THERE is one lingering image from childhood that will forever be burned into my memory.

No, it's nothing of a too-incendiary nature. The day I incinerated the hollow tree was indeed memorable, but that it not what concerns us here. Neither is it, too, with a later act of pyromania regarding a privet hedge.

What is it about small boys and boxes of matches? Any psychologists out there? Sorry, but this latest trawl through the back pages concerns something far more mundane... my father tending his tobacco plants at the top of the garden.

Tobacco plants, I hear you say. What, in Britain? Oh yes. My dad was a serious pipe smoker and grew his own Fine Warwickshire Flake.

He used to hang the leaves in the potting shed, cure them in the family bath (!) and then press them into blocks. Then, once a tot of rum had been added, he cut the compressed wedge with a razor blade and transferred the finished product to a pouch or tin.

What was it like? Absolutely horrendous. I remember once rolling a cigarette from this concoction, using a torn page from the Beano for paper. The result of this early introduction to the joys of smoking was three hours writhing like a sliced worm on my back underneath the damson tree, eyeballs going like propellers and nausea so bad that death would have been a welcome release.

How strange that so many of us persevered in defiance of the dreaded swirling pits and became expert smokers.

My dad lived in the garden. Yet, oddly enough, he was always relatively smartly dressed when performing his horticultural tasks. He would wear a slightly more scruffy version of his everyday wear - old suit, cardigan, tie and flat cap.

When not applying foot to spade or fork, finger to pruning shears or trowel, his apparel would revert to suit, waistcoat, collar and tie, topped off with trilby hat. He'd always been the same - pictures of him as a young man in the 1930s showed him dressed to the nines, no matter what the occasion.

I'm always fascinated by those old black and white photographs. Surely it must have been terribly uncomfortable dressed so formally all the time? Was it not dreadfully hot playing tennis in August looking as if you were going for a job interview?

All I can say is that if people were sweating buckets then those little Kodaks did a marvellous cover-up. Yet people were more smartly dressed in those days. I would say that until the late 1930s, men and women were far better turned out than they are today.

Perhaps the kipper tie and Concorde-lapels of the 1970s were the last gasps of sartorial expression. Maybe the tailored cheesecloth shirts, figure-hugging trousers, coal scuttle coiffured hair and Jason King moustache were the death rattles of a fashion age, one last party before the Age Of Drab took over.

I mean, what has happened to the nation's dress sense? As a young man, I spent a fortune on clothes. Look at the equivalent today. All men under 35 look the same - cropped hair, dark slacks, casual shirt worn over the trousers (why?) and non-descript shoes.

I accept that it might be only fitting that such grey clothing merely reflects the equally tedious music around these days, but surely, if youth cannot do the peacock strut, then who can?

The other major complaint I have is this growing tendency for young men to walk about Worcester stripped to the waist. Why on earth do these inadequates imagine that the rest of us want to gaze upon such a procession of pigeon-chested, maggot-coloured monosyllabic morons?

Do they think "hey, think I'll strip off to the waist and give the women a thrill" and then choose Worcester High Street as the scene for their would-be Chippendales audition? Search me.

And what makes these youths with bodies like blowfly larvae want to reveal all in the first place? As if the building site lobster-look isn't enough to contend with?

I think it's a shame that youth in all its glorious foolishness and self-adoration cannot spend a few brief years looking ridiculous rather than hideous.

And what about parents' rights? Why have I not been given the opportunity of being presented with a creature from Outer Space masquerading as one of the daughters' boyfriends and being left thinking: "Nice lad, but needs a blooming haircut and some decent togs."

It's just not fair. My parents' generation had a field day with Herberts such as myself. "Is it a boy or a girl? You can't tell the difference these days. This music all sounds the same to me. Why does he have long hair? Look at those trousers, they're disgusting... and as for those eyelashes, he must be wearing make-up..."

I have the feeling we are in the fallow period of a cycle. Fashion waxes and wanes - one has only to reflect on the flamboyance of the 18th Century right through to the late Victorian age to see that taste is a moveable feast.

Quite where that leaves our modern day Beau Brummell, well, I'm not quite sure. All I know is that we are in a non-age, a time when no one is making any statement whatsoever. A period that will be omitted from the history books on account of it being just too boring to record for posterity.

Yet, I can't help thinking of my dad, dressed in his worn collar, tie and shabby gardening suit, tending his young tobacco plants. This was the self-same father who once gave me a verbal roasting for appearing at the meal table wearing jeans and a T-shirt. How times change.

But whether for the better, well, I'll leave that one for you to decide. Only one thing remains the same and it is this. If I smoked that old Fine Warwickshire Flake today, it would have the same disastrous effect on me.

Such a relief that not everything is spoiled by progress.