At heart, I am a traditionalist. My values hark back to a time where the pace of life was slower and more considered, and I have a quiet determination to preserve the things I believe to be important, that I see as under threat. I eschew marketing terms such as “brand” and “product” and I have little time for the insincerity and disposability of modern consumerism.

We live in an age where society is more preoccupied with the future than ever before. Unlike Einstein who claimed never to think of the future because it came too soon, we are constantly aware of it and the consequences of failing to embrace it.

Whereas the future was once a distant vision, it now pervades the present as we worry about everything, from educational choices for our children, their future, growing old and pension plans. Gone are the days when children flirted with professions, deciding one week to be a train driver or air hostess, and a teacher or model the next. We now have to seize the moment and ensure that we have planned for the future.

Today’s adolescents are encouraged to think now about their old age; anxiety for some means careful planning, where once the state would have provided. Scientific breakthroughs are continually improving the quality of life and increasingly threaten to continue to further prolong life expectancy.

Recent advances in technology, while making life easier, also increase the pace and pressures inherent in a society where, due to such progress, everyone and everything is instantly accessible. Mobile phones, tele-messaging and the internet have brought about the 24/7 society. So is it any wonder that there is now a burgeoning industry in nostalgia, harking back to a time when life was lived at a seemingly different pace, summers were always fine, winters white, the trains ran on time and the whole family sat down to daily meals, not just to Sunday lunch?

History shows that nostalgia is not an entirely new phenomenon. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) mourned the passing of his school days: “….all are gone, the old familiar faces,” and A. E. Houseman (1859-1936) wrote of “…the land of lost content / The happy highways where I went and cannot come again”.

So nostalgia is nothing new, but has taken on a greater significance with the accelerated technological development of this 21st century, when major changes began to affect single lifetimes. Whereas once true nostalgia might have been the exclusive prerogative of the old and, perhaps, to a certain extent the educated, the symptoms are now displayed by a much wider audience.

Its characteristic of eliminating the negative makes nostalgia attractive to a younger generation with little imagination, as well as an older one with time on its hands.

Of course people in extremes have always looked back on something they have lost or left with longing, a phenomenon particularly prevalent in wartime, when troops longed for home and the certainty of a life once led, rather than an uncertain future - homesickness compounded by the certain knowledge that things were changed forever and they might never see their homes again. Then the horror of the present is sufficient to make a dubious past seem full of lost promise.

Nostalgia is here to stay and will no doubt continue to nurture an industry. Countless thousands of tourists come to Britain every year to indulge in nostalgia, to intensify their perception of the past.

We live now in a British period of dire weakness but also of residual strengths which have not yet been destroyed.

In conclusion I offer a small list of institutions that come into this latter category, most of which are in a precarious state: the NHS, universities, libraries, public parks, cash in society, telephone land lines, public information bureaus, and daily newspapers; although even as I write, the London Evening Standard will have no more print editions. Founded in 1827 there will be no more sellers cries to “read all about it”. Nothing better illustrates the fate of London’s press than no Standards for sale on the platforms and the sight of a tube carriage crammed with phones. Since 2009 some 300 local newspapers have closed in Britain.