I found Thor’s mighty hammer Mjolnir down the side of the passenger seat of the Ghostbusters’ car, writes blogger Dan Wainwright.

It was a moment of profound triumph because I last saw that two inch piece of thin plastic about 16 years ago.

Since then it has been in my parents’ loft along with all my other toys.

Last week I helped them remove all my old possessions in their plastic crates and bin bags so my folks could get their loft insulated.

I still remember the trauma of losing Thor’s hammer. Without it he was useless as a crimefighter.

I was a prolific collector of action figures, from He-Man through to Transformers and superheroes.

Particularly careful as a kid I was relieved to find I still had all the tiny accessories the manufacturers warn you not to swallow – Batman’s batarangs, The Penguin’s missile umbrella and the little plastic umbrella my Doctor Who figure carried (Sylvestor McCoy’s incarnation for all the Whovians).

My Batmobile still shoots out two yellow missiles from a spring loaded holder at a ludicrously dangerous speed as if I had only just unwrapped it last Christmas.

But what amazed me the most was how the quality and durability of toys has declined as the years progressed.

The 1980s were a time where kids’ cartoons were written purely to sell action figures – and I was an incurable addict.

Early toys, such as Mattel’s He-Man range, are still in perfect condition despite my being very young when I played with them and having an infant brother who seemed to love nothing more than giving the Masters of the Universe a slime bath.

You’d rightly expect that as I got older my toys would have been taken better care of.

But moving into 1987 along came a series called MASK (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, I kid you not) which was basically Transformers with people driving them.

Those beautifully crafted vehicles – cars that turned into planes, petrol stations that became tanks – were put away carefully but all the mechanisms have perished, the cars are stuck mid transformation and their box looks like a plastic scrap yard.

It makes me feel a little uneasy because there are museums full of perfectly preserved toys made generations ago. They built stuff to last in the 1960s and 1970s.

But I doubt I’ll be able to pass on more than a couple of my old toys to any of my descendants. They were made for a fad, for there and then.

My earliest toys have been carefully packed away again, safe inside the plastic fortress that is Snake Mountain.

I’ll make sure nothing happens to them and by the power of Grayskull He-Man will have a new owner one day.