I was lucky enough to be born a Xennial | Clive Smith

I was born in this period and apparently we had the best of the old and new worlds – an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood.

It got me thinking and it’s pretty accurate. I know you look back on your past with rose-tinted specs but there’s no way kids today have a childhood as good as ours.

The fun to be had with just a ball and two people – one either side of the road – trying to bounce a ball off the kerb, two points if you caught it when it bounced back, one if you didn’t. Children today would probably think it was lame. It wasn’t. So, a shout-out to the kids who still play ‘kerbsy’.

And at this time of year you’d always see kids doing ‘Penny for the Guy.’ I can’t remember the last time I saw that.

I remember, years ago, seeing a couple of entrepreneurs in Frogmore Road, Fratton, doing ‘Penny for the Scummer’ with their Guy in a Southampton shirt. Money was thrown at them from all angles and it must have been a decent little earner.

I expect today you’d find a nice little spot and some wannabe ‘road man’ would rock up with a penknife and risk two years in a young offenders institution for a few 50p coins and a Kit-Kat.

We didn’t watch videos on YouTube of other children unboxing toys. We played with our own. And we played our games without having to look at a computer screen. Oh, the hours we spent playing 1-2-3 In, Manhunt, British bulldog and conkers, not staring at an iPhone for hours posing for the perfect selfie.

And when we were at school you knew you were in for a treat when the big TV was wheeled in. This was our introduction to technology. Today we have super-thin smart TVs hanging on our walls.

Because of all this we are more tech savvy than previous generations, but we still appreciate the simpler times.

On £80,000 a year surely MPs can afford childcare?

As the Brexit debacle rolled on MPs were required to attend the Commons on a Saturday. Oh, the horror!

It was too much for Labour MP Chris Bryant who stood up and said MPs should be given financial help to pay for childcare. There were even nods of approval and shouts of ‘here, here’.

It was the first time in 35 years they’d been asked to do this, just the fourth time in 70 years. Surely they could cover childcare costs on their nearly £80,000-a-year salaries?

A simple solution would be for them to have enlisted the help of family, friends, a babysitter, you know, like normal people do.

These people live in cloud cuckoo land. How out of touch have they become?​​​​​​​

Our immigration laws are clearly not tough enough

After the awful events in Essex, where 39 migrants were found dead in the back of a lorry, there have been calls to relax immigration rules to prevent it happening again.

Apparently our laws are too tough and encourage people to take these risks. I disagree. They clearly aren’t tough enough if 39 people made it across the Channel in that lorry.

Any loss of life is tragic, but people know the risks when they enter a country illegally. Why should we change our laws?

Had we not been such an easy touch people would think twice before crossing continents trying to take advantage of our welfare system and then end up dead in the back of a lorry.