Time was, if you went on a trip to the seaside with the family, small children were given an I Spy book or a comic for the journey. These days, they have iPads.

Going to pub or club for a teatime drink at weekends, and youngsters accompanying their parents are often quiet as church mice, sitting in the corner with a glass of juice and a bag of Wotsits, playing electronic video games or watching cartoons on a tablet with a 10inch screen and headphones.

By heck, when I was a lad children weren’t allowed inside pubs at anytime.

On trips to Blackpool I was left on the front step with other abandoned kids, clutching a bottle of lemonade. The only game I had was trying to find the blue twist of salt in the bag of Smith’s crisps.

My three-year-old granddaughter Jeannie doesn’t have her own tablet – she borrows mine on trips away to visit relatives. I download episodes of Brer Rabbit, Octonauts and Abney and Teal and she is as happy as Larry as dad drives down the motorway.

Even the language children use has changed. One little lad had a bag of sweets and my chum Rag asked: “What sort of spogs have you got?”

He hadn’t a clue what spogs meant.

”Spogs. Spice. Sweets?”

May be adults should go on an annual course to keep up with pre-teen terminology. Followed by teen terminology. In the same conversation at the bar, someone asked if youngsters of a certain age still use the word snogging or necking? In the past, this was an innocent if slightly vulgar reference to kissing, a pleasant experience as long as you got your differentials right.

I found this difficult with one girlfriend who was taller than me and I had to kiss her goodnight at the bus stop standing on a brick.

The affair ended when we accepted our mutual incompatibility after we turned up on one occasion to find someone had
stolen the brick.

Of course, necking could also be used as a description in drinking: “He necked that pint down quickly,” I said.

”Nay lad, that’s swallocking,” said Rag. “You swallock a pint.”

May be we need a course in Rag terminology, as well.