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On my train journey to work, I pass lots of houses with big back gardens, and I can’t help noticing that there seem to be some seriously lucky kids living in these places. So far, I have noticed gardens containing a chute, some swings, an inflatable bouncy castle, a ful-size trampoline, a giant Wendy house and a child-size jeep. Not that I am jealous or anything, but when I was little there was a tree in my garden, and I used to pretend it was a house. At some point I found a long dead branch, and I would happily spend hours sweeping my imaginary house with it. I did have a Wendy House, but it took about six hours to erect and then my brother always staged an invasion and I ended up sitting outside peering in through the greasy plastic windows and blubbering, so it didn’t get brought out too often.

I am well aware that I am in danger of embarking on a “When I was your age I had to gnaw coal for dinner and clean my teeth with ferrets” type of angle, but seriously, do kids actually need their own branch of Toys R Us in the back green? Would it be so terrible for them just to charge about the garden, fall over into some mud and then do some wobbly handstands? Because the beauty of these sort of activities is that they don’t require any equipment, and the beauty of not needing any equipment is that there is nothing that needs fixed, cleaned or maintained. These kids with their flotillas of back yard boats and fleets of dinky Daimlers are surely being exposed at an excessively early age to the disappointment that adults confront as soon as they are old enough to start acquiring stuff: namely, that the aforementioned stuff does not come with a team of cheery pixies to maintain it for you. Bouncy castles get holes in them, trampolines get ripped, those kiddy jeeps look like they’d need an MOT every year, AND have laughable fuel efficiency.

No, maybe I’m just old and cantankerous - in fact there is no maybe about it - but I’m glad my back garden was a place for running and skipping and skinning my knees. Although I do quite fancy a chute…

This has just made me literally weep with laughter.