Glen Medeiros takes me on a trip down memory lane

The song in question was Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You by Glen Medeiros. If you’ve never heard it I recommend you download it to your i-prefixed device this instant.

The song itself reminds me of a time of innocence before such i-prefixed devices stole the sun from our hearts.

It was released in 1986 when I was in my ninth year. I was a boy of simple pleasures - I liked Lego, football and Roald Dahl books. My favourite drink was Dracula’s Blood, a crimson concoction of Sodastream origins, my favorite food was chicken and chips, and my hero was my dad.

On reflection, now 36, nothing has changed, except that my favourite drink is now beer.

The reason for the bleary-eyed nostalgia prompted by Mr Medeiros was that we were returning from Lucy and Ben’s first ever Easter Egg hunt which took place at her Granny and Grampa Todd’s house.

Seeing the excitement in Lucy’s eyes as she discovered a bright pink egg behind the Big Stone of Saintfield will stay with me forever. As will the look on Ben’s face as he charged about the lawn with his little blue cap on.

Their’s is an innocence that I wish I could bottle. Like myself at that age, they haven’t a care in the world. What I wouldn’t give for a time before Facebook and alcohol when the world was a much simpler place.

As a kid I remember playing football on the green close to my Nanny Elsie’s house for three or four hours then having to eat an entire packet of Nice biscuits to boost my sugar levels. I also recall my Granny Peggy always buttering my toast with a knife that had been used to spread jam. I’ve never liked jam but occasionally I’ll put a small smear of jam on my toast just to recreate a taste of the past.

I realise that there’s a lot of cherry picking that goes on when indulging in trips down memory lane. Adults tend not to get nostalgic about revision for exams and the days when it rained.

Baz Luhrmann ably sums it up in the song ‘Sunscreen’ when he says: “Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.”

I’m probably no different from my own parents as I look to the future at what’s in store for Ben and Lucy, who are currently cocooned in a small, good place. Will my nostalgia-based advice be enough to keep them on the straight and narrow when faced with the big, bad world?

Almost everything that’s ‘just around the corner’ strikes fear into me - boyfriends, girlfriends, best friends, imaginary friends, break ups, learning to drive, X Factor auditions, acne, alcopops, the internet, textspeak, selfies, tattoos...

Actually I lied about Glen Medeiros being on the radio. He was on my iPod and he was put there deliberately to evoke such feelings of nostalgia. And part of the reason for me being bleary-eyed was the fact I’d had two ciders that afternoon.

So given that I have become the very person I’m railing against - a lying, alcohol-swilling individual who owns an i-prefixed device - then you can pretty much ignore everything I’ve said up to now.