Now children have to put up with all colors of suffering around the world and I wouldn't like to pretend that my gift-free Yuletide, my present-free Christmas, with not a nugget of gold, a drop of myrrh or even a strand of frankincense in sight, is up there with the true misery that millions of children in less fortunate places in the world have to suffer not only on a yearly but a daily basis.

Sunday nights meant Mastermind. In this show, nervous members of the British public would sit in an atmosphere akin to the International Court of Human Rights, on a strict black leather chair under harsh spotlights, all for the pleasure of answering questions about the Wessex aristocracy or Funereal Practices in Victorian England.

In the mid-70s, candles were all the rage in Britain. We weren't all attempting to open mini-Madame Tussaud's or give aromatherapy a kick-start.

I don't want to think how many hours of my childhood I wasted at Copper Creek. It wasn't much of a creek. It ran through a patch of woodland and paused for a while, meandering to a standstill in a wide arc where the water was deeper and the banks further apart. You could almost fool yourself that you were on the pages of a Twain novel in that part of Pennsylvania.

Using the buses in my childhood was an adventure, not the tiresome chore that it's been turned into now. For a start, I used to catch buses at a time when the classic old routemasters patrolled the streets of London. The health and safety obsessives of today would have a heart attack if these buses were still around.

While I sit here writing this blog post, I listen to the house I sit in. It's quite a modern house, maybe 20 years old at most. The furniture inside is a mix of the newly acquired and the treasured golden oldies. All the appliances and gadgets though are brand spanking new. The oldest thing is the TV which is perhaps 3 years old.

Winters were colder in the 70s. I don't know if it was the lack of global warming or just my warped childhood memory, but it seems the frosts were sharper, the occasional snow a little deeper. Actually, I do know what makes me believe this - our bathroom.

We didn't have a large extended family when I was growing up so the house was never overflowing with cousins and nephews, grandkids and the like. My mother had a sister, Abel who was childless and husband-free. My father called her the 'old maid' and I never understood the reference to much later.

Our garden in Portland was not large. Once you had taken off the space occupied by our beloved Bambi II trailer, there was little more than a patch of grass left, surrounded on three sides by a whitewashed wooden fence that separated us from the Milkins, the McDonalds and, over the back, the Partridge family.

Mention October 1962 to most people in coastal Oregon and they won't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis - it will be the great storm of Columbus Day that year that comes to mind.