We were small but our dreams were big – bigger even than those battling dinosaurs in One Million Years BC, a film we watched on the new colour TV.

Hooray for Ray Harryhausen!

The hole we were digging could have reached Australia if only we didn’t have to stop for an ice-cream. Who was going with grampa to get them? You can keep Rockaway Beach or Montego Bay. For my favourite stretch of sand, seaweed and moulted crab shells will forever be Maybole Shore.

It would take about an hour and a half to walk from Maybole, the hometown of Agnes Broun (mither of Rabbie Burns), to the Shore. That is unless it’s 1982 and you make it back in half that time so as not to miss an episode of The Monkees. We sang Cheap Trick’s If You Want My Love and Paul McCartney’s Take It Away as we ran. Along with Ailsa Craig, big volcanic sister of the Bass Rock, you can see the outline of Macca’s Mull of Kintyre from Culzean Bay.

And I don’t know what it was but my older cousins were always doing the things I wanted to do but couldn’t because I was still doing the things they were doing when I had wanted to do those things the previous summer. I vroomed with Matchbox cars; they kapowed with toy soldiers. I kapowed with toy soldiers; they read the Beano. I read the Beano; they played football. I played football; they listened to music. I listened to music; they went to university. I went to university; they joined the navy or went into teaching. I never wanted to be a sailor or a deputy head, but I wonder still whether they might be doing something I should be doing.

The sweet shop opposite the old school house at Carrick Academy, where my mum had been educated and my grampa still worked as the janny, was a magical place. Did we visit it before or after warming up the old telly for Herge’s Adventures Of Tintin? Surely not before?

We’d probably been up since half six watching grampa light the fire or helping granny make breakfast. We were allowed to rummage in the school dressing up box and pretty much had the playground to ourselves.

I had my first crush, too – on a lass who lived a few skips from the school gate and would come and play hopscotch and talk about who was nice and who was naughty in her class. Don’t know much about geography. Don’t know much about trigonometry. Play it again Sam.

The pool in Maybole opened in the mid-70s and when it wasn’t bucket and spade weather, or suitable for a trip to Culzean Castle, we’d settle for an indoor swim. Grampa would do a length underwater – who needs the Man From Atlantis? – but by the time I could match him it was 10 years later and his health was fading.

What transports me back to these times and places? Not the taste or texture of a shell-shaped French sponge cake. But there are other portals: just the words mince and tatties, and no matter I’m vegetarian; a summer’s drive in Assynt when the view’s the exact match of the image depicted on the hand-painted ceramic tiles behind the counter of the butcher’s; the dream of an afternoon walk with grampa and great uncle H in the walled garden in Culzean’s grounds; or seeing a saucy postcard by Donald McGill and thinking of a plump jellyfish bobbing up and down in the tidal wash at Croy.

Even the phrase A big boy did it and ran away catapults me be back half a century and there I am stood outside a taxi driver’s house, mum having told me to wait on the pavement; and his wife coming to the door and looking unimpressed as I pointed at the big boy who’d rang the doorbell and was indeed running away, honest.

I’ve not been back to Maybole in a decade or more. There’s so little need. It’s here within me, you see, those endless summers of childhood, that grain of sand that found its way into your piece and crisps, playing hide ‘n’ seek in the echoey and polished school corridors, and our stop-motion sword-swinging skeleton dreams. One Million Years BC and it was only yesterday.