The following column is in no way intended to promote anti-social behaviour of any kind, nor is it condoning any kind of mischief committed by children, particularly the kind that gets senior citizens shaking their canes in the air and muttering: "Why, you little..!"

But we had a discussion in the office the other day which I found so interesting that I'd like to open it up to the general populace.

It began when an article was submitted to us from our regular film reviewer which contained the line "knock down ginger" in reference to the childish practice of knocking on doors and running away.

As I said up top, this is not a big nor a clever practice, and it can actually prove quite dangerous; you should never knock on a strange door because it might a) belong to a pensioner who might have a heart attack at your silly behaviour, or b) be the home of a sinister paedophile like the Child-Catcher out of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who will kidnap you and keep you in an old fridge dumped in his overgrown garden especially for the purpose of storing naughty children in.

But, we all did it, didn't we? Houses which had doors opening right on the street were the easiest to do but also the least fulfilling - people who live in such homes are so used to idiots knocking on their doors and running away that they rarely bother to actually answer their doors any more, even if it's the bloke from the Lottery with a big cheque or a neighbour telling them that their house is on fire.

Much better were houses with a decent-sized front garden. These required a great deal of skill, and when we played the game we generally took it in turns to knock on the doors.

This would mean you would carefully unlatch the gate, creep up the path as quietly as possible, then hammer like a maniac on the door before turning around and pelting down the path and up the street with your mates, laughing your heads off and hiding behind a parked-up Triumph Dolomite or a Ford Cortina.

Ah, such fun. Well, let's face it, there wasn't much else to do on cold winter nights (this was always an autumn-winter game; we needed cover of darkness) apart from set fire to things.

But what particularly prompted the whole conversation was the terminology used in this article to describe this age-old game, that was probably invented about five minutes after the first primitive man put a makeshift door up in front of his cave.

It was this phrase "knock down ginger". Only the two Londoners in the office had heard this, quite frankly, ridiculous term which in no way describes the endeavour it is attached to.

One of the Southerners also came up with a series of other names, including "knicky-knocky" and "knocky-knocky-nine-doors", but then again she does claim that her nan has lived next door to half of the people who've ever appeared in the TV Times, so perhaps she isn't to be trusted.

The Northerners in the department had much more prosaic names for it. "Tap latch" was one we used to use on the other side of the Pennines, as well as the much more commonplace "knock-a-door-run" and the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin "knock and run".

But the final word went to my colleague Mr Mike Priestley, Bradford born and bred, who responded to the straw poll about the definitive local name for the game with: "We used to call it knocking on doors and running away."