So it’s my birthday.

I was treated to what can only be described as a breakfast banquet by G consisting of all my favourites: eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, fried potatoes, toast with marmalade, fresh black coffee and orange juice.

All served by a beautiful woman, life doesn’t get much better than that.

This afternoon we decamped to the local Odeon to see Ocean’s Thirteen; an enjoyable, guilty pleasure, bit like a big mac.

But I don’t want to talk about Ocean’s Thirteen. I want to talk about Transformers.

The full trailer was played – my first viewing having seen the teaser back in Jan – and I admit it I geeked out, it looks amazing…from an effects viewpoint anyway.

Then something else happened. Suddenly I felt old. Grown up even. The cause of this sudden onset of decreptitude? The realisation that it had been twenty-four years since I first saw the original cartoon, that seminal triumph of American marketing trussed up as a cartoon morality play.

See, you can practically hear me turning into an old fart in that paragraph, a pretentious one at that.

But you know what. There’s another voice in my head. It doesn’t look back and see the barely disguised marketing, the absurd yet about-to-become-terrifyingly-relevant-again cold war propaganda. That voice, one I treasure, simply says:

“Awesome, robots kicking the shit out of each other and that, like, turn into stuff.”

And when philisophical, that all important debate:

“How come Megatron was like twenty feet tall as a robot and then turned into a gun small enough to fit in a guy’s hand?”

So come the 3rd July, I’m going to leave grown up Neil locked in a box. Down to Greenwich I will go, clutching my ticket in one hand and a bucket of popcorn in the other. It won’t be 2007 to me when the lights go down, oh no, it’ll by 1984. Not bad for £6.99.

Transformers, it’s childhood in disguise…