I WAS watching my grandson playing football the other day, and marvelled at his silky skills as he put in thunderous shots with both feet, soared like a marlin to plant headers beyond the keeper’s reach and put in a series of bone-crunching tackles.

And he didn’t even get his knees muddy, for his exploits were all on the big screen as he twiddled the controls of his super duper X-Box Play Station whizzbang or whatever.

He used to challenge me to play, but I could never work out which little man I was supposed to be, and spent much of the time hacking away at the corner flag while he rained in the goals.

Alex takes his football very seriously, whether on screen or for real.

When I suggested we didn’t bring him back the usual football shirt from a trip abroad, because he already had wardrobes full, he eyed me solemnly and declared: “Granda, you can never have too many football shirts.”

As well as football games, he has a host of others, including racing cars, shoot ‘em ups and other high tech masterpieces of mayhem.

I often wonder how the youngsters of today would have coped with the pastimes of my youth, when we didn’t even have a television of any description until I was nine, let alone one on which you could play games.

The first person on our estate to have a television was already a minor celebrity, having returned from the war with a German bride, who was a lovely lady, but was always treated with the deepest suspicion by the local children.

It must have been quite unnerving to arrive in a foreign land and settle down to watch television, only to glance over your shoulder and find at least a dozen urchins with their noses pressed to your front window, gawping in amazement at the Lone Ranger or Rin Tin Tin.

Bless her, she would sometimes let us into the living room to watch in comfort, perched on the settee like swallows on telephone wires, and she even plied us with pop and biscuits, but we never told our parents, for fear of being accused of consorting with the enemy.

To we children of the 1950s, the height of electronic sophistication was a colour changing torch, powered by three vast U2 batteries which expired after some 10 minutes.

The torch had a twist grip which changed the colour of the light from white to red or green, but the beam was so feeble it made a TocH lamp look positively dazzling, no matter which colour was deployed.

There were no rechargeable batteries in those days, but the dead U2s did not go to waste.

Few weeks went by without us starting a fire in our back garden, ostensibly to get rid of rubbish, but in reality because it was just good fun, especially when the neighbours slammed their windows with cries of “I’ll swear there’s a firebug in that ‘ouse!”

We would burn anything, from old Daily Mirrors and cardboard boxes to bike tyres and inner tubes, not to mention any mouldering conkers or other cast-off toys.

As an added bonus,we used to throw the big old batteries into the glowing embers, and wait to see what happened.

We’d usually forgotten about them until they exploded with a satisfyingly ear-splitting crack, spraying anyone within 10 feet with choking clouds of indelible carbon which no amount of scrubbing with carbolic soap or even a Brillo pad and Vim would remove for at least a week.

Alan, the chubby chap next door, spent half the year banned from playing with us, but every so often his mother would relent, and he would be allowed to come and join in our games.

He was invariably the one caught in a battery blast, and he would totter home like Al Jolson singing Sonny Boy, and his mother would be round accusing us of deliberately blowing her precious son up.

The unfortunate boy was the butt of many of our jokes, and his mother was round again accusing us of electrocuting him when we all linked hands and touched an electric fence for an elbow-jarring buzz.

He did get his revenge though, when we went to a supposedly haunted abandoned farmhouse to play a game of supercharged hide and seek, where every hidey hole just might contain a ghost.

I returned home drenched –Alan had peed on me with devastating accuracy through a hole in the roof!