child about to leave the comfort zone of his primary school years, I can't help feeling that I'm sending my son into the lion's den.

Not a day goes by without reading or hearing about acts of extreme violence in our secondary schools, the worst of which has to be last week's murder of Kiyan Prince.

The promising young footballer had stepped in to break up a fight when he was repeatedly stabbed outside his school, becoming the latest victim of our rampaging knife culture. What a waste.

Reading all the commentary that has followed, it seems no school bag is complete these days without some sort of blade tucked away next to the sandwiches and set squares.

Apparently, most schoolchildren now carry a knife for protection'.

I'd like to think that Swindon has not yet reached the extremes of the London boroughs, but maybe I'm being nave.

It's certainly safe to assume that if the majority of inner city kids feel the need to arm themselves, our children will probably follow suit, if they haven't already.

And it goes without saying that every knife carried is potentially another loss of life, possibly of your child or mine.

Today, I would urge every child who thinks it's cool or hard to carry a knife to give it up under the national amnesty, which began yesterday.

And for those idiotic few who persist in hiding their blades, let's introduce X-ray scanners at the school gates machines that can pick up these weapons and eliminate the risk they carry before it's too late.

Let's do it for the sake of all those skinny kids, the fat ones, kids with glasses, tall kids, those with freckles or the wrong sort of trainers, and every other kid who is deemed not to fit in.

Let's do it so that children like Haydon can feel safe.

No, but they are brave

Hmmmm. I'm not sure what to make of Swindon's own Vicky Pollards, Leanne Hurd and Sasha Foxworthy, whose makeover we featured this week.

On the one hand, I think it's bizarre that two girls on the threshold of adulthood are so proud of looking and sounding, by all accounts like the quite grotesque comedy character, and even volunteered to appear in this local paper to tell the world.

On the other, I can't help but admire them for being so confident of themselves and their appearance that they can shrug off all the jibes and laugh along with their critics.

It takes a strong girl not to care what others think.

I suppose the question I really need to ask myself is whether I'd want one of my boys to bring them home to meet mum in a few years.

Well, nobut yeahbut no