When they were younger, our children loved making magic potions. They’d fill jam jars with water, mud, my wife’s perfume, Fairy Liquid, etc. Then they’d seal the lid and put them on display on their bookshelves for weeks.

Is there a genetic urge that makes us want to do this, I wonder? I ask because, when I was a child growing up in Abergele, I used to love making magic potions too.

Ann Morris and I would pick rose petals from the front gardens along High St and crush them between two rocks and mix them with water in a jam jar to make ‘perfume’.

In late summer, we crushed blackberries, elderberries and bilberries to make ink. And we even used the juice of raw onions to make invisible ink. It brought tears to our eyes. To reveal the writing we had to hold the paper close enough to a candle flame to heat the paper without burning it.

We’d make stinkbombs by throwing lighted matches into an empty Haliborange bottle, then close the lid quickly and wait until the flame went out.

Unscrew. Sniff, sniff. Phew!