A shadow has hung over half-term, and it is Bumpee-shaped.

I don’t know if you are aware of Bumpees. If you don’t know any primary school-aged children, then you probably don’t. If you do have kids, then you’ll know that Bumpees are one of the current favourite bits of plastic that have great currency and cachet in the school playground.

Or rather, were the current favourite bits of plastic at the time of writing. These things move faster than neutrinos bounced out of the Large Hadron Collider. As parents well know, by the time you read this, Bumpees might be the uncoolest thing since... I dunno, season three Gogos.

Still, let’s assume that Bumpees are still cool. What are Bumpees? Small plastic discs, with an embossed B on one side, and a picture of some freaky little I-don’t-know-what on the other. An alien, maybe. Or a goblin. One of these things that populate primary school children’s waking hours, anyway.

They are two for £1.99. There are perhaps 100 to collect. The clever thing, from the manufacturers’ point of view, is that they come in sealed, opaque packets, so you can’t see which ones you are buying. So if you want to collect them all – and at a mere £100 for a full set, who wouldn’t? – you risk spending three or four times as much as that because you are bound to get doubles.

As in the real world, some Bumpees are more special than others. There are glittery Bumpees, silvery Bumpees and... a gold Bumpee! Number 100! A Wonka-esque golden prize! And we have one!

Had one... Charlie, so enamoured of his golden Bumpee, couldn’t keep his treasure under wraps. So he took it to school, hidden in his bag, glowing like the secret treasure in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

The golden Bumpee attracted a lot of attention. It was passed from child to child, each one gasping in wonder at the sheer golden plasticness of it.

I arrive on a rare opportunity to pick Charlie up from after-school club, and he is in a state of mild panic. The golden Bumpee has gone missing. We search high and low, but its rare glow emanates from no shadowy corner.

The witch-hunt begins. In the manner of the Spanish inquisition, Charlie begins flinging accusations around, acting on hearsay as to who thinks they heard who last saw someone who might have held the precious treasure. Before he gets out the Torquemada robes and torture implements, I whisk him away.

After that, he descends into self-recrimination. He should never have let so-and-so look at it, he should not have allowed such-and-such to hold it.

“No”, we say, gently. “If it was so precious, you shouldn’t have taken it to school in the first place.”

“I’ll never see my golden Bumpee again,” says Charlie, sadly.

“Actually,” says Alice, suddenly, “that was my golden Bumpee.”