What a different world it was then. I’m talking about those boomer years.

Snowflakes will recoil in horror at squeezing their toothpaste out of a tube made of lead. It did us no harm apart from rotting your teeth and giving you mild lead poisoning. It got banned, of course – a clear case of political correctness gone mad, if you ask me.

But at what cost? Try folding a plastic tube up from the bottom when it’s part emptied; the bugger just recoils. Not like lead. That stayed dutifully folded and allowed you to chase all the toothpaste up the tube and out.

And all this nanny emphasis on health and safety was so unnecessary. When I was a lad we had iodine instead. You kept this evil-smelling, devil’s potion in a little bottle in full view and reach of us kids. It was an effective reminder of the golden rule of H & S – “Watch Out!”. If you got cut or grazed it got rubbed into the wound staining it orange but more impressively, it stung like buggery. Better not to tell your mam you’d been cut; better still to be careful instead.

And white dog shit. Where did that go? Have today’s dogs evoluted an ingestive system that expels only non-white matter? The consequence is that kids today who can’t afford chalk are deprived of the opportunity of tagging pavements (or corsies, as we knew them in Hucknall) with prototype graffiti.

And then there’s those tables printed on the backs of school exercise books which were so helpful as an aid to essential learning and formed the basis of future year’s quiz knowledge.

How will youngsters these days, for instance, ever get to know that there were 240 pennies in a pound (and also 16 ounces)?

or that 20 grains = 1 scruple

or that 3 bushels = 1 sack

or that 24 and a half cubic feet = 1 solid perch (for mason’s work)

But I’m pissing against the wind, aren’t I? You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Different worlds, see?