Last week I had one of those moments when you look at your childhood, then look at what your own children are up to, and suddenly feel a thrilling frisson of despair. “Society has progressed so rapidly since I was a squirt,” you think, “that there can never be any chance of my own flesh and blood ‘getting' where I'm ‘coming from'. They could never comprehend the constituents of my, now distant, childhood. I am as a foreigner to them. I might just as well have been brought up by dingoes on the Moon, in Spanish, for all that I have in common with my progeny.”

At the time of these dolorous thoughts, I was on my back, in my swimming costume, hurling down a 60ft indoor waterslide - not the usual circumstances for sombre life introspection. Indeed, the person who had gone before me had spent the ride screaming “HAVIN' IT!”. By and large, it was not a gathering in tribute to Proust. Any madeleine would have become very soggy.

And yet, I could not stop the flashbacks.

My childhood swimming pool - along with pretty much everyone else's in the country at the time - was a vast, echoing Victorian mausoleum, dedicated to chlorine and rat bait. Winds blew down blue-tiled corridors. Dead insects clogged the pool-filters. Filthy windows gave permanent, nuclear dusk. The toilets were so frequently broken that, rumour had it, a kid from Warstones School had been told by the swimming instructors to pee in the guttering by the changing rooms - the cleaners would “mop it up later”.

There was no shallow “fun pool” at Heath Town Baths. The water was a terrifying 4m deep from beginning to end. The presumption, upon construction, was that the Victorian bathing gentleman would dive in, execute a brisk, military 20 lengths, as he had been taught at Sandhurst, and then climb out, invigorated and refreshed. To the learner child-swimmer, however, it seemed deadly. Looking down to the bottom would give you vertigo - like you were hanging in space. It was easy to see the dark-blue outline of sharks down there. Rusting submarines. The Mariana Trench.

And once you were in, it was punishingly, dementingly cold. To climb in was to become instantly elderly; with brittle lungs, skin that hurt and eyes that rolled into your head, seeking a more hospitable temperature. Once you were in, you would head, as if your life depended on it, for the underwater jets at the pool's sides. Here, the water was fractionally warmer. Grey-faced, prematurely aged children would gather around them, shivering, like prawns around a sewage outlet pipe, and had to be chivvied back from the edges of the pool by the instructors - sometimes by the expedient of being lightly bashed on the side of the head with the gigantic, long-handle ladle thing that they kept by the poolside, for fishing out cockroaches.

The only way you could have “fun” at pools like this was by staging a series of vicious, all-out, adrenalin-pumping wars with other children. Or throwing all of the polystyrene, child-chewed floats out of the pool and making the smaller children get out to retrieve them.

We paid absolutely no attention to the safety posters on the walls. Ducking, diving, pushing, petting and running totalled the entire agenda for survival in that dirty, pitiless, freezing cold chest-freezer. Girls would pray for the onset of the menarche, in order to be excused. Boys would rub their bare feet across the tiles - actively foraging for verrucas on a similar basis.

Years later, when we saw The Empire Strikes Back, and the scene where blizzard-bound Luke has to cut open a dead space-llama, and shove Han in its hot guts to stop him becoming hypothermic, my sister Caz said: “I wish they'd had dead space-llamas in the changing rooms at Heath Town.” It was a different time.

Compare all this, then, with the swimming pool my two 21st-century girls frequent. It's a pleasure-arium. It's a jollification dandy-dome. It's a lido for lotus-eaters - except indoors, obviously. It has hot tubs and a wave machine - monsoon showers and whole Jacuzzi areas. The temperature is a luxuriant 70F (21C). The chief architect must have been a gigantic hummingbird, or a lizard with a slide-rule. It is like some manner of sensualist paradise. One keeps expecting to see sloe-eyed, jewel-speckled houris, proffering hashish-pipes to the sullen teenagers queueing up to get Nic Nacs out of the vending machine.

Indeed, it was as I was watching a huge Turkish grandad sitting in a Jacuzzi area - beaming as a million council-funded bubbles spritzed his undercarriage - that I suddenly saw Archway Leisure Centre's pool through the eyes of my 11-year-old self. Had I seen such a place in 1986, I would never have guessed that this could be a place for a child. I would have presumed that we were in the Playboy Mansion - or Peter Stringfellow's fruity sex-bungalow, in Surrey.

Had you then additionally pointed out to my child-self the presence of a café at the poolside - selling toasties, hot chocolate and muffins - my mind would have burst like a stained-glass window hit by a flying pigeon. In this respect, you can see why the Doctor is so chary when it comes to taking kids time-travelling in the Tardis. A café could be no place for a child! They were barely places for adults. I don't think there was a café in Wolverhampton in 1986. Even in TV dramas at the time, characters had to have an incredibly strong reason for utilising such an exotic facility - needing a meeting place for an affair, say; or having to tell Miss Marple a very specific piece of information, before being brutally murdered. The idea that, in the future, normal children might casually swing by a café, and have a flapjack as part of a wholly quotidian afternoon - one remarkable only for its ringing averageness - was unthinkable. Even more merman-fantastic than homosexuality; or wi-fi.

No. My children could never conceive of my childhood. Never.

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