Cast your minds back, if you can, to 1986. A different era. The nation rejoiced as a jolly redhead married the Queen’s favourite son. Britain had a cast-iron prime minister who looked set to go on and on, with nary a dent to her patent leather handbag. A first-class stamp cost 17 pence; the average family home only a little more. There was a Big Bang in the City and a larger one at Chernobyl. And, in the nascent ready-made drinks market, something similarly seismic happened: Marks & Spencer launched the bevvy that spawned a thousand imitators, the ‘gin in a tin’.

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This epoch-defining moment passed me by at the time (I still had a few years left at primary school). When I was a 90s teen, it was alcopops that commanded the headlines and moral panic. It therefore wasn’t until about a decade ago – when I began hosting children’s birthday parties in my local park – that gins in tins came into their own. I soon learnt that the horror of hosting a dozen small people, radicalised by Haribo and gentle parenting, could be mitigated by chilling a crate of tinnies under a bag of supermarket ice and handing them round.

Me and my mum friends would clank cans then disappear behind a tree for a crafty fag while the entertainer (cheap because they were ‘awaiting a DBS check’) cracked on.........

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