That was an awful business about the boy hurt by exploding batteries in his toy car.

I don't know whether you saw the story of the three-year-old lad. Apparently the batteries blew out a noxious powder which burned his mouth after his mum mixed old and new batteries in the toy. And that's just what she did wrong. Mix old and new.

I never knew you couldn't do that. But Duracell say, yep, there's a warning on the packet. I knew that you shouldn't try to recharge non-rechargeable batteries. I knew that you should not lick the acid jelly that leaks out of very old batteries. I also know, at great cost to my sister and me, that you should never throw your old batteries into a fire.

I was about eight when it happened, and my newly-born sister was on mum's lap having her nappy changed in front of the fire. Little, old innocent me decided to throw an old torch battery on to the coal fire and, after a few minutes, there was a huge explosion and a red-hot cinder jumped on to my sister's leg and burned her badly.

Boy was I in trouble, but I don't recall ever having been told not to dispose of batteries in that way. And I probably wasn't a very bright eight-year-old. Maybe that's because of the brain damage from all the head slaps I got for throwing old batteries into the fire. But to this day, my sister still has a white scar on the front of her thigh.

Thing is, when I was a lad, we didn't have much cause to use batteries, apart from in torches.

My train set was clockwork, the motor we had for our Meccano set was clockwork, even clocks were... clockwork. The problem with clockwork was that if you wound it up too tightly, you'd smash the mainspring. If you lost the key, well. And clockwork items always ran down too quickly. It would probably have kept that annoying, pink, Duracell bunny drumming for 30 seconds, not all week like on the TV advert.

Rumour has it that when technicians were testing batteries on the pink rabbit in 1989, it just would not stop, it escaped the laboratory and has been on the run ever since.

Oh, what a dark, dismal world it would be for most of us today without these handy, little power packs, because there's hardly a contraption around for which batteries are not included.

Portable radios, CD and DVD players, watches, torches (some things never change), TV remote controls, laptop computers, cameras, calculators, cordless power tools, smoke alarms and toys of every description, for children and adults.

Mrs H has just bought me the latest in battery-powered luxury a neck massager built into a plastic, blow-up bath pillow, so it can massage away the cares of the day while I take a long soak with an ice-cold gin & tonic or two. She's a clever, caring woman, really.

I still haven't worked out whether expensive rechargeables are cheaper in the long run than disposable batteries but, every so often, I have a recharging session to keep batteries alive when I have not used various items for a while. It drives Mrs H crazy because virtually every power point in the house has something plugged in on charge cameras, flashgun, drills, screwdrivers, Walkman, you name it.

Oh, and despite our incredible advances in technology, we still need batteries in cars, lorries and buses. When are they going to invent some solar device for car roofs that will give enough power to get an engine started? Come to that, when are they going to invent a car that can run for a decent distance and speed on solar power?

What on earth would we do in a world without batteries? But heed that warning: Don't mix old and new ones in the same machine. Got that?