Remember when your ultimate dream was to be served a grasshopper? A grasshopper was equal parts crème de menthe and crème de cacao (with extra cream already) and varied with as many other extra intoxicating fire-accelerants that you can think of.

If you hadn’t had a properly made grasshopper; well then, you hadn’t lived. My Uncle Leo made perfect grasshoppers but my aunt Lucille reminded me that “no bar in the city would employ that fire-bug bum!” (Leo, in fact specialised in mixing any blend of flammable materials that you could think of; his skills eventually earning him a period of incarceration after a small – well, relatively small – conflagration that we don’t discuss outside the family.)

No-one servesgrasshoppers anymore – unless you can provide letters from two psychiatrists and the family doctor guaranteeing that you are approximately sane and won’t sue; or an Uncle Leo who is not under a court sanction preventing him from approaching, unaccompanied, within 100 metres of anything combustible.

But enough personal reminiscing already: what about all those other boring, bland or downright stupid things that we lusted after?  Where is the past of yesteryear?

Enter the prawn cocktail. This is, or was, a cocktail glass half-filled with lettuce, some canned prawns and a sauce that defied DNA testing; accompanied by Blue Nun wine whose only distinctive note was to have a bottle label depicting grape-picking nuns in blue habits.

These days we get served deconstructions of veal, cheese, tomatoes, garlic, herbs and breadcrumbs. Remember when these were all pressed together and called a schnitzel?

In fancy restaurants it got called a Vienna schnitzel. But who’s going to fondly remember eating six separate little piles of ingredients in 30 years?

We also loved Luna Park in the past. It was sort of like the Disneyland that you had when you had no “Disney” – or no “land” – or no concept of the value of money.

Today’s youngsters will have little to reminisce about amusement parks; they won’t need a fond memory of wearing a full body cast for a month after going on the spiflicator or spinal-break bucket basher rides. But we lovingly remember the absolute ennui that was going round in circles on the merry go round – sitting on a frozen horse that was leaping in a frozen moment.

And then there was Pez, spinning tops, yoyo’s, Uncle Reggie’s Racing Rockers (that defied any attempt to move forwards), clunky puppets in The Thunderbirds and the Milky Bar kid (although, admittedly, Bob Katter seems to have reclaimed this image in his election ad where he guns down a couple of Liberal and Labor staffers).

It’s boredom that’s missing, and that’s what we need to reinject into kid’s lives.

There’s simply so much interesting stuff to do these days that none of it is, essentially, at all memorable.

James McAuley described the merry go round as a “painted miniature cosmos... in undulant flight the children ride through dreams to the music of the spheres”. 

Romanticised codswallop of course, but it’s nostalgia that, these days, we’re just not providing for people to look back upon through rose-hued glasses. I’m not even sure that you can still buy buy rose coloured glasses that you can put away for future use. 

Nope, nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.