The media are making much of the poor being unable to afford food. I saw one programme about more food banks opening up and was dismayed.

One interviewed woman explained that she was a school dinner lady, earning too little to afford food. The lady was taken to a table and given a cup of tea. As she sat down, she placed a mobile phone on the table in front of her while a food parcel was prepared.

My assumption, then, is that a mobile phone is such an essential commodity that humans can no longer be expected to live without one.

As long as the phone bill is paid from a person’s income, that person can then be fed by donations from a food bank to stay alive – to send messages and make calls to friends and family which used to be made when they met in person.

I was brought up after the Second World War. My parents coped with problems including clothing and food rationing. We had no car, television, computers, tablets or mobile phones.

To make ends meet, families grew vegetables; meat was kept in outdoor ‘meat safes’, eggs in a buckets of water; clothing was handed down to younger siblings and lodgers were taken in to help with rent.

Those needing financial help were means-tested before public money was forthcoming. But since the end of the war, society and the media have been telling young parents the world owes everyone a living.

DAVID BROWN, Jordan Hill, Oxford