My kids are getting bored of the cliched ‘when I was young, we…’ conversation starter. I am at serious risk of developing boringblokeitus as I explain how, even if it wasn’t ‘better’ per se in my day, life was certainly a lot more fun.

Reminiscing the other night around a firepit as I taught the kids the age-old tradition of the charcoaling of the marshmallow, I, along with the able assistance of Private Peroni, started reeling off a list of wonders from yesteryear. It will cost me, as a trip to yesteryear don’t come cheap. A large proportion of these bygone activities I have promised I will introduce them to, if they are still on sale, add a couple of retro zeros onto the price tag.

Some of the old products are still with us today, including Matey. I purchased a bottle recently and, even though the label miraculously still gets away with reinforcing stale gender stereotypes, the receptacle is smaller.

On a Friday night we would go to Blockbuster and choose a film, before they were rebranded as ‘movies'. I remember a revelation one night when, arriving in Rye, East Sussex, they had installed a touchscreen video dispenser, which lasted a week before the screen got cracked.

We would spend happy Saturdays banging gunpowder caps with my dad’s hammer we had pilfered from the garage.

All the women went through a perm stage, as did some of the older boys, once Kevin Keegan, then the Ronaldo of his day, succumbed to the lure of the crimper.

Endless hours were spent inspecting random magazine pages in hedgerows and poking white dog poop with sticks before we would bundle into a friend’s house to enjoy a soda stream, and, under the guise of going to admire his brother's huge plastic hi-fi, we would instead admire his illicit booze collection that had been stumbled across under his bed.

We would enjoy 10p mixed bags of sweets that we didn't dare drop on the carpet. Not that it mattered anyhow as there seemed to be an obsession with covering each square inch of flooring with thick plastic matting to ‘protect it’, what from, I am still unsure. A phone call would cost ten pence, which we would have to pretend to put in the money box by the phone on the marble elephant table, before father would temporarily take the lock off. You would then spend 20 minutes trying to dial a number. One slip of the finger and the process would have to be repeated.

The weekly sojourns to town were spent window shopping at Our Price, eating sweets bought from Woollies pick and mix (is it any surprise they went belly up?), before popping into Tandy to admire the latest in tech called the Walkman. The day would be capped off by peering through the windows of Chelsea Girl, purely for research purposes of course.

Bubble-gum in sticker packs, taping the Top 40 on a portable tape player, eating fish and chips out of newspaper and attempting to avoid roundabout decapitation in a playpark would take up the remainder of the weekend before terrorising your teachers come Monday. They would then get their revenge as they threw you over a vaulting horse or launched a blackboard rubber from 40 yards at your temple. Still, a trip to A & E wasn’t such a grind back then. You could park for free within a mile of the hospital entrance and 20 minutes was classed as waiting a lifetime.

Yes, take me back. Carefree? Most certainly. More dangerous? Hell, yeah. We had no seat belts and it often felt as if the life expectancy of a kid was around 14, but by god it was fun. Now it is commercialised, fraught with unseen danger as we wrap our kids in cotton wool and sit indoors reminiscing and wondering what happened to the French exchange student we fell in love with aged 12 after spectacularly failing to impress her with our lame attempts at Electric Boogaloo.