IT was December 1980. I was lying curled up in bed, not wanting to leave the only warm spot in my freezing attic bedroom, and certainly not wanting to walk through the drizzle and fog to my punishing four-hour schedule of lectures and tutorials.

I switched on my tinny, ancient portable wireless in an effort to wake myself up which I did, sharply, when I heard the newsreader announce that John Lennon had been murdered.

I was 20 and in my second year at university a textbook candidate for something called the reminiscence bump.

Ever heard of such a thing? No, me neither, not until the other day, when I was listening to the radio again. (I do a lot of that.) The reminiscence bump is not, as some of you might suppose, the morning-after jolt you get when you suddenly remember just what you did or said after the ninth gin and tonic the night before.

Rather, it's what boffins called that period, usually between the ages of 15 and 25, in which you gather the most vivid memories of your life. It's the reason I'll never forget that chilly December morning back in 1980. It's also why people my Mum and Dad's age can recall all the equally hackneyed detail of the moment they learned that John Kennedy had been shot.

Researchers at Leeds University are being paid good money to tell us about this reminiscence bump. It seemed a bit of a cheek to me until they explained it was all part of establishing how your personality is shaped for life. A lot of it apparently dates back to those halcyon days of your youth.

Memory's a bit of a double-edged sword, of course.

I can still scare myself thinking about my recurring childhood nightmares, which tended to involve either madwomen on the battlements of burning mansions or dinosaurs chasing me and a lot of other humans down a motorway whose hard shoulders were studded with cauldrons, each brimming with boiling people.

Sometimes, if I was really lucky, the two dreams would melt into one bizarre horror story and I would awake, gibbering in the half-light and ready to convince myself that the dressing-gown hanging on my bedroom door was really a hovering ghost.

I don't know why people get so uptight about exposing kids to violent action movies. I got enough material to terrify me for life from Jane Eyre and the natural history book I won in my last year at primary school.

There was a fascinating documentary on telly on Monday night about a bloke who suddenly and completely lost all memory of everything that had happened in his life.

He knew how to write, could remember the names of cities in Australia but he'd no idea what his name was, who his family were, or anything that had happened to him before the moment he suddenly realised he was on a New York train and had no idea where he was going, or why.

Now, I wouldn't wish the obvious fear and distress he felt on anyone, but I had to admit there were parts of his condition that appealed to me. Who wouldn't like the chance to ditch some of the memories that make you shudder, wince or squirm?

Personally I think the cash would be better spent at Leeds University on developing techniques to help you forget events that happened years and years ago, yet still have the power to make you shudder when you think of them today.