WE are just about to enjoy another Christmas in the twilight zone between parenthood and grandparenthood.

Whereas our Christmases once required expert knowledge of Tracy Island and Polly Pockets, these days we are happy to leave it all to Father Christmas and his elves.

However, we have had an enlightening conversation with some young parents recently, who informed us that the must-have thing for boys this year is a Nerf Blaster.

A what Blaster? A Nerf Blaster.

It sounds horrific, like something they would have used in Vietnam, but when it comes down to it, it’s only a big, brightly coloured plastic gun that fires foam bullets or darts, Nerf being a brand name.

If you are the kind of person who, like me, craves knowing the origins of strange words, then ‘Nerf’ is going to get on your… um… nerfs.

Some say it has some connection with hotrod drivers in 1950s America, where ‘nerfing’ meant ‘nudging’, and that would be a satisfying explanation if anybody could give a reason why it then came to mean shooting foam bullets.

Worse still is the claim that Nerf stands for ‘non-expanding recreational foam’, which is Nerf turned naff.

One thing that I do have on good authority is every self-respecting boy in primary school wants one for Christmas, and I can understand how they feel because, 40-odd years ago, we felt the same about Johnny Sevens.

It looked remarkably similar to a Nerf Blaster, except a Johnny Seven was seven guns in one, so you had the means to shoot and kill your best friend in seven different ways.

It was the Swiss Army Knife of toy guns.

There were two main problems with Johnny Sevens, however, the first being it was a ridiculously one-sided ‘fight’ with your mates, since the rest of us all carried cheap cowboy pistols (and some caps if we were lucky), and the second being that Johnny Sevens were expensive.

Every boy wanted one, but the only person I ever knew who actually got one was my cousin, Nigel.

Last week I pointed out to Nigel that a recent BBC programme about past Christmases featured a Johnny Seven, just like his, and he was amazed I remembered – because he had forgotten he ever had one.

Clearly, owning a Johnny Seven never lived up to the expectation or the hope of getting one, which I suppose is true of a lot of things in life.

The most surprising thing about all this is toy guns are back in fashion.

When our kids were young it wasn’t seen to be good parenting to buy them weapons, the general theory being that they would grow up with a violent streak that would surely lead to cold-blooded murder.

In theory, cousin Nigel should now be doing time for gunning down innocents in multiples of seven, but although I haven’t seen him for years (because he now lives in Australia), as far as I know he hasn’t shot anybody yet.

We were good parents, so our son only ever had one gun – a cowboy rifle he took a shine to when we were visiting a theme park in France.

The only trouble it ever caused us was when we tried to get it through airport security and we ended up having to put it in a special bag, fill out a form in triplicate and not make any false moves at passport control.

So that’s my view on the issue of giving toy guns to kids at Christmas, and sorry it was a bit convoluted.

I now realise I should have done it as a list of bullet points.