I can smell the Palmolive and taste the Tooty Frooties. A time when the cards we swapped were from packs of PG Tips, clackers were banned from the schoolyard and our transport home was a spacehopper. My friend Gail went one better with one that looked like a giant tomato. She also had a brother who shot at us with his airgun. He's a doctor now.
Yes, I'm talking about a childhood where road safety was dominated by Billy Beacon and a visit to our school by the BBC. They'd come to film us for "Heddiw", that little bit of black and white Welsh current affairs, safely steered into the early evening schedules by R Alun Evans. I still don't know why they came to our school. None of the kids spoke Welsh, although not knowing the anthem was a dap offence. For the boys anyway: the girls got the ruler.
The Secret Squirrel generation had another rodent hero. Some of us still have the Tufty Game and remember the goodies that the half-a-crown membership of the Tufty Club got you. (Burglars note - I carry my badge with me at all times. Along with my Tessie Bear from the Ricicles box tops, so don't bother breaking in.) But Tufty's gone all modern. He's got his own website, http://www.tuftyclub.org.uk/., and a marketing consultant in Newport who wants to bring him back to teach the grown-up version of road safety. Despite numerous warnings, parents are still parking outside a Malpas school and causing a safety hazard. Clearly not pitching up on space hoppers.
Funny to think that when I was learning to look right, look left, look right again, Parliament was acting on the decade-old Wolfenden Report and introducing the Sexual Offences Act. The Hart-Devlin exchanges which preceded it still made essential reading on legal philosophy courses twenty years later, and maybe still do.
David Laws was just a toddler when the law was changed and I was standing on the kerb. Perhaps I should rephrase that. Because the Wolfenden Report also discussed the rise in street prostitution at the time, which it associated with "community instability" and "weakening of the family".
Words which could have come from the Conservative manifesto. 2010. In the week that we all feel sympathy for Laws but wonder whether we should have paid for his sensitivities, we also learn that three street prostitutes have been murdered in Yorkshire.
Half a century on from Wolfenden, which is the real scandal?
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