"It was a vast, shining globe, and it cast a light of lambent topaz into space - but it was not a sun." They do not rate among the best-known or beloved opening lines in the long history of literature, but they have been emblazoned upon my heart for nearly a quarter century, since that happy Sunday afternoon in 1979 when I discovered in the shelves of the Lighthouse Book Exchange a second-hand paperback copy of Star Wars by George Lucas.

It was subtitled From The Adventures Of Luke Skywalker, it had a yellow spine and on the cover there was a drawing of Luke striking a kind of kung fu pose with a light-sabre, Princess Leia beside him, and, looming above them, the outline of Darth Vader like a great black cloud.

I can't be entirely sure whether George Lucas actually wrote the novel, or whether he hired someone to write it under his name, but it set my young imagination aflame in a way that was only dimly and more shamefully echoed by such subsequent literary discoveries as the bath-tub scene in Eric von Lustbader's The Ninja, or the bit in From Russia With Love when Bond returns to his hotel to find a Russian agent named Tatiana in his bed, wearing nothing but a black ribbon around her throat.

Besides teaching me such useful words as "lambent" and "wookie", the book set my heart aflutter. It was high adventure and romance, and it featured a black-hearted villain, and a young heart pure and true, and a beautiful princess to be rescued and won. It was one of the great feats of 1970s cinematic special effects that Star Wars managed to persuade an entire generation of bright-eyed young men that Carrie Fisher was good-looking. I pored over her photographs in the book with a distant and inchoate longing, a longing that would remain distant and inchoate until at least 1981, when I discovered the bath-tub scene in Eric von Lustbader's The Ninja.

Along with Purdey, Leia set the template for my feminine ideal, which made adolescence even more inconvenient than it might otherwise have been. When you are a gangling teenager it is hard enough to find any girl prepared to look at you twice without recoiling, without further demanding she be a cross between an intergalactic rebel princess and a karate-kicking secret agent with a taste for guns and high-cut dresses. There are surprisingly few of those knocking around school buses.

Still, I was swept away by Star Wars, and I took every opportunity to see the film. I remembered this recently as I sat watching the original Star Wars trilogy on M-Net. I first saw Star Wars when I was five, and then again when I was 10 and it was rereleased and I persuaded my father to take me to see it. Ooh, the lights and the lasers and the great rumbling spaceships through the blackness of space and the more infinite blackness of the cinema.

I would run home and reread the paperback, appreciating the greater nuances and essential information only available in the printed word. Did you know that Chewbacca the wookie was 100 years old at the time of the first movie? Or that Leia's surname is Organa? Oh yes, it was all there.

As each film came out I would rush to see it, gasping at the villainy of the universe, cheering at its heroism, chewing my heart out about whether Vader could really be Luke's father. I wasn't one of those creepy little kids who sit inspecting blue-prints of the battle-stations, or comparing the specs of Rebel and Imperial military hardware, or anything - I was always far more interested in the fi than the sci - and thankfully I never actually had a C-3PO doll or an Airfix model of the Death Star, but I did while away many hours in the early 1980s practising my light-sabre technique and wondering whether I would grow up to resemble Luke Skywalker or Han Solo more closely.

But I realised, as I watched this week, that one of the essential ingredients in the ongoing romance was distance. I was dependent on the inscrutable whims of the cinemas for my big-screen exposure to Star Wars. There were no videos, and your chances of seeing on television any movie that was less than 15 years old were about the same as your chances of meeting Princess Leia on the school bus and persuading her to share your lunch.

I lived the romance through memory and books and the happy wanderings of my solitary imagination. Time and distance made it yet more glamorous, until I could scarcely believe that real people could have made something so marvellous.

I am glad that I was not born in the early 1990s, rather than the early 1970s. Today the 10 year old in me would be able to watch the DVD, and play the PlayStation game, and watch it on television. There would be no longing, no yearning, no wondering if those glorious two hours when I was five could really have happened.

But of course nostalgia is a fraudulent thing. As nostalgic as I am for that time, and as sad as I am for the kids of today, my parents would have looked at my high-tech, high-speed 1970s childhood and sighed for the simpler days past. And so it will be with today's children and their children. Nostalgia never changes, and it never lessens with generations.

I watched the films again, and at first my heart stayed largely unmoved. The light of lambent topaz looked more like a halogen bulb. But then I looked away to refill my drink, and as I glanced back, the Star Wars theme was playing, and - look! there was Luke Skywalker - for a moment I was back in the dark and 10 years old, a long time ago in a universe far, far away. Boy, it was a good feeling.