“This is exactly what it was like for you when you were ten, isn’t it?”

Those words are uttered by Mrs B on the occasion of me settling down on the sofa to watch live football on the telly, with a copy of the Beano spread out on my lap and a tea of chicken and mushroom Pot Noodle with three slices of buttered bread.

The whole ensemble certainly has an air of a Saturday afternoon in 1980 about it, the only things being materially different including a lack of Frank Bough, more baseball caps and laptops in the Beano than there used to be, and the fact that England are playing reasonably well and no-one has thought it necessary to bombard the fans with tear-gas outside the stadium.

I can put myself back there, or a hundred Saturday afternoons just like it, as though it were – well, perhaps not yesterday, but a fortnight ago last Thursday. Certainly not 34 years ago.

Back in 1980 I was on the cusp of turning 11 and going to high school, just like my son is now. At that age I worried endlessly, it feels like – about the threat of nuclear war, about unemployment, about getting my head flushed down the toilet on my first day at big school.

I was also, despite all this, crazily optimistic about the future. I was a science fiction geek and believed in a future where there would be wonderful things and astounding technology, electric cars and hand-held communicators like on Star Trek.

I take a look around the world and think my ten-year-old self would probably be disappointed. None of the usual stuff we were promised – trips to the moon and jet packs, etc etc. Just a world that looks pretty much like his.

And then… well, there are electric cars, aren’t there? And we do have mobile phones with apps that allow me to speak to my parents with pictures as well as words – even Captain Kirk didn’t have that. And I’m writing this column on a laptop that has more computing power than the set-up that put a man on the moon half a year before I was born – what’s more, it’s not even my laptop, it’s my daughter’s. What she uses for school.

So perhaps me from 1980 would take a look around the world and die from happiness. And maybe, just as his world of 34 years ago probably wasn’t quite as bleak as I remember, I should stop and take stock more often and appreciate the ways in which the world has changed for the better.

The copy of the comic on my lap and the carb-heavy snack are the links between that world and this, and perhaps they will be the links between this world and the one 34 years the other way down the road, when my son and daughter are roughly about the age I am now.

Who knows what kind of world they will have created by then? If I give you nothing else, my children, at least take into this brave new world the delights of Pot Noodle butties, the Beano, and live footy on the telly.