AS I’m nearing 40, I find myself starting sentences with “Back in my day...” Just as my Ma does, and my Granny did before her.

As a child, I could never quite tell whether old people were using it to demonstrate that things had got better or worse.

For instance, when Granny would stand on the Glen Road and lament “Back in my day, this was nothin’ but fields”, it sounded as though she was mourning some idyllic, pastoral image of grasslands and flowers in a time gone by; whereas I would look around and think, “Aye but surely it’s better now that they’ve built schools and your new house on it, Belle?”.

Sometimes the phrase was wielded to express nostalgia, but more often it was a way of telling us kids how easy we had it compared to them.

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Like the time my Uncle Martin heard me moaning about the batteries dying in the remote and barked: “At least you have a remote. Back in my day, us kids were the remote – we’d get flicked on the ear........

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