NOW I have reached the grand old age of 34 I think I can say with some authority — it was MUCH easier being a kid when I was a nipper.

At this risk of sounding like an old biddy, or worse still, a cliché, things were just a LOT easier “back in the day”.

Yes, we still had endless fall outs and arguments — my dad still thinks it's hilarious that until the age of about 13 I had a new “best friend” almost every week.

But we did this in the playground, or outside of school, when we playing together.

We (thankfully) didn't have the horror of cyber bullying, which appears to be increasing at an alarming rate with ever more websites and social networks popping up each week with which kids can be horrible to one another.

Because mobile phones didn't exist — I can hear the collective scream of horror from Bolton's young folk, but yes, we managed without constantly being in touch with one another and without checking Twitter and Facebook every 30 seconds — when we went out to play, our parents had no clue where we were until we came home when we were hungry.

Don't get me wrong, we were never far from home, and if they'd wanted to find us, it probably wouldn't have been too much of a stretch, but we didn't have to keep our them updated every 10 minutes with where we were and who we were with.

But the one thing that has struck me as the biggest change between being a kid all those years ago and being a nipper now, is the amount of risks we were allowed to take.

School trips often involved gill scrambling — basically climbing up a steep, fast flowing river — we camped and ate grub that would probably be classed as “food poisoning on a plate” and when we played games and got hurt, we simply stopped playing those games.

I once broke an arm after falling out of a tree I'd climbed.

Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely NOT advocating doing that — but I learned my lesson and didn't do it again.

While I think the Bolton primary school which has banned games that could hurt children is doing the right thing in keeping its pupils' safe — I just think it's a shame youngsters can no longer find these things out for themselves.