Sorry but I'm back on the growing old bandwagon - piling on even more evidence as to why, for me, the so-called golden years are no longer just a distant blip on the horizon.

Scientists claim to have unearthed the reasons why older people look upon the past through rose-tinted glasses. Apparently, with time running out, people direct their attention to more positive thoughts about the past, hence all the references to the 'good old days.'

Now I constantly harp on about this subject, so much so that after a Victorian Day at her primary school, my eldest daughter commented: "Mummy, I don't think the olden days are as great as you say they are."

Yet I can't help promoting them as glorious. I can't stop harking back, lecturing my children on how "in my day" a tomato really tasted like a tomato not like a ball of bland liquid with pips, how you could also actually taste the yolk of an egg and how bubble gum was a far better product, the bubbles from which could get so big they would pop all over your face.

I tell them how the butcher's van would stop outside my parents' house selling lovely fresh meat and how we could make money by collecting empty pop bottles and exchanging them for pennies at the village shop.

I can't help drawing comparisons between the amount of traffic on today's roads and those of yesteryear. I tell my daughters how different it was three decades ago - how I would play all day in the village and rarely see a passing car, whereas now the lanes are not unlike the M62, awash with four-wheel tanks and huge executive saloons.

And I will regularly harp on about the cost of things nowadays. "I remember when I used to get my hair cut for five or six pounds," I will recall, as I struggle to find a hairdresser to do it for less than £25.

But television is the subject that really gets the good-old-days treatment. There are programmes from the past that I remember loving - the hour-long Saturday night Thriller series, Rich Man, Poor Man, Dallas and Monty Python. Now there's rarely anything I'd rush home for apart from, maybe, Cutting It (far-fetched drivel but we women lap it up), Sex And The City and a couple of American sitcoms.

To me, even the weather seemed better in the past. "We had proper seasons then, with real snow," I will say. "We could go sledging every day."

The scientists who carried out the study into age and memory said their findings also provided the reason for our angst-ridden youth, concluding that younger adults find negative memories much easier to recall than older people.

I don't have any problem with those recollections either - I can still vividly remember being chased down the garden path by my dad after I had thrown a teenage tantrum, being teased at school for having ginger hair and being cruelly dumped by my first true love.

I'm still full of angst about all this and more and I certainly wouldn't want to go back there, even if I could go sledging and get a cheap haircut.

But maybe I should start mentioning it more often. Remember the bad - it's a sign of youth.

Updated: 11:48 Monday, June 09, 2003