I left you last week planning a late return to avoid arriving home at the tail end of my grandson's fourth birthday party.

It's always the worst time to make an appearance. Everyone is usually just about out of control, running around screaming and crying and generally having hysterics. And that's only the adults.

As it turned out, I need not have driven past the house slowly once or twice before venturing in. The party had been a birthday lunch and the little guests had long since gone home, leaving only the usual trail of party debris. Pasta down the sofa, crisps underfoot and various precariously balanced cups of fruit juice on window ledges and the mantle shelf. In other words, it was a success.

As parties go it was, I suppose, small fry. Nobody had hired a clown or for that matter an entire circus. We didn't have fireworks, performing dogs or somebody posh in to do the food. This is, in the USA, and to some extent in the UK, now something of an upwardly mobile trend. Parents vie to provide the most lavish party they can, or can't, afford, for their birthday boy or girl.

I suppose if you look at it with a sociological eye, the children's party directly reflects the times we live in. Today's children, who are overloaded with gifts and games and fast foods all year round have to be given something more exciting that their usual fare: Whereas my generation was quite happy with jelly and blancmange and a cake with gooey icing on it. And the wartime child was probably delighted with an eggless sponge filled with beetroot jam.

What the next generation will get I hate to think, but it all smacks a bit of the Roman Empire which kept going over the top with spectacle and splendour until they went right over the top and down again with a thud.

Come to think of it, many of the children's parties I've hosted do resemble some of the worst excesses of the Roman amphitheatre, except we lacked the chariots; but there's an awful lot of damage a child can do when running amok with a tricycle in your sitting room.

I have to admit that I hated parties as a child, because I was shy and dreaded those hideous games devised by sadistic adults. These always included 'pin the tail on the donkey' and the equally dreadful 'Postman's Knock' which was destined to give you a lifelong inferiority complex if the postman failed to ring for you once, let alone twice.

The food, if I remember it, was very simple and usually consisted of paste sandwiches, jelly in paper cases and a variety of chocolate biscuits, plus fairy cakes (cut into little butterflies if you were in a posh house) and a very sickly sponge birthday cake. Nothing exotic and certainly nothing speared by cocktail sticks.

It seemed to be the norm that one child was always sick, one wanted to go home as soon as it arrived, one refused to eat anything and the birthday child always threw a tantrum if someone else won the pass the parcel.

The only birthday parties I actually enjoyed were thrown by an aunt who always took us out for afternoon tea an a hotel and we were allowed to eat things like rum babas and order toasted tea cakes. Her motives for the outings probably had something to do with the fact that she lived in a small Regency terraced house with pale cream walls, cream carpets and cream draperies which certainly wouldn't have been improved by sticky fingers covered in chocolate or being doused with fizzy orange.

When you become a parent yourself you don't really think of children's parties at first, but then they loom large and invitations start to appear. Then you have to learn the etiquette.

I remember being faintly surprised that parties lasted for such a short time. 'Not short enough', said one friend, and soon I knew what she meant and learned that invitations should firmly state ' from 3pm to 4.30pm' which meant 'and not a second longer or I'll lock your unpleasant child in the coal cellar until you pick it up.' The biggest sin you could commit was not arriving on time to collect your brood.

Food, of course, had gone slightly upmarket with cocktail sticks making their appearance spearing cheese and pineapple and chipolatas, although they could always be relied on to spear one child who hadn't quite got the hang of removing them from the food first. Crisps, twiglets and nuts had to be offered, sausage rolls were fine but sandwiches were very passé. You might get away with egg and cress rolls if you were lucky. Ice cream had replaced jelly and blancmange and the very organised housewife (or very stupid, depending on which way you viewed it) made elaborate ice cream concoctions like Knickerbocker Glories and then spent the rest of the year picking cherries out of their Wilton and bananas out of the fake coals on the gas fire.

Now, you can buy birthday cakes, dozens of shapes and sizes depicting the child's favourite cartoon character or film. In those days you were a bit of slut if you didn't spend the requisite number of hours constructing a pile of sponges and filling them and covering them with various tooth decaying mixtures.

My worst experience of cake making, which I have probably mentioned before because it is imprinted indelibly on my memory, was making a Devil's Food cake which had thick brown sludge-like frosting for my son's seventh birthday party. The icing had already begun a slow slide off the cake, the fate of any icing I apply, when one child, probably my son, said it looked like cat's pooh. Inevitably every child took up the cry 'pooh pooh cake' and starting flicking bits of it at one another and by the time they were collected they were all liberally smeared with it and I heard one child tell its parent that they had had a cat pooh cake and I received a very funny look. So, advice note to party givers, avoid chocolate frosting wherever possible.

Pizzas

Today party food shows how sophisticated children have become. Pizzas and tacos, prawn crackers, tortilla chips and dips, pasta salad and prawns and chicken dippers. A friend told me that at one party her eight year old went to there were smoked salmon sandwiches, so I suppose fish paste is out now. Entertaining out at fast food restaurants or bowling alleys is now an option, especially for older children.

The party bag, instead of being a piece of cake and a small gift as it once was, or a lolly on a stick when I was a child, is now a Hollywood production number and soon mums will have to use carrier bags or they'll be on the social blacklist.

I suppose it's something we have to do, and each new generation gets the baptism of fire. And I speak as someone who has survived parties where small boys danced on the sideboard, small girls pushed a dozen unwanted chocolate finger biscuits, each with just a tiny bite out of them, in between the books in the bookcase and one enterprising child managed to lock itself into the downstairs loo within five minutes of arriving and screamed so loudly that we had to break the window to get him out; I am a veteran.

There was also the time that dog got out and nipped every child it could reach which certainly livened up musical chairs for once. I've never seen four year olds move so quickly.

I can also recall, but perhaps not recommend, a party I took my two daughters to where the hostess asked the mums if they would like to stay (well, practically begged actually) and then served us all very large drinks for the next two hours so that by the time we all reluctantly left it was a wonder we took the right child home.

Now that's my kind of party.