Someone at the Health Education Authority has discovered a fascinating fact that we will have to accept on trust as it would be difficult to check out for ourselves. If you laid all your veins and arteries end to end they would stretch right round the world . . . twice.

It sometimes seems as if the same could be said about textbooks on the human body and the dangers of late 20th-century life, but here we have two more publications to extend our low-tech information highway by another 50 cms.

Body Maintenance is aimed at eight to 12-year-olds and covers minor ailments, simple first aid and the basic body concepts dealt with in science AT2. My 10-year-old loved the thumbnail-sized cartoon maintenance men who stroll across the pages repairing damaged body parts. Better still, they get caught in a dandruff snow storm and are shown sitting on the toilet with their dungarees around their ankles. That will more than compensate for the “boring bits” about alveoli and sebaceous glands (and thank you, HEA, for the reassurance that each hair has its own erector muscle).

But teachers may find the text rather trying because it reads like a script for a children’s Saturday morning television “prog” and is full of constructions such as “breathing is a real body basic”.

Personally, I would prefer to switch channels to Stay Safe, which adopts a more sober approach even though it is also aimed at eight to 12-year-olds. Sobriety is, of course, called for as the topics include physical and sexual abuse; stranger danger; fire, water, road and home safety; bullying and racism, drug abuse, and - more positively - the new rights and protections offered by the Children Act.

I would question why there should be eight pages (a sixth of the total) on sexual dangers and only four on road and cycle safety when 400 children a year are being killed on Britain’s roads. But I won’t press the case too hard because I have just read yet another report in my morning newspaper about a woman who was systematically abused by her father throughout her childhood.

She never knew what to do, however, because the only books on her bedroom shelves were by Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton. Sadly, the worlds that they created are not the ones that children actually live in.