Gen Z will find it difficult to understand how people entertained themselves on Fridays during the 90s

There was a time once, a beautiful time when Friday evenings meant a takeaway and a movie was on the cards.

You'd go through the routine of getting the menus out of a drawer in the kitchen only to order the exact same thing you always picked, and then you'd go and take a trip to the nearest place to you that did video rentals.

It was heaven, shelves of movies containing stories and adventures untold as well as the old faithful ones you'd rented time and time again because they were just that good.

These days it's more likely you'd get a Deliveroo and browse the options on Netflix before deciding there was nothing worth watching.

It may be my nostalgia for a different time talking but while it's more convenient and requires me to get off my sofa less often it doesn't feel as good.

I was a kid in the 90s and even my local corner shop had shelves for video rentals, and after the turn of the millennium those VHS tapes were steadily replaced by DVDs.

For a time it felt like a golden era, but everything comes to an end and eventually those shelves of movies disappeared including the copy of A Knight's Tale that I must have rented a dozen times.

In my local corner shop two shelves became one, then one shelf became a little turnstile with DVDs in it that didn't last very long at all.

By 2013 the nearest Blockbuster announced it was shutting up shop and this movie mecca was no more, replaced by a hairdressers salon.

We can harp on about how Gen Z kids won't understand, though some of the eldest of that generation will have been able to experience this stuff during the 00s, but one can't really blame them for never having had the proper chance to understand.

All accounts of these places go through a strong filter of nostalgia from the people who enjoyed them but ultimately betrayed them.

Who killed Blockbuster? We did.

Businesses like Netflix got big by offering to send you the DVDs so you could rent a Friday film without even leaving the house and we lapped that s**t up.

We can talk about how much we loved those days and didn't fully appreciate them until they were gone, but they're gone because we voted with our wallets and chose another way that required less effort on our part.

Then of course there's the compelling argument that it wasn't actually a better time and that we're more nostalgic for who we were back then than what we were doing, perhaps that's true.

Still, there was a certain ritual to it all which is remembered as being incredibly enjoyable and no longer exists.

Who knows what things we'll be nostalgic for two or three decades down the line?