There's no denying, today's trip to the cinema is a very pleasant experience.

You can book well in advance, know exactly where you're going to sit, the chairs are big and comfortable and the sound and picture quality first rate.

Granted, you frequently need to add to your mortgage to cover the cost of tickets and snacks, but a pleasing leisure activity it remains.

Things were not always so, however.

Back in the day, rather than whip out your phone and call up the cinema listings, you waited patiently for your local newspaper and sought out the regular advert telling you what films (if you were lucky enough to have a cinema with more than one screen - and three was very much the most you could expect) were showing and at what time.

Then it came to a case of planning. This was an era before you could book in advance. So to be sure of getting in you needed to queue. The bigger the film, the longer the wait.

When I was a child, growing up in Tunbridge Wells, many a Saturday afternoon in the early 1980s was spent sat on the steps of the now demolished cinema at the top of Mount Pleasant Road waiting for the doors to open. Days of loitering in a warm foyer were for a future era.

Cut it too fine and you'd be queuing halfway down the steep street. Worse case scenario, someone from the cinema would come down the line and count the numbers waiting before informing those too far down that they would need to do something else with their evening.

There were no allocated seats either (or swanky luxury seats for extra money, for that matter) - hence why queuing up early (well, I had nothing better to do) paid dividends.

You'd get a cartoon or a short information film before the film started (I remember going to see tear-jerker ET and a child sat nearby was in floods at Tom & Jerry which proceeded it, which didn't bode well).

Adverts spoke of restaurants 'just down the road from this cinema'.

And, more often than not, there would be an interval giving you the chance to bolt to the loo or popcorn stand. They even had - and this makes me sound ancient - ushers selling ice cream and overpriced snacks.

Of course, back in the day, it wasn't all digital film either...so there was always the risk of the projector giving out. Watching Superman II in Sevenoaks one afternoon the proceedings were brought to an abrupt halt when the film broke.

It was different times. For starters, I don't fully remember the price of a ticket but £1 sounds not unreasonable.

There are many indicators of getting older, but memories of attending long-since-gone cinemas is one of them.

My first ever cinema trip was to The Regal in Cranbrook to watch the original Star Wars. Today it's long been a car park for a Co-op.

I can remember moving to Ashford in 1984 and paying a visit to the picture house (which I think was actually called the Picture House) which, back then, was close to the railway station.

I'd like to say I forget what film it was but I don't. It was BMX Bandits. Having just Googled it, it starred a then 16-year-old Nicole Kidman. She and the cinema experience have gone on to far bigger and better things since.

My over-riding memory, however, was sitting in the auditorium watching the Pearl and Dean 'pah, pah, pah, pahs' and every time someone walked past the aisle on which I was sat, the floorboards would lift my seat up. An uncomfortable seat made even worse.

The cinema was refurbished not too long after - which was, frankly, a blessed relief. By the time I was old enough to sit in the smoking section (yes, you could have a fag while watching a film) it wasn't half bad.

A shame, then, that the cinema near the station would eventually be engulfed by the works necessary to turn its neighbour into an international terminal in 1992. Today the cinema site sits somewhere beneath the road system and car park to serve all those people catching a train to Europe. Except, of course, since 2020, there are no international trains. Revenge is a dish best served cold and all that.

Living in a town with no cinema was a pain.

Fast forward a few years and things started to change. The opening of a multiplex on one of the retail parks at Lakeside - just a hop, skip and a jump from the Dartford Tunnel - meant you could go and spend the day watching back-to-back films if you so wanted. Films were shown with a rude frequency in modern auditoriums. It was worth the trip.

It too has long since been demolished, however, and replaced with retail units.

I can but pray my patronage of Westgate's rather splendid Carlton Cinema (£3.50 a ticket people!) doesn't provide the kiss of death I seem to have given the bulk of movie houses I've frequented in the past.