STAYING with my friend and her two sons last weekend, I spent a good hour pouring over the lads' most prized collections. Not fossils, shells or rocks, but Yu-Gi-Oh! cards.

It was mentally exhausting, feigning interest in more than 100 computer-graphic-style pictures of vicious-looking creatures that have scores attached to them as to how powerful they are and how much havoc and destruction they can wage. But the experience proved beneficial.

Last week, at the end of a lovely day out with a colleague, his wife and seven-year-old grandson, the little lad was keen to show my daughters his precious Yu-Gi-Oh! (pronounced You-Gee-Oh - how quickly I'm pulled up if I say it incorrectly) cards. I think he was impressed when I asked him if he had an 'eight star', the highest (I think) rating on the creatures' terror scale.

My daughters don't collect anything like that and I found myself being grateful that the occupation was, in the same way as Pokemon cards, confined to boys. "It's so boring," I found myself saying.

I had obviously completely forgotten a great chunk of my own childhood, which surfaced when we moved house. At primary school in the Sixties, I was an avid collector of cards. They all came free with bubble gum (or should that be the other way around?) and I would buy them in the village shop in Kirby, North Yorkshire, on the way back from lunch in the local scout hut, otherwise known as the school dining room.

When I found them, I straight away remembered how obsessed I became over certain collections. One, called Champions, was linked to the popular TV series of that name about members of a secret international spy organisation. There were 45 cards in all, each with a photograph and text, taking the story a bit further on.

Within a minute of flicking through them I remembered how hard it had been to get hold of number 43 to complete the set, and how I would have traded my little brother to get hold of it. I remember swapping dozens of spares for it with a boy in my class. Funny thing was, I hated the series.

I also collected High Chaparral cards, again linked to a TV series that I didn't like. They featured the main characters - over 40s will remember Big John Cannon, Victoria, Blue, Manolito and Buck - and not only told a story but also made up a jigsaw of the characters' faces on the back. I never did manage to collect them all but it wasn't for lack of trying.

I've got football cards - the Leeds squad I have in my possession includes Lorimer, Hunter and Bremner - featuring different makes of car (I've got the whole set of those and would have killed for some of them), Land Of The Giants (another TV series), Man On The Moon (might E-bay that one for its historic interest) and many others.

More than 40 years on, the cards may have changed but the excitement they generate hasn't. Next time my friend's sons ask me to sit down and observe the merits or otherwise of Yu-Gi-Oh!, I will give them my undivided, and very genuine, attention.

Updated: 09:18 Tuesday, September 28, 2004