And when it came to building one from an Airfix kit, there were no fiddly propellors and awkward landing gear.

Uncle Brian gave me a balsa wood Meteor when I was young. Painted black, green and grey with the red,white and blue bullseye targets on the wings, it just spelled class.

We all glued our fingertips together and lost the insignia transfer stickers for model kits as kids. Building up fleets of planes that some lads stuck from their celings with catgut fishing line and drawing pins, hung in a perpetual dogfight over the bed.

Forget Lego bricks and Meccano, the Coquetdale lads constructed plastic tanks, planes and ships from Airfix kits.

The small tins of hummel paint that you had to buy separately and almost always forgot, plastic cement and metallic grey base coats.

Finding pieces of essential machinery still attached to the square plastic frame after you'd finished and wondering in bemusement what they were for.

Airfix kits were tactile and the instruction manuals were more technical than the 64-page incomprehensible booklets that you get to put together an Ikea flat pack today.

You'd start by glueing the wings together: Simple enough, unless you forgot to put the machine guns in or got them upside down. The fuselage was again simple enough, but only if you got the wheels in first. If there were flaps, forget it.

My dad constructed a huge Harrier jump jet that I also played with for hours and it's only now when I attempt to put together a bedroom drawer set and the only tool I'm supposed to require is a Phillips screwdriver that I realise the frustrations that he must have gone through. They did require your parents' help. It was a bonding thing between dads and sons.

I did build a small tri-plane once that I was very proud of. The Red Baron. Von Richtofen. The easiest thing I've ever painted. It was, of course, all red.

But I still regard the Meteor as my favourite plane. Even when we went to the top of the hills above Scots Gap with Toma and his parents to watch Concorde's first take-off from Newcastle on a clear, sunny day, that graceful, white long-necked apparition in the air couldn't compete with the Gloster in my eyes.

Imagining wearing a leather flying hat and googles, brown leather coat with fur collar with the smell of engine fuel in the cockpit as your machine guns rattled into life and voices crackled over the radio as you swooped and dived with the plastic plane in your hand.

Airfix was an icon of the 1970s. But did anyone ever remember to paint the tiny pilot before sticking him into his seat and clagging on the cockpit glass?