No helicopter parents. No smartphones. No social media anxiety. Just you, your mates, and a street lamp that told you when to come home.

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Growing up in Britain during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Generation X experienced something extraordinary – and we didn't even realise it at the time. We had the last truly unsupervised childhoods, the final years of affordable housing, and a world where you could actually disappear for hours without your parents panicking.

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From knocking on doors to see if your friends could play to recording the Top 40 off the radio, from corner shops that sold single cigarettes to schools that hadn't heard of risk assessments, this book captures the texture of a British childhood that simply doesn't exist anymore.

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This isn't just nostalgia – it's a reckoning with uncomfortable truths about inequality, opportunity and what we owe the generations coming after us.

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For Gen Xers: finally, someone's written it all down.