A recent report claimed that children, on average, spend 20 hours per week online or staring at a phone LCD display. Nothing saddens me more than begrudgingly agreeing with the findings, although I believe the respondents downplayed the time spent anti-interacting so as to avoid embarrassment; as if the equivalent of half a working week wasn’t shameful enough.

The phone screen is a modern day poison akin to other ills that were overlooked in their time, yet produced devastating consequences. On no one’s gravestone will it ever say ‘Lovely lady, terrific WhatsApper’ or ‘Great guy with a heavenly Twitter finger’. Its usage, and our obsession, is a 21st Century illness with no known cure.

My daily routine as a child was always the same. Having planned to copy Jeremy's homework on the number 44 in the morning, I would arrive home, shove down some Smash potato, put on my football kit and pretend to be Dalglish until it was pitch black.

Others would go bike riding, swimming or playing knock down ginger. Occasionally my brother would ‘borrow’ one of my dad’s Gas Board smoke pellets from the garage and give the neighbours merry hell by pitching it in their porch. But still, they are stories to tell, although I often wonder if anyone is listening.

Maybe the cause of the obsession with the screen is us parents. Due to media overkill, every unpalatable incident involving children is reported widely creating hysteria and dread. This creates a fear factor where the safest, and only, option is to keep the next generation safe indoors. With confinement comes boredom and parents can only take so much pester power before they rescind their rigid regimes and give in to the evil of the Samsung Galaxy S6.

In the car for a journey of more than five minutes I suggest eye spy, car snooker or ‘talking’. All fall on deaf ears until the inevitable handing over of the device and a mini marathon of Slither ensues. No parents are immune. A few years ago I was lucky enough to be given a ticket to see McCartney at the Hammersmith Apollo and was seated in the VIP area behind his youngest daughter. It is rare to see someone at a McCartney concert wearing earmuffs and playing on their phone. She did both with the only surprise being the choice of game for a sibling of the world’s most famous vegan - ‘Bacon and Eggs’.

When I was bored and my mates weren’t about, I didn’t have the option of FaceTime or messaging. I could use the red dial phone (if I put 10p in the box stealthily placed by Father on the white faux marble elephant table). This was in the days where it took 20 minutes to dial out. Get one number wrong and the process would have to repeat, leaving you with trigger sores.

One cold wet day, with friends AWOL, my mother suggest I collect something new. I asked what? She replied ‘Car number plates’. After ripping the front one off my neighbour’s Volvo, she explained she didn’t mean ‘literally’. I then stood for 30 minutes on a main road scribbling random combinations of numbers and letters, like a precursor to Countdown, as cars flew by, intentionally splashing a poor sodden kid in an ill-fitting yellow rain mac clutching a damp A4 notepad.

I soon realised the complete wretchedness of my predicament. Therein lies the quandary: if I were 10 now, with the deluge of on-point entertainment on offer, I too would be pestering mother for her iPhone which would be duly handed over as a modern day dose of pre-teen Calpol.