From peanut butter to Fats Waller, my tastes are unchanged since I was 25. And that’s how I like it!

SET in our ways by the tender age of 25? Nonsense, I thought, when I read this week that more than a third of us are so fixed in our habits and tastes after our first quarter-century on this Earth that we never take to anything new for the rest of our lives.

Now, if we were talking about 50-yearolds, I could just about understand it. After all, by the time we’ve been knocking around for half a century (and I passed that milestone 11 years ago), most of us have experienced enough people, places, books, films, music and pastimes to have a pretty settled idea of what we like and what we don’t.

But 25? Come off it! Life has hardly begun. Who are the unadventurous 38 per cent who have told pollsters they’ve been stuck in the mud ever since — with their favourite foods, travel destinations, hobbies and friendships set in stone from that day to this?

Only when I thought about it more deeply did the awful truth begin to dawn on me: oh my Lord, I’m one of them!

I don’t know about you, but I’m hard pushed to think of any of my likes and dislikes that have changed significantly since I celebrated my 25th birthday in 1978.

Recording

Take music. True, the occasional recording I’ve heard over the past 37 years has drifted in and out of my list of desert island discs. Even Lily Allen’s Smile put in a brief appearance a few years ago, before I realised it would drive me mad if I heard it too often as I lay on my lonely beach beneath the palm tree.

But there’s a hard core of six records that have remained in my top eight, and will stay there for ever, since I first heard them and fell in love with them long before I was 25 years old.

In no particular order, they are Edith Piaf’s Milord, Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, Fats Waller’s My Very Good Friend The Milkman, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Buddy Holly’s Raining In My Heart and The Sloth by Flanders and Swann.

Now, you may say this is unsurprising, since a great deal more music, including almost the entire classical repertoire, was written pre-1978 than has come out since.

But my point is that I’ve listened to much more music over the past 37 years than I did in the first 25 — including countless works by the great classical composers, which were new to me.

Yet nothing I’ve heard since — by Mozart, Beethoven or anyone else — has shifted those six firm favourites of my teens and early 20s from my list (though it was Cherubino’s love song from the Marriage Of Figaro that kicked Lily Allen out of eighth place).

Test your own top eight. Whether your taste runs to Led Zeppelin or J. S. Bach (or both) you may be surprised by how long your musical favourites have remained unchanged over the years.

Or take travel. In my first 25 years, I hardly ventured abroad and never set foot beyond Europe, spending most of the holidays of my childhood and youth at home or in Ireland.

Since then, I’ve seen a fair bit of the world, from New York to Delhi and Hong Kong. Yet if you ask me to name my favourite foreign city, it would still be Dublin, after almost 50 years at the top of my list.

Or food. Britain has experienced a gastro-revolution since 1978, and I’ve tasted and enjoyed all sorts of dishes I’d never tried before. But just as my lifelong preferences for plain chocolate over milk, red wine over white and bitter over lager were all set in stone before my 25th birthday, so too was my love of good old steak and chips above all else. Oh, and the smell of peanut butter still makes me retch.

Best film? Cabaret — my unchanged favourite since I saw it at 20.

Best books? Pride And Prejudice, Scoop, War And Peace (I know, I’m desperately unoriginal) — all first read between the ages of 17 and 23, and never shifted from their top three slots.

Passion

Favourite sport? None. I’ve tried my very best to develop an interest in soccer, cricket, rugby, tennis — golf, even — so that I could share our sons’ passion for at least one of them. But it’s no good. The best I can manage is a flicker of patriotic support when England is playing. Otherwise, I remain to this day as immovably anti-sport as I was at 25.

All of which brings me to politics — surely one area of life in which we might expect our increasing experience and changing circumstances to shift our youthful allegiances.

Indeed, there can be no more famous observation on the subject than the remark attributed variously to Edmund Burke, Anselme Batbie, Victor Hugo, King Oscar II of Sweden, George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill and any number of others: ‘If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are a liberal at 35, you have no brain’ ( the key ages differ from version to version, while some say ‘ republican’ or ‘ socialist’ rather than ‘liberal’).

Yet how many of us really do change our political views as we grow older? Clearly, there are a good many floating voters around, while the emergence of the SNP, Ukip and the Greens has somewhat complicated the picture.

But in my experience — though there will always be plenty of exceptions — the general rule is that people’s politics don’t change very radically as the decades roll on.

Certainly, most of the Lefty friends I had in my early 20s remain Lefties to this day, holding important jobs in politics, at the Guardian or BBC.

As for the sixtysomething husband of one of my many sisters-in-law, he’ll go to his grave ranting against ‘Tory scum’, deaf to all reason, just as he’s been doing since he was in short trousers.

Cruel

Indeed, I can think of only one Left-wing friend from my youth who has admitted to altering his views a little with the passage of the years.

‘Since my 40th birthday,’ he once told me, ‘I’ve allowed myself one Right-wing thought every week.’ But I bet he voted Labour on May 7, the same as ever.

As for me, I was a Tory at 25, and I’ve been the same ever since. Goodness knows, I’ve tried hard enough to see the other side of the argument.

I’ve studied Marx, listened to Ed Miliband’s speeches and waded through hundreds of Polly Toynbee’s articles in The Guardian. But it’s no good. I simply can’t change.

While I don’t for a minute question the sincerity or good intentions of Karl, Ed or Polly, it simply beats me how any grownup with a knowledge of life or history can think Socialism anything but a cruel creed, from which the poor have always suffered most.

However, I mustn’t end on such a sour note. I guess it’s because we experience life with such intensity in our teens and early 20s that so many of us stick with the beliefs, habits and tastes that we picked up during those crucial formative years.

This is not to say that life has nothing new to offer after our mid-20s. Come to think of it, I’ve acquired at least five firm new favourites since I passed my 25th birthday — four of them sports-mad males … and their mother, whom I married at 26.

But then the odd exception aside, why should any of us change our old ways if we find that they suit us?