I WAS eight years old when I discovered that the average first year junior pupil isn’t acquainted with the finer points of Morris dancing.

About the same time, I also realised that most children didn’t spend their weekends at folk festivals, or have a dad that owned a musical saw and could play a banjo while wearing boxing gloves.

Most families didn’t have a Morris Minor to push-start in wet weather, or a broken-down motorbike to sit on at the side of the house, which their parents had used for youth-hostelling.

They didn’t carry candlesticks up to bed on Christmas Eve or chant the traditional rhyme “Here comes the pudding rich and round, full of fruit and holly crowned” when serving the traditional festive dessert.

And nobody I knew would have been as excited as I was about finding, at the bottom of my stocking, a shiny piece of violin resin wrapped in a square of brown velvet.

Many children’s 1980s were all about Rubik’s Cubes and snake belts, and switching between supporting Everton and Liverpool, depending on who was doing best in the league.

We had those things, too, but also an insight into a time gone by – including the world of Morris dancing.

Boxing Days were spent watching the Southport Swords, Easter Saturdays following the coconut dancers around Bacup.

I even have a painted wooden Morris man in full Southport Swords regalia, carved for me by a melodeon player.

Now I certainly don’t crave afternoons of watching them perform outside a Lancashire inn – it’s not as much fun when you’re all grown up and can no longer get away with running around pub tables.

But the smell of real ale can often stir a longing for the peace and simplicity those times seemed to provide.

Perhaps it was different for the adults – with all the usual frustrations of queuing at the bar and trying to keep an eye on your roaming kids while they play hide and seek in the beer garden.

But there must be something in it because, despite reports that they are rarer than a dodo driving a Reliant Robin, there are 14,000 Morris men and women in action today.

And now there’s even a film out – Morris: A Life with Bells On, that follows enthusiast Derecq Twist as he pioneers a daringly freeform brand of the dance, dubbed “Extreme Morris”?

Extreme Morris? It’s pretty extreme already.

Its practitioners risk getting inadvertently whipped by a hanky or lamped by a stick, or muscle exhaustion from repeated stepping with bells strapped to their legs.

Admittedly, the film is a Spinal Tap-esque mockumentary – and is hopefully as funny – but anything that draws attention, and therefore prevents the extinction, of a 400-year-old cultural practice has to be a good thing.

If the Village Green Preservation Society wasn’t a fictitious organisation invented by The Kinks, I would think it had been working away quietly in the background.

Because, along with the spotlight on Morris dancing, there also seems to be a rise in jam making, cake baking recipe books and grow your own.

And I am glad to report that pikelets are back on the supermarket shelves after a baffling period of absence.

Perhaps we could found a Liverpool branch of the Village Green Preservation Society, a sort of secret club dedicated to bringing back the good things about the Olden Days.

We could start with quince jam and damson wine making, and move on to restoring the hedgerows and saving the bees.

And when we pass the reins over to future generations, they can set about bringing back the iPod.

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