My mum once found a shoebox stuffed under my bed. Closer investigation discovered that it contained a rat I had caught. She wasn’t best pleased, to put it mildly.

But that was the sort of things we boys did back in the ‘good old days’. We also climbed trees – sometimes falling out of them – and built dens in the wood out of all sorts of dodgy materials that would keep the Health & Safety brigade happily busy for weeks these days.

We raced bikes recklessly down muddy hills – and we fell off them as well, cutting knees and hands. With my mates Tony Cumner and Steve Poulter we played football and cricket in the street and there were days when I rode off on my bike to go fishing.

We also delighted in exploring nature; keeping frogspawn in jars of water, beetles in jars of grass, catching butterflies, watching birds and collecting colourful fragments of eggs found on woodland floors.

There were times when we built soapbox cars out of bits of wood and old wheels and careered down the road or were content playing marbles on the path. And, of course, all this was punctuated with fights and tears.

This was the stuff of childhood, a battlefield and a playground in which character was forged between the ages of nine and 13.

Of course the decline of these days has long been mourned as boys today show more interest in ‘stupid’ girls than playing; more interest in wearing the right trainers than scuffing them climbing trees; more interest in computer games than going outside and, dare I say, even blooding themselves in the world of alcohol rather than slaking a hard-earned thirst with cold ginger beer.

These are the consequences of a high speed age in which children have to grow up too fast, but also an age which has become more ruled by fear.

Where we were booted out to play and told to come back in time for tea, today’s parents are frightened to let their children out of sight – and that’s official. A National Trust survey revealed last week that 87 per cent of parents wished their children would play outside, but that one in four wouldn’t even let them for fear for their safety.

Perhaps the most telling statistic, however, is that 38 per cent of children spend less than an hour a day outdoors. That, more than anything else, is an alarming and sad indictment of the erosion of childhood. This isn’t an ‘old man’s rant’ against the ‘good old days’, but a mourning of lost days that should never have escaped the grasp of our young.

Still I suppose at least mums won’t be finding rats in shoeboxes under the bed anymore.

We've got the message

MY guess is that most of us are aware by now that Wycombe District Council has assumed the mantle of the Car Parking Watchforce.

The legions were sent out some months ago to scour the streets for those who would flaunt parking regulations and as a consequence slap tickets on the offending automobiles.

So can someone please inform the authority that our roadsides no longer need to be littered with large garish yellow signs informing us of the fact.

Frankly it beggars belief that almost nine months on we still have these signs ruining our verges.