On Friday, it being the occasion of my son’s eighth birthday, a Gaming Bus pulled up to our house and offered him and his 12 sweaty little friends a two-hour stint in a bus decked out with Playstations, Xboxes and Switches, plus a slightly underwhelming virtual reality (VR) experience fitted to the vehicle’s side.I don’t recall what I did for my eighth birthday, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t loading a dozen of my closest friends into a bus filled with state-of-the-art computer gaming. I likely had people out to our house for some small sausages and chips, followed by some dancing around in our sittingroom to two up-tempo novelty records that were reliably wheeled out any time we had people over. These were Black Lace’s Party Party (the best album of all time) and its follow-up Party Party II (the joint-best album of all time).Such gatherings were, however, rare. I grew up in the open countryside of the Derry/Donegal border and had few people – let alone children my own age – anywhere near us. We weren’t in a village or even a loosely coherent townland. There was no church or pub or GAA club, no post office or parish hall. Just a dozen-or-so properties, most of them farms, spread across a sprawling five-mile patchwork of fields that meandered back and forth across a border to which nobody paid much attention.I’m acutely aware of – and as a memoirist, professionally hindered by – the fact that memories from childhood rarely hold up. But I do remember feeling deeply envious of families who lived around other people. I used to thrill at depictions of suburban kids in Hollywood films, or city dwellers on TV sitcoms; people who had neighbours who’d drop in unannounced and wisecrack with our heroes as if they were their second family. People who had neighbours full-stop. I longed to be part of a gang of local kids, meeting up over long summer holidays so we could ride our bikes in striped T-shirts, trade football stickers, get into PG-rated scrapes and maybe go hunting for a dead body or two. I don’t wish to state that this was a lonely existence. Nature did, after all, furnish me with 10 siblings, so solitude was not a state I was gifted with at any point in my upbringing. It’s just that few of my siblings were excited by the prospect of locating a cadaver with me, so there was always an extra frisson of specialness to those occasions when our house was filled with people to whom I was not directly related.These parties were, necessarily, large affairs, since the starting population of my family (12, including my dad) would be supplemented not just by my chosen friends, but also their parents and any of their siblings who were the same age as mine. Since I generally had at least one sibling who was the same age as every child in Derry, gatherings of 40 or 50 people, ranging in age from four to 65, were standard.With this, however, came another drawback of my isolation. Unused to having so many schoolfriends in my space, the immediate flood of non-standard visitors could prove overwhelming. I have several distinct memories of balking at seeing some random child playing with my toys in ways I didn’t approve of, or picking up things they weren’t allowed to. Things I wasn’t allowed to. More than once – perhaps every time – these parties ended with my father politely informing guests that I’d retired to my bedroom “for a bit of me-time” before bidding them farewell on my behalf.[ Séamas O’Reilly: Social media bans for children ignore the scorpions in the roomOpens in new window ]Thankfully, my son is a much more consummate host than I was. We live directly across the road from his school, so he was particularly delighted when we told him he could take his guests on the 23-second journey to our house at home time. This he did, a paragon of smugness, leading them like a pied piper intent not on drowning local children, but providing them with chicken goujons, apple juice and 80 games of Mario Kart.This they did, along with some Minecraft, Fifa, Gran Turismo and some mildly baffled sittings at the – aforementioned and underwhelming – VR experience. Once back inside, we had cake and music and the adults decamped to the garden for well-deserved drinks.On a whim, I fired up Black Lace’s Party Party and Party Party II on the Bluetooth speaker. They don’t hold up, I’m sorry to say. So few memories from childhood do.