As long as you are living in the past, you are bang up to date

Ladies and gentleman, the impossible has happened. CDS, those much-maligned rings of polycarbonate plastic despised by musos for being soulless, corporate and textureless, have officially become cool. Where once hipsters boasted about their 12-inch collections, or went to anally retentive efforts to produce mix tapes, now the fashionable clearly Frisbee discs at each other to prove their indestructibility.

For royalties from the sale of CDS, in decline since the onset of the digital era two decades ago, edged up 0.7 per cent in 2017 – a sure sign of burgeoning cool-kid interest that will have us all back obsessed with them in 12 months’ time.

And that’s not all on the nostalgia front. Last year, an exhibition in London’s Olympic Park – 64 Bits – cast a dewy eye over the web of yesteryear, with such seminal moments as the world’s first Pizza Hut purchase. Meanwhile an Oxford psychologist, Professor Charles Spence, has suggested that the fondue revival taking John Lewis by storm is attributable to Brexit, global insecurity and a hankering for the comfort foods of our youth. Those of us old enough to have done some of this stuff first time around will raise the usual eyebrow at this sort of malarkey.

For my part, I’ll happily dig out my CDS, not least as my most up-to-date technology remains a radio-cum-cd player. (What? CDS are invincible and can also be used as coasters.)

I remember when I was first introduced to the internet – at an Oxford seminar in 1992 – thinking: “Christ, this crazy military sh*t is never going to catch on.” Whereas today I would obviously top myself were the Zara site even temporarily unavailable. As a hoary Gen X-er, it is a challenge to explain to millennials how one could be a student before the advent of mobile phones. “But, how did you have sex?” they demand. Answer: we left messages on a noticeboard to arrange assignations, a sort of primitive sext. I unearthed one recently. It ran: “Betts, come outside and have a snog.”

Given that retro realms are never quite in sync, the challenge must surely be to work out which era must be emulated within which lifestyle category. Accordingly, for the most bracingly au courant, technology is clearly stuck in the Nineties; fashion lurking in the swaggeringshouldered Eighties; food harking back to Seventies’ simplicity; while interior design hovers somewhere in the Sixties, all wicker, rattan, fringing, wall hangings and lurid paint jobs. Put it all together and one achieves the perfect pinnacle of modishness.

Prof Spence is right: there’s a degree of thumb sucking while assuming an embryo position in all this, not least when we feel that the world is going to hell in a handcart, as everyone always does. Punk svengali Malcolm Mclaren dismissed nostalgia as “a notion of boredom,” in which “the old will always look cute”. But, then, punk itself is looking pretty cute 40 years on. And there are eco advantages to be had in the recycling of fashion, tech and knickknackery in our otherwise throwaway world.

I saw a play this week in which twentysomethings pretended to be oldsters by adding talc to their hair, groaning whenever they stood up, and lamenting that their lives were over with nothing to show for it. The hero was 49 – two years older than me. Clearly, I may myself be about to become retro chic. FOLLOW Hannah Betts on Twitter Hannahjbetts; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion