I was born in 1940. In 1941 my dad was called up and I went with my mother to live with his father and mother in Berwickshire. They lived in a two room farm cottage. The water supply was 150 yards down the road where a hand pump supplied the horse trough and the cottages. The adults used a wooden yoke to carry two pails of water to the house. The toilet was out the back behind the pig styes. There was a coal fire in the range in the living room which heated a water tank in the range. Cooking was on the range. Light was by candles or paraffin lamps. There were six adults and me in the cottage.

My grandfather and grandmother slept on a bed settee in the living room. An Uncle, Hector Gray, had one of the bedrooms. My aunts slept in the attic on beds made out of tea chests and I shared a room with my mother.

There was a war on. My toys were a collection of bottle corks in a glass jam jar. On any given day they could be anything I wanted them to be.

There was food rationing. The first time I ate a Cadburys chocolate bar was when I was six. Bananas became available again after the war was over. There were widespread rumours that if you ate more than one you would die.

I wasn't poor. I wasn't deprived.

I had a happy childhood in the bossom of a loving family.

Poverty and deprivation is one of the themes of this election with competing claims on targets to eliminate child poverty.

News flash ... Its not going to happen.

Its not going to happen because it is a mathematical impossibility. And that's because the definition of poverty is mathematical.

The widely accepted definition of poverty is an income which is less than 60% of the national average On this measure, the proportion of the UK population defined as in poverty is roughly one in five.

This is a relative, not an absolute definition of poverty.

Unless there is a government mandate to give everybody the same, identical income, the level of UK poverty must remain at roughly one in five.

If you are living in "poverty" are you really poor?

The international poverty standard of the World Bank is an absolute standard based on daily income in US dollars. Very few Scots would be considered poor by the international poverty standards.

There are a couple of problems with using a relative standard.

Large amounts of government money are being wasted trying to fix a problem that is unfixable.

The more serious problem is that the label of "poverty" is stuck on individuals and neighborhoods. Those individuals and neighborhoods become "deprived".

Hope goes out the window.

In this day and age, no child should be malnourished and we need aggressive social programmes to make sure it doesn't happen.

But we do need to have a look at our definition of poverty and the effect this has on society.