A FEATURE in last Friday's Evening Press wondered if life really was better in the 1950s. It had been inspired by a survey for Yours Magazine, a publication whose existence was previously unknown to me.

This is a magazine for the over-50s, apparently. I was going to use the word supplement instead, to avoid repetition, but decided that a "supplement for the over-50s" might be something that was popped hopefully in the mouth rather than read.

None of us is getting any younger, a statement which is banal but true. Having notched up another birthday this week, I am now 48. How did that happen? Never mind, there are compensations. In two years I shall be able to read Yours Magazine, at least in theory.

The idea of a magazine for the over-50s fills me with a certain dread. Hell, it's not a certain dread, it's a great, looming, black-cloud-squatting-on-the-horizon dread. What could be worse than confining yourself to your own age group, to willingly accept that you are now one of the grumbling oldies?

Much better to be a grumbling "middler". With middle age now stretching from perhaps 40 to 60 or, with a following wind, 70, it puzzles me why anyone should want to identify themselves as proudly belonging to the over-50s.

Time will tell, but if it tells me to read Yours Magazine, I may well tell time to take a running jump. This, incidentally, is not to disparage editor Valery McConnell and her magazine, it's just that I can't ever see a day when such a read would hold even a scrap of appeal.

As to whether or not life was better in the 1950s, it's hard for me to say. I was four when the decade ended. The biggest thing that happened to me, apart from being born, was falling out of a bedroom window at the age of three and receiving a bump to the head.

It was no surprise to read the findings of the Yours Magazine survey. Nearly all the respondents, whose average age was 69, felt life wasn't what it was. The 1950s were slower, friendlier and more community-minded, and there was less crime and greater innocence.

Modern life, in contrast, was crime-ridden, sleazy and promiscuous, foul-mouthed and second rate.

All of which strikes me as nonsense now - and I hope it will still strike me as nonsense at the age of 69. What is it about the ageing process that turns us into moaning curmudgeons who think everything is going to pot?

If I still had a trilby, I would raise it to the Lord Mayor of York. Janet Looker is a fine mayor and a speaker of brisk good sense. Asked what she thought of the survey, she advised reaching for the salt container, adding: "It's absolute rubbish." She also said: "If you read Jane Austen writing in the 1770s, all the mothers and aunts say exactly the same thing - that when they were young people respected their elders."

A sound point. Such surveys have more to do with people's fondness for a particular period, usually a time when they were young, than any objective comparisons.

AS the political conference season ends, here is a rough guide to what's been going on.

The Liberal Democrats, who went first, have turned from snug to smug and should only be lent votes with caution.

At the Labour bash, Prime Minister Tony Blair said sorry for Iraq; or, then again, did not, depending on which newspaper you turned to. Other than that, the party seems to be relying on a strange formula perhaps best summed up as: "We know you guys don't like us but you're going to vote for us anyway."

And all this week in Bournemouth, the barely rejuvenated Tories have been playing musical deckchairs on the Titanic.

All of which does wonders in restoring faith in politics.

Updated: 08:44 Thursday, October 07, 2004