BRADLEY Lowery is dying of cancer. The six-year-old from County Durham has been struck down twice by the cruellest of diseases despite his tender years.

He suffers excruciating pain on a daily basis and was nicknamed ‘Resus Brad’ by medics in the North East due to the number of times hospital staff had to call in the resuscitation trolley to save him. He will die tragically, heartbreakingly, with his childhood still in its infancy.

Ian Brady’s life lasted 79 vile, depraved years before his descent into hell earlier this week. During those years, Brady, along with Myra Hindley, took the lives of five children aged between 10 and 17, before burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor near Manchester.

All of which proves life is indeed not fair.

What Bradley Lowery’s family would do for extra hours with their brave little boy, let alone the number of years Brady spent breathing the air of those far more deserving of time on this planet.

These spirited youngsters like Bradley and, locally, Ethan Burney and Jacob Buckett, provide us with a healthy dose of inspiration and teach us grown-ups, with our moans and our gripes, life lessons way beyond their single-figure ages. There are reality checks for us all in each of their smiles alone.

Their laughter and unconditional happiness in the face of extreme pain and fear make a mockery of many of the issues we cover in these very pages.

Dog mess on the streets? Bins not collected for a week? Council cuts and public toilets closing down by the dozen? All frustrating and all worthy of a whine, but they are not a six-year-old dying of cancer or an eight-year-old losing his sight.

We are all guilty of a lack of perspective at times. It comes with the territory in this austerity-driven, highly stressed and busy world we live in. But imagine if we all took a minute or two to think about kids like Bradley Lowery?

I’ll apologise at this juncture for even mentioning Ian Brady in this piece, in an attempt at a ‘life isn’t fair’ analogy. He doesn’t deserve this newsprint any more than he deserved a place on Earth.

But for every one of him, there are hundreds, thousands, of inspirational kids like Bradley Lowery who we can all look at and become better people.

So while life is not fair, we can all do our bit to ensure we embrace the things we are blessed with while we can. Bradley Lowery does.

FOOTBALLER gets some time off, goes out and lets his hair down. Nothing new there, yet Tyrone Mings probably faced the wrath of his manager Eddie Howe when he arrived back for training yesterday.

Mings decided to take a little trip over the Irish Sea to Dublin on Monday after Howe had granted his players some leisure time following the win over Burnley on Saturday.

The defender is partial to a Tweet and an Instagram post (as are most people in this ‘Look At Me, Look At Me’ age) and that was his downfall thanks to an Instagram Live video showing him sporting a Gary Barlow face mask and leading ‘Up The Cherries’ chants in his watering hole of choice.

Mings is a very bright lad, so it came as something of a surprise that he would deem it a good idea to broadcast himself to the world enjoying what appeared to be some boozy hijinks when Cherries still have a Premier League game to play tomorrow.

While footballers should be allowed to take some time off and enjoy themselves in the same way the rest of us do on an average Friday or Saturday night, if they want the trappings and salaries that come with playing sport at the top level they need to accept that they are never truly ‘off duty’.

And some advice on how to intellectually manage their social media output wouldn’t go amiss either.