I live in a pleasant Lewis village called Marybank – just south of Stornoway, a sort of post-Great War new town and not forty minutes’ amble from the town centre.

It is also remarkably free of incomers and dippie-hippies, not least as prominent main-road signage advises those in pursuit of mystical Celtic Twilight that we boast a minor industrial estate, Lava’s Garage, two currently shuttered salmon-processing plants and the Lewis rubbish-tip.

And, over the last year, we in Marybank have enjoyed a reinvigorated community council, which – from determined mowing of grass and gorse to erecting the village’s first communal Christmas tree – has proved active and thoughtful.

Today the squat-a-leg-at-each-corner terrier that is our Rommel towed me determinedly into a distant, high-wire fenced corner of Marybank erected two decades back as what schools describe as a ‘multi-use games area’.

Framed and indeed colour-coded outlined on the tarmac for tennis, 5-a-side football, badminton… and just this morning, as Rommel whuffled eagerly around the goals, two shiny, netted basketball-hoops were installed.

There is just one eyebrow-raising issue with our local MUGA (multi-use games area). I have never actually seen a kid in it. Far less, children in the plural ever in that play-area. Thwacking a football or tennis ball.

Not even for the quiet and illicit purposes one remembers, of yore in Mrs Thatcher’s first term – well, at least wot one heard of at Third Year morning registration; this puff, that can, and the odd beautifully presented, shyly inscribed mix-tape.

Weeks in the illicit recording from Radio 1, the calligraphy of the label laboured and seldom perfect but conceived, always, in the consuming crush at the time.

We must fearlessly address the truth. Near 20 years of SNP rule has reduced our little land to a sad, sterile realm where the mass of children no longer play.

They just don’t. They seem largely to be huddling indoors these days, drooping over their ‘devices,’ and in entire meltdown if the broadband goes down and they are suddenly excommunicated from TikTok, Snapchat and the rest.

(They don’t, these days, frequent Facebook: that is for Granny and about as cool as her cardigan.)

That is not to shake a censorious head over them. In many regards, today’s teenagers are admirable, in contrast to those of us who came of age in the Eighties. Their schools are much happier learning environments. With heavy emphasis on communication skills, healthy relationships and respect for diversity.

When I visit schools, I am struck time and again by the quiet social confidence of the teenagers and their unassuming courtesy. Though why do almost all of them wear black?

It was different in my day. Scotland, half a century ago, was awash with children, a baby-boom peaking in the mid-Sixties. And the streets seethed with them – but it was also a Scotland where children were widely hated.

Where strangers snapped at you on the street, the lady at the till rebuked you if you forgot a please or thank you, matrons on the bus deftly placed a handbag lest you dare to sit beside them and even a great many teachers evidently loathed youngsters.

But we played. It was an age when the maternal spirit was very much the Highland snap of ‘Away out with you now from under my feet’ – and, on Saturdays and during the holidays, you spent the day roaming the neighbourhood, exploring the world from a safe space, meeting in conclave in shady woods and so on.

And, when family finances were tight and toys were few, it was wonderful how we used our imagination.

Untold Germans perished in our playground to convincingly vocalised machine-gun fire and cries of ‘Uuurgh..’ and ‘Gott im Himmel!’

Save when we decided to fight the Japanese – when, of course, the howl was ‘Aieee…’

We glorified in spectacular death-falls – I am still remarkably good at falling, surviving two recent snowy slips without a bruise, instinctively going limp and rolling through the tumble – and, once, I made a widely admired Dalek out of nothing more than a tennis ball, a cheese-grater and some deftly deployed plasticine.

But the girls – it was still an era when the sexes often entered the school by separate doors and kept to opposite ends of the playground – had a richer culture still and one, alas, that has been lost for years. They had a vast repertoire of songs to orchestrate various pursuits – rhythmic play with balls and ropes, hopping games, clapping games – that had descended by oral tradition, unfiltered by grown-ups, for many decades.

I remember ditties like Alouette, Gentille Alouette, Alouette, Je Te Plumerai – almost certainly brought back to Glasgow by distant grandsires who had survived the Great War – sung in perfect French by gap-toothed Scotstoun lasses not yet eight. That world has long gone.

Born in 1966, I was among the last Scots on the wrong side of a real generation-gap – broadly, the offspring of parents who had grown up in a far more formal, smartly dressed, self-consciously respectable pre-television world than we had and before the moral and social upheaval of the Sixties.

Who shuddered about pop-music, guys with long hair, most comics, unfortunate neighbours who never attended church and, in a memorable line from my mother when we once tried to watch Top of the Pops, ‘men who painted their bodies’.

But we now negotiate another one. People in their mid-20s have never known a world without the internet, email and social media.

My generation – raised on sci-fi where the typical computer was built on the scale of a cathedral-organ – could not have conceived of an age when one, doubling up, too, as a calculator, a phone and a camera, would be small enough to slip into your trouser pocket.

And pals of mine like that bright young sports-journalist, Hamish MacRae – 23 – wonder how any of the fossils of my generation ever managed to get a date.

With great difficulty, to be honest, as parents constantly reminded one the telephone was very, very expensive; it was invariably in the hall, and it was odds-on a little brother would be maliciously listening in on the extension.

Somehow, though, we managed. Just as the Apollo 11 space capsule that bore man to the Moon and back muddled through with less computing power than today’s typical dishwasher.

I rather enjoy that time of day, getting on for four and Rommel’s second walk, as we pad towards the woods and the school bus swings in, decanting the latest Marybank teens in their immaculate black – scattering at once for their homes, their devices, their socials.

But I do feel increasingly that youth is wasted on the wrong people.