GRAB a custard cream if you can, because I want you to consider where you stand on biscuit barrels.

Crumbs, I hear you thinking.

I forget how it started, but the subject came up when we went out with our daughter and her boyfriend.

It turns out that while our family hasn’t owned (or at least used) a biscuit barrel for… well, it must be at least ten years, the boyfriend’s family still have one that they keep topped up with shortbread, digestives and Bourbons.

We can barely remember the last time we bought a single packet of biscuits, let alone mixed a variety of them in a tin.

And we just couldn’t envisage ever owning a biscuit barrel again.

But here’s the thing: They tell us a lot about modern life.

When we tried to think of all the other things that used to be found in most homes, but which have now become obsolete, the list got so long we had to write it down.

And we didn’t even consider technological advances, just everyday items that we had at home, before we were married, which have now disappeared.

In our kitchen you will no longer find a mincer, toast rack or wall-mounted tin opener.

Neither do we have a tea caddy, tea cosy, tea strainer or tea trolley. There are no jelly moulds, iced lolly moulds or trays for making ice.

And there isn’t a butter dish or sugar bowl in the house, either.

In the drawers you’ll find no egg timer, mechanical whisk or knife-sharpening steel, and the bread bin went the same way as the biscuit barrel.

Other everyday items from our childhoods that have gone include ashtrays, antimacassars, net curtains, light-switch finger plates, draught excluders, lino, paraffin and a plastic ice bucket in the shape of a pineapple.

Gone, too, are telephone books, a plastic gadget for storing telephone numbers and indexing them from A to Z, and a telephone table to put them all on. Only the telephone itself survives, but looks like an endangered species.

There is no calculator, no poker, no hat/coat/umbrella stand and no sign of stamps or letter openers. Likewise: No fountain pen or ink, and no blotting, carbon or tracing paper, and no typewriter, obviously.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I also believe we have permanently run out of Tippex.

We don’t have a piggy bank or any other money box, but we do have a charity box - because change is now for donating, rather than spending or saving.

Milk tokens? They are a distant memory.

Whereas our mum always had knitting needles, crochet hooks, pin cushions, hair curlers, head scarves and a compact, my wife has no such things.

Also missing are shoe horns, hair clippers, nail files and nail brushes, and we can no longer play ludo, draughts or the football pools.

I still have a bike, but no bicycle clips, cycling cape and/or leggings, nor an old-style saddlebag or dynamo.

So biscuit barrels are only the beginning of the story, but they are possibly the most significant.

To me they are the ultimate symbol of the relative affluence and comfort of a post-war, post-industrial Britain in the second half of the 20th century, when, for the first time, we all had more biscuits than we needed.

In other words - and is there a bigger irony? - biscuit barrels remind us of a time when we all went a bit soft.

As opposed to now, when politicians begrudge us every crumb of comfort.