In many hundreds of years to come, an archaeologist of the future will unearth a perfectly preserved old-style wooden school desk - and with it will reveal the loves and hate of generations of forgotten youngsters.

I suspect I am not alone that when I think of my primary school years, I do so with memories of desks with lift-up lids - room for ink pots and a groove to stop your pen tumbling onto the floor.

I should point out, at this early stage, that I did not attend a school where writing implements were a quill you had to constantly dip into ink.

Nor did the teacher walk around with a mortar board perched upon their head while bending a cane and armed with an itchy whacking finger like a scene from the Bash Street Kids in the Beano.

I'm not, quite, that old.

But such was the quality of these under-rated design classics, one can only assume they had indeed once served a generation who did. And by the late 1970s when I first packed my satchel and headed off to school, they were still serving children.

And each desk - as those future archaeologists would discover - carried the scars of all the boys and girls who had called it theirs over the years. Because in an era where the desks were wood and the obligatory compass which lived in every child's pencil case came with a sharp point, it was no great challenge to carve your name, your favourite football club or pop group, as you got older, a highly realistic male appendage, into it.

'It was no great challenge to carve your name, your favourite football club or pop group, as you got older, a highly realistic male appendage...'

Heaven knows what scholars hundreds of years hence will will make of it.

Yet those desks were glorious inventions.

By providing the built-in internal storage, they ensured every desktop was clear by the end of the day.

Inside you could comfortably house the majority of your exercise books, a selection of quality conkers and, of course, the playground's finest form of trading commodity - football stickers.

For the messier members of the class, there was the temptation to also stash your sandwiches, chocolate Wagon Wheel (I'm sure they used to be bigger) or banana (not, I might add, a euphemism). A mistake in many cases, as forgetting they were there and leaving them in a warm classroom for the weekend would most certainly be noticeable upon your return to school on the Monday.

It was also easy to identify those of us for whom tidiness was something of a foreign concept.

As the sight of my desk today testifies, the temptation to have so much stuff inside your desk that it was difficult to actually shut the lid was one I - and a number of pals - suffered from.

But then this was also an era where teachers wrote on blackboards with chalk. It sounds like a different world from today, where a white board and pen seems pretty old hat compared to interactive boards where teachers can really get creative.

Those blackboards (although I remember they were more green than black in many cases) were either fixed or, if they were particularly swanky, on rotating rails which allowed the teacher to move it up and down to cram on more stuff than ever before.

Not to mention, of course, the board rubber which wiped all that long division you hadn't properly been paying attention to off the board and then proved such fun to pad on the back of someone's trouser leg, thus leaving an oblong shaped chalk mark clearly visible, when the teacher left the room for a few, unwise, moments.

Today, probably quite sensibly, its all plastic-topped wipe-clean desks and trays for storing things. It's probably a lot more practical - just nowhere near as much fun.