Those were the good old days… weren’t they?

Ah, the good old days. The summers were warmer and it always snowed at Christmas, remember? Nostalgia, as the writer Angela Carter once observed, is “the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies, our memories come in monochrome.”

Looks like she was right. According to a study by animal charity Spana, half of adults over the age of 50 agree that life in the past was preferable, compared with 19 per cent who think the present day is best. What do you reckon? Are we just a bunch of rheumy-eyed old gits or have the over-fifties got a point? In the immortal words of Gladys Knight: “Can it be that it was all so simple then/ Or has time rewritten every line?” Here’s a list of some things that people claim were better back then …

1. Not so much traffic on the road. True. But cars were about as safe and comfortable as a shortbread tin on wheels. To travel in the back seat of a Hillman Minx, unrestrained by seat belts, was the closest most of us will ever come to a near-death experience.

2. Things were built to last. No sniffy 12-year-old assistant at the Apple store explaining that their wireless-only keyboard won’t work with your computer, which is at least FOUR YEARS OLD, you dinosaur! On the other hand, there was your mum struggling for years with the Hotpoint Twin Tub, hoicking out the boiling-hot washing into the spinner compartment, which had all the centrifugal force of a bluebottle in a jam jar.

3. Fresh produce. People certainly had a healthier diet

because there was less choice and no additives or ready meals. Obesity was rare. But we thought peaches came in tins and pineapples in chunks, and “salad” was a lettuce leaf on a plate with haemorrhaging beetroot. Ready meals have freed women from domestic servitude so, instead of feeding Sunday’s roast into a Spong mincer, we can do really important things like watch

Poldark and shop online.

4. People were more patient, having face-to-face chats instead of being glued to smartphones. Nowadays, we are permanently distracted. People rarely pick up the phone. We have 24/7 connectivity and live more atomised lives than ever. Social media is turning our children into neurotic narcissists who measure their self-worth not by the content of their characters, but by the number of likes they get on Instagram. A definite win for The Past, this one.

5. Classic TV shows. Who doesn’t look back fondly at the light-entertainment giants of that golden era – and wonder why we didn’t notice half of them were paedophiles?