We all know that ‘back in the day’ things were very different. There was no television in South Africa, there were no cellphones, there were no DVD players, there were no CD players, no fax machines, no handheld calculators and there were no computers, actually.

The biggest leap forward in the entertainment business since the Second World War was the Sony Walkman and colour television (yes, lad, it used to be black and white. And grey).

But, in my youth (which was definitely back in the day), radios had become port- able. Even better, record players had become portable (and seem to be coming back). But many other things are not back, and one of the things that is not back is the valve radio. It is a type of large mains-powered radio which used glass electronic valves instead of transistors. These radios were much more sensitive than modern radios and it was quite easy to use them to listen to for- eign radio stations, such as the BBC, the Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Radio Voice of Japan and so on.

In the absence of anything else to do, I used to rig up my radio or radios and listen to all these foreign radio stations. To get good reception, I had to have some form of antennae and so, in the garden of my parents’ house, I strung from the very tall trees long antennae wires made of copper. This was in Johannesburg, where thunderstorms are frequent. I do not know why lightning never struck any of my antennae. Certainly, they were begging for it to happen. Of course, if lightning had struck then, I would have been killed and the house would have been set on fire. But this did not happen (I think it did not happen because there was a sort of small but distinct hand of protection over young boys back in the day).

Our other projects included making gun powder – we discovered the explo- sive property of matches. We made touch powder (which is a paste that you can put onto door handles and the floor and, when it dries, the moment it is touched, it explodes with a violent crack). School mate Kim Pratley (now CEO of Pratley, as in putty) had the formula perfected.

I was discussing the youth of the then average boy with Carl Hvidsten, a structural engineer in Cape Town. He listened attentively and said that his claim to fame was a potato gun. He explained that he took a pipe about 3 m long and stopped the one end, filled the bottom end with a mixture of various flammable fluids, then dropped a potato in there and lit the fluids through a touch hole. Living on the edge of the park, he could quite satisfactorily fling the potato 100 m or so into the park. He experimented with different types of mixtures of fluid until he came up with the ideal propellant mixture. The boys at his school were fascinated, his parents less so.

Talking to Hvidsten, it struck me that much of what we did back in the day was a form of self-education that was forced on us. We had to entertain ourselves, and we entertained ourselves in the best possible way by investigating things which were always slightly dangerous, as boys do.

I have a friend who has a young child of eight and there is not a moment that his face is not buried in some sort of screen. Either it is the screen of his cellphone, the computer, the Nintendo, the playstation, the DVD or the TV. It is all coming out at him created by other people. What will he learn from this? I am sure nothing more than the fact that entertainment comes from screens and how to charge batteries. I very much doubt that it is as satisfac- tory as shooting a potato 100 m or so from a PVC pipe or listening to distant radios. It is this time of youth when we learn subjects not taught in school. No more. But it is going, fading, if not already gone.