If you’re of a certain age in the UK then nothing quite says Christmas like a few bits of scraggly silver tinsel. Today’s plump, full-bodied, multi-colour garlands that uncoil gracefully out of their cardboard box in December and drape themselves seductively in perfect loops from your picture frames are just too damned smug for their own good. And before that, there were the paper chains, which you really didn’t want to reuse after their first year (but you often ended up doing so anyway because you just couldn’t face the prospect of licking all that glue again).

Yes, despite all the blinding evidence to the contrary, I continue to cling to my stubborn belief that the 70s were fab. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I was a child back then and even in that tired, worn-out, filthy decade, things still looked exciting from the perspective…