When I was younger, I was never really part of a particular clique. I was not especially academic, sporty, artistic or musically talented, and I was definitely not one of the cool kids. I simply seemed to sit somewhere in the middle, without any obvious group or particular talent defining who I was. Perhaps because of that, I do not remember being overly influenced by the trends of the time. There may be some logic to this, as research suggests that the groups we belong to can shape our choices, from what we wear and buy to how we behave. When the people around us become interested in something, it naturally becomes more visible to us and, whether we realise it or not, we can find ourselves wanting to be part of it too.

That does not mean that everyone who belongs to a particular group is more likely to follow a trend, or that those of us who sit outside one are somehow immune. In fact, any notion I may have had that I was naturally resistant to trends disappeared in the summer of 1988, with the arrival of the Coca-Cola Spinner.

I had owned the odd yo-yo before, but none had really captured my attention. They would go down, occasionally come back up, then find their way into the bottom of a toy box, where the string would inevitably become tangled around something else. The Spinner was different because, whether it was the way the string was made, the balance of the yo-yo or something else entirely, tricks suddenly felt much easier to learn and accomplish. This was always going to appeal to me, as the path of least resistance is, in my opinion, a perfectly viable strategy, particularly when it allows you to look far more skilled than you actually are. Oh man, I loved my Spinner.

I spent hours during the summer holidays practising tricks, including Walk the Dog, Rock the Baby, Around the World and, of course, the Sleeper, which helped make several of the other moves possible. Before long, groups of us were standing around together with Spinners in our hands, taking turns to demonstrate what we could do and hoping, probably not quite as casually as we pretended, that everyone else would be impressed. There were no mobile phones being held up to record us, and nobody was creating tutorials, counting views or checking how many people had liked their latest attempt at Around the World. We simply watched one another, picked up ideas, practised until we could do them ourselves and then passed them on to someone else. We did not need a hashtag to tell us that something had become a trend because we could see it in the number of Spinners appearing in playgrounds, parks and streets.

Then we heard, somehow, through the grapevine that a Coca-Cola representative was coming to a local shop to hold a competition. I genuinely have no idea how we found things like this out in those days. We were so disconnected by today’s standards, yet important information still seemed to reach everyone who needed to hear it. Perhaps someone had seen a poster in the shop window, or perhaps a friend told a friend, who then told another friend. However it happened, the message travelled, along with the most exciting part of the story. Someone would have the chance to win a prized gold Coca-Cola Spinner.