WHO remembers clackers? A 1970s fad, clackers consisted of two hard plastic balls on two strings, connected at the top. The idea was to get the balls to clash together, both at the top as well as the bottom of their arc of travel. Get it right and it sounded like a machine gun.

A whole generation of young people suffered bruises and even broken bones, as you might expect from a toy directly descended from a weapon, the Argentinian bolas.

Few mourn the passing of the clackers, yet we get terribly misty-eyed when we recall the lost joys of the hula-hoop and the skipping rope.

We have an Enid Blyton-like view of an idealised childhood, which is perhaps why we get more steamed up about the demise of conkers than clackers, despite both being equally pointless and hazardous.

Yet another survey this week bemoans our loss of playtime innocence.

The Big Mothered Britain report, commissioned by the makers of kids' drink Fruit Shoot, reveals that 57 per cent of Manchester parents - the highest of any region in the UK - believe that we have gone too far in protecting children today.

Three quarters of Manchester mums skipped as girls, but only 15 per cent of girls do so today. Three quarters of fathers played conkers, but only four per cent of their young sons now do the same.

We believe that health and safety culture deems snowball fights, conker competitions and the traditional playground game of British Bulldogs too dangerous.

I can get a little wistful about tig or hopscotch, but not British Bulldogs, which - giving full vent to the sadistic tendencies of the pre-pubescent boy - was often little better than legalised affray.

I'm not sure we should be any more nostalgic for this than for the Tom Brown's Schooldays tradition of roasting small boys over an open fire.

Parents are, this report contends, concerned that the use of "readymade" entertainment, such as games consoles, is stopping children developing the social skills that home-made games once fostered.

I'm not sure I agree. My two boys, now 18 and 15, are of the PlayStation generation. They have not climbed many trees, nor played much tig. But they have spent hours on end skateboarding. Go to any skateboard park - and there are lots of them - and you will see children on boards and BMX bikes heroically risking broken bones, just like we once did climbing a tree. And the return of the trampoline offers our youngsters whole new risk possibilities.

We should not blame kids for making choices not available to us in our day. Facebook or skipping? Conkers or Metal Gear Solid? Recorder practice or Guitar Hero? I know which I would choose. We cannot uninvent the technology which has transformed our lives.

But, yes, the downside of more sedentary entertainment is fatter children. While doing my morning gym session, aboard an upright bike with a TV screen attached, I came up with the solution to Britain's porky youngsters: a PlayStation attached to a pedal-powered generator! Behold - a new generation of supergeeks with the intellect of Comic Book Guy and the legs of Lance Armstrong.

The game is up for all you Twits out there

ONLY cave-dwellers will perhaps be unaware now of Twitter - the constantly- updated stream of online banality beloved of people such as Stephen Fry. Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield amusingly characterised Twitter as the equivalent of saying: "Look at me, mummy, I've got my sock on...".

Users of the site must, of course, deliver every "tweet" in 140 characters of less.

So smiles greeted news this week that a new strategy document on government use of Twitter runs to 20 pages and 5,382 words.

The government plans to expand and manage its "corporate presence" on Twitter, and those dreary words alone should be sufficient to convince early-adopters that the Twitter game is well and truly up.

My own thoughts on Twitter come in at considerably less than 140 characters: "Get a life".