In later years, you find yourself pouring out reminiscences of days long gone to anybody prepared to listen. In your own company you dwell on them. With self-publishing an affordable option, many of a certain age have taken to writing about them.

A common theme is that special decade which never goes away for those who came of age during it. We may look back in anger on some aspects of it but we can never escape from it, even if we wanted to. That decade for me was the Sixties.

What does it actually mean to come of age? I’ve often wondered. Ask and people look puzzled as though it’s common knowledge. Some literalists mutter about being old enough to vote, to have consummated relationships, to join the armed forces?

It’s usually taken by the more mentally expansive to be a new state of maturity in thought and feeling, probably at a time the body begins to change and we are plagued by hormones - and all those kinds of things.

Most of the great coming of age novels I read in my youth, and possibly unconsciously identified with, were by Americans. J.D. Salinger is worth a mention for having started the balls rolling, so to speak, for me with Catcher in the Rye.

Published in 1952, it’s not a long novel and I remember reading it in an afternoon. Even today, it’s recognisably modern in its frankness and the self-analytical confessions that we don’t find too much in earlier novels of growth. Confusion and disillusionment has already set in for the book’s narrator, Holden Caulfield, who by 16 is weary of the world. (Salinger, himself, was in later life almost a total recluse.)

Certainly the teenage years can be confusing for those living through them but they do not have to be angst ridden - and may well contain the best as well as the most character-forming experiences of our lives.

It was in my early teens that I discovered my poet, Robert Burns, the one above all others who inspired great feelings. It cheers me that Salinger took his title from Caulfield’s youthful misunderstanding of a line from this poet’s Coming through the Rye. He dreams of somehow ‘catching’ children before they plunge from youthful innocence into the abyss of adulthood. (The same poet inspired the title of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men).

Certain milestones on the way to enlightenment and a certain cynical maturity I do remember very well and, with a little archival research, can locate precisely. The first edition of Private Eye was published in October 1961 and my father bought it and chortled over it. I read it and understood it was satire, even though many of the references meant little to me.

A short while later, in November 1962, the BBC launched That Was The Week That Was. Overnight such as Willie Rushton - he of the brilliant Harold Macmillan impression - the comic actor Roy Kinnear, the calypso-singing Lance Percival and the delectable Millicent Martin became household names. There were only two television channels at the time so anybody broadcasting on either could emerge from total obscurity to national fame in an instant. With a peak audience of 12 million TW3 became firmly embedded in the national conscience.

It was worth staying up late for, and nicely followed on from the other channel’s spy series, The Avengers. Speaking of espionage does rather remind me that Private Eye was the first publication to name ‘C’, the current Head of MI6. The editor Claud Cockburn, in a short piece in August 1963 titled ‘Note to foreign agents’, daringly divulged the identity of Sir Dick White, as the ‘head of what you so romantically term the British Secret Service’. The cat was out of the bag that the country even had an MI6.

Clearly in every way these were changing times. Spy fiction, featuring professionals who fought dirty and were considered expendable by the state, was probably for my generation what sci-fi and fantasy were for later generations. The first James Bond film Dr No appeared in 1962 and here was a new kind of suave, womanising hero, with a Beretta under his armpit and an exploding device in his pocket. He was vastly more worldly than the pre-war clubland amateurs. You might say the spy genre had come of age.

Innocent bystander Richard Hannay, jumping on board a steam train bound for Scotland, seemed more like running scared than engaged in an act of derring-do - when compared with Bond jetting off to Jamaica to take out Dr No’s nuclear reactor. Ursula Andress, in the film, did offer rather more personality than Madeleine Carroll, who co-starred in Hitchcock's take on the Thirty-Nine Steps.

The next few years seemed in every way particularly spicey and a bit like a spy story in itself. The political scandals beloved of the Daily Mirror just piled up. The Vassall affair, the lurid story of a civil servant blackmailed by the Russians (you might call him their vassal not ours) was hardly off the front pages before the far from perfumed Profumo came along.

Now here was a sensation to eclipse all others. The Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, was having an affair with a call girl Christine Keeler who was also offering the same services to a Russian naval attaché. As if this wasn’t bad enough he’d denied it in the House of Commons, where of course all politicians are obliged to speak the truth. Of course they do!

Did the public suddenly wise up?

This news certainly opened the eyes of many and sharpened their interest in the government machinery. Reading the news gave the distinct impression the establishment was in urgent need of change. It seemed obvious that the press was failing abysmally in its duty to tell the unvarnished truth - but then suddenly it seemed like TW3 had done for Super Mac.

Week after week they had mocked him mercilessly, his Edwardian demeanour, aristocratic drawl, shuffling gait. In the words of Richard Ingram, best known of the magazine’s many editors, “We had called him mad, mangy, bucktoothed, accused him of lying…”

And then he was gone and in farcical circumstances. Following an operation he decided to do the decent thing and step down imagining he’d be out of action for months. A week later he was pretty much recovered and chagrined to learn that De Gaulle, the French President, had shrugged off - Gallically - the effects of the identical operation in Le Weekend!

His replacement, Sir Alec Douglas-Home (formerly Lord Home, pronounced ‘Hume’) was almost beyond satire, a hyperbolised parody of a half-witted Earl looking, sounding and behaving like something out of a P.G. Wodehouse (pronounced ‘Woodhouse’) novel. Poor chap, his lack of chin was a gift to cartoonists.

Strange that he should chance along the first time that ordinary people in the twentieth century had access to satire. Satire in this country owes its origins to the eighteenth century but it received a popular boost in the mid-1800s with the huge rise in newspapers and magazines, thanks to the lowering of paper taxes and development of printing technology. (The very opposite is happening today.)

Those able to afford a threepenny weekly had access to information on local and national news and politics. Punch, the weekly magazine specialising in humour and satire, which coined the term ‘cartoons’, was established in 1841. For the next 70 years it was to inform and entertain generations of readers, often exposing wittily what could not be spoken in high seriousness.

The need to maintain morale during two world wars pretty much ended satire for the first half of the twentieth century, although Punch readjusted and just made it into the new millennium.

Then in 1963 almost as suddenly as it appeared the comet that was TW3 dropped out of sight. Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC, personally announced it must discontinue because of the approaching general election. Simultaneously, Private Eye’s weekly sales plunged from 80,000 to a trifling 20,000! The price went up and my father stopped buying it.

Was satire dead, many wondered, as the public - shocked by Kennedy’s assassination - seemed no longer to find current affairs much of a laughing matter.

The aristocratic Sir Alec lasted exactly twelve months in office and was replaced by Harold Wilson, Huddersfield-born and plain speaking. Looking back now, I reckon Britain came of age, pretty much at this time, as I did, when TW3 began satirising British culture, poking fun at government figures, the royal family, and popular celebrities of its time. The country went and voted in a Labour government, the first since Clem Atlee was elected in July 1945. If I’d been old enough Wilson would have my vote and subsequently received it in later elections.

To my mind the country had come of age - and yet who knew it at the time? From what I’ve seen in the next 60 or so years, the immortal words of Salinger’s philosophising hero come to mind: “The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all.”