I must make a point of asking the next passing eight-year-old child if eight-year-old children still collect things.
I must also make the point of asking this passing child the question in the presence of several responsible adults.
Or is it the other way round?
We live in a society that puts a lot of time and effort into protecting the vulnerable from the vulture.
The sad thing is that quite often the vulnerable didn’t know that they were in need of protection. So now as well as being vulnerable, they can add suspicion to the list.
I was born in 1940, and with the benefit of hindsight, life for young children then was more relaxed than it is today.
We lived in Pulrose. Pully was one of the first social housing estates on the island. Most of the residents were in the same boat as each other.
Young parents bringing up young children on very tight budgets.
For most families, the only insight into the big wide world was by courtesy of the Daily Mirror or the wireless.
Entertainment for us kids was the Dandy and Beano, or the Saturday afternoon matinee in the Picture House.
The matinee was the highlight of the week. Donald Duck and Micky Mouse cartoons and a ‘Black Hat v White Hat’ cowboy film.
That was the height of our sophistication and the limit of our contact with the outside world.
Unless, that is, you took up collecting. Everyone collected something. Stamps, cigarette cards, matchbox covers, you name it, we collected it.
My specialities were coloured glass marbles and cigarette cards.
The stuff you collected was like a currency. Everything had a value, and everything was negotiable.
At one stage, I also collected bus tickets. That was when bus tickets were little squares of cardboard. Can you imagine, in today’s politically correct world, swapping a Ship Matches box for a Stanley Matthews cigarette card?
Cigarette cards and match box covers would have lost all their magic if they had a picture of a rotting lung and the message: ‘Smoking Kills’.
Times definitely change and not always for the better. In my day, kids weren’t frightened of strangers, because we never met any.
We all lived in our own world. I never even knew any kids from Peel until I went to Ballakermeen.
Pornography was limited to occasional glimpses of torn out pages from a publication that was discreetly called ‘Health and Efficiency’.
If bullying was a problem, it was not one that caused me any concern, and as for eating disorders, they only cropped up in families that struggled to put food on the table.
Modern communications have changed everything. Now we have instant access to whatever is happening anywhere in the world.
We can do all our shopping without leaving the house. We can be educated or enraged. We can be influenced or injured. We can watch films and listen to music. We can do anything. We can be customers or contributors. But we can never be alone.
The innocence of childhood that my generation enjoyed has been overtaken by the world wide web.
In my day If we needed to speak to one of our friends, we would call and see them, or if they lived further away, queue up to take our turn in the nearest public telephone box.
The world we live in is under attack from all sides. Children can be cruel to each other, your bank account can be emptied by con men, and terrorism can hold society to ransom. If there could be a complete embargo on all news coverage of terrorist threats and atrocities, terrorism would be pointless and would die a death.
Or am I being naïve? Innocence is as outdated as a collection of beer mats.
I think I will put my collection of Famous Five books up for sale on eBay.