"I HAVEN'T heard anyone say that since I was a child," exclaimed a woman my own age sitting next to me.

I'd just refused the offer of a box, saying I'd keep my newly-bought footwear on, thank you, as I put my sensible lace-ups into my shoulder bag. "So who says growing up is compulsory?" I grinned at her as I stood up to leave in my new Dr Martens and she tried on some flat casuals with a brightly-coloured countryside scene painted all round the uppers.

And, before you picture Mrs Cave striding beyond redemption in 14-hole, clumping black bovver boots, let me say that these new DMs are just ankle-bone high, pale beige, comfortable as slippers and, good heavens, actually foot-shaped. Nor do I plan to have a tattoo, get my navel pierced or go for bright scarlet hair, but I am so glad that, today, age lines are blurred in our wardrobes.

In fact, I had to defend my new, fitted and white-collared polo shirts against predatory offspring (but at least that solved part of her birthday present; I ordered some for her). I don't think my generation, as twenty-somethings, would ever have plundered our mothers' wardrobes.

Biba, then the peak of dolly bird trendiness and, this month, the subject of several 40-years-on backward glances, was our aim. We were desperately trying to look as if we'd just popped down Kensington High Street and picked up a little number.

Few of us had, but I still remember fondly a winter dress in a sort of ginger biscuit-coloured boucl, with exactly the right amount of figure-skimming flare, which looked as if I just might have done.

By the way, whatever happened to winter dresses? And never mind that, it's hard enough to find a winter skirt. Warm fabrics seem to have gone into limbo as if we all live with cranked-up central heating. Fight global warming with proper winter clothes, I say.

When we were Biba-mad, our mums' generation was revelling in the delights of a warm fabric which didn't crease, washed like a dream and came in quite pretty colours. No longer did they have to choose dark shades or spend a fortune on dry-cleaning for anything other than summer dresses.

Crimplene. It was the wonder fabric. My smartest aunt turned up at my wedding in a very elegant outfit from a top London store - so elegant it was among clothes selected from her wardrobe by burglars a year or so later - yet Crimplene seemed doomed to dowdiness very, very quickly. It could be that we didn't take to it after seeing our mothers in it and, not having liked it in our twenties, we grew into our thirties and onwards with an ever-decreasing fashion gap and have never reached the Crimplene age.

This now-narrow gap also gave me one of those golden moments on holiday this year, when the leather-jacketed and DM-ed steward on the door at a music festival event demanded proof that I, in my jeans and my own DMs, was entitled to show a senior citizen's ticket. ID-ed. At my age. Made my evening, that did.