On a recent trip to North Wales, I found myself walking among familiar landscapes.

Because it was there, in the heart of the Snowdonia National Park, we had, in 1988, been taken from my secondary school in Ashford for the eagerly anticipated geography field trip.

It was one of those trips you heard about when you first entered the school and looked forward to. Given my family could never afford to send me on the annual skiing trip, it was a big deal.

I must have been about 15 at the time.

I particularly remembered walking around this dramatic lake as the mountains towered over it. The teachers who were accompanying us were flabbergasted that having issued strict instructions for us to be wearing warm coats and suitable footwear, the bulk of us had opted, instead, for wafer-thin cagoules and trainers. Oops.

As I found myself walking in the footsteps of my past, I recognised a vista we had all been tasked with sketching to identify how it had been formed. It was, gloriously, exactly how I remembered it.

My memory of the rest of the trip all those decades ago is fading now. But I remember it being the height of humour in the dormitory of the youth hostel in which we were staying to flip over our friends’ mattresses if they made the error of going to the loo before we were all asleep. How they laughed.

Each coach trip through Snowdonia seemed to consist of everyone singing the – then new – ‘Push It’ by rap duo Salt ‘n’ Pepa while others hid behind their foam headphones on their cassette Walkmans. Reminiscing about it with one of my dearest life-long friends recently (he’d had his mattress flipped), we still spoke fondly of something so deep in our past.

But school trips were something to relish. They provided a break from the routine and, for many of us, the first chance to experience spending time with our mates 24/7.

It was exhausting at times, but great fun too.

When I’d been in junior school in Tunbridge Wells, my parents had signed me up to attend a series of classical music concerts – the Robert Mayer concerts I think they were called – at the Royal Festival Hall. They were designed to introduce youngsters to the sophisticated music.

They were not the highlight though. Because afterwards we’d get taken on a trip to an attraction in London. A sort of reward for sitting patiently through the concert.

As we waited for the coach to pick us up in the morning the main discussion point would be the previous night’s episode of The A-Team. Miss that and you were very much out of the conversation.

Then, once onboard, it would be a case of everyone passing around the old Nintendo Game and Watch handheld games. They’d look completely out-of-date to any youngster today. A simple static screen where you normally tried to jump falling barrels or something else which, at the time, seemed the height of technological entertainment.

Of course, no one really paid any heed to the classical concert. Instead, when we reached the museum or whatever it was we were visiting afterwards, most of the time was spent rubbing our feet along the carpets to create sufficient static electricity to give our unsuspecting pals a small electric shock when you touched them behind the ear.

Or collecting as many leaflets as it was possible to cram into your pockets to help make paper aeroplanes to then launch from your coach seat on the way home. Simple pleasures.

It was sobering walking around that area of Snowdonia again all those many, many years later.

It was a connection to my youth while the landscape remained untouched – just as majestic as I remembered it in my mind’s eye – that it was hard not to be a little moved.

All our young hopes and dreams. All the lives we had before us.