WILLIAM Hague feels free. He's not the only one. A year after he resigned as Tory leader, he says he feels like a teenager. Not bad for 41. And about time too. But he's not alone in trying to work out what he wants to be when he grows up.

When he really was a teenager he had all the answers. William Hague wasn't actually your typical surly rebellious adolescent. Apart from his drinking habits - extreme but refreshingly normal - his behaviour would have had most of his contemporaries gawping in bewilderment. Just think of THAT speech he made when he was 16. Now he describes himself then as a 16 year old "elder statesman."

He had his life planned out. All highly commendable - and very untypical.

For we all need our teenage years. We need a time to be daft and dreamy, to try out new ideas, new ways of living, one day being a rebellious punk, the next day longing to save the world. It's a time for extremes and glorious irresponsibility in which we gradually find our feet and our way in the world.

If we miss out on that, we can never be too sure we've followed the right path.

It's not just William Hague who missed out on your typical teenage bit. Many top sports stars do - committed to discipline and training. Actors and actresses suffer too, dominated by demands of studios with multi-million pound budgets.

Then there are young parents. In those long ago days when many young couples "had" to get married at 16 or 17, they missed out on the frivolity of youth and many worked hard and made a real go of marriage and parenthood, tricky at any age, much more so when you're not much more than a child yourself.

So not surprising when these pressures are lifted to find these people going through a delayed adolescence in their thirties and forties.

And now - as a report revealed last month - there's a whole generation of fifty somethings, the lucky ones who have time and money and are embarking on adventures, on gap years, travelling the world, doing a degree, changing careers. Just basically trying out life and its possibilities after 20 or 30 years of responsibility.

William Hague's gap year is possibly more well paid than most. But the principle's the same. And he looks remarkably well on it - relaxed and confident and utterly at ease with the world and his place it. That's another advantage of being a teenager in your forties. This time round you can actually enjoy it.

OPENING the new Saltburn Cricket Bowls and Tennis Club this week, Jack Charlton said he hoped it would inspire children to stop watching sport on TV and start playing it. Quite right.

Every day we hear new concerns about the young generation of couch potatoes we are rearing, and all the problems associated with obesity and lack of fitness they are storing up for themselves in the future.

If every lad with an England shirt actually went out and played football for as long as he watched it on television, then many of those problems would vanish in the space of a season.

LENNOX Lewis floored Mike Tyson and is hailed as one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. He also relies heavily on help and advice from his mum, Violet, who accompanies him to his training camps.

This is good news for mothers everywhere - what an example for boys to follow.

And just who would dare call Lennox Lewis a Mummy's Boy - to his face?

Welcome back to the flag. Fly it with pride. A few months ago when Smaller Son, anticipating the World Cup, spread an England flag across the windowshelf of his car, his father cautioned against it. England flags and Union Jacks were too much a sign of the worst sort of football supporter. So much so that the rioting Russians in Moscow modelled themselves so closely on English soccer hooligans that they even wore Union Jack T- shirts.

But then suddenly it seemed every car and taxi driver started flying the flag. The jubilee covered half the country in red, white and blue and St George's crosses. Flags hung from windows, hedges, lampposts, draped round road signs, sprouted in gardens in a glorious mish-mash of God Save the Queen and the England Team.

There were lots of good things about the jubilee weekend, but one of the nicest might be that our flag has been reclaimed from the racists.

THE rising tide of indiscipline in schools is now said to be a direct result of too much competition in the classrooms, say American researchers.

Tosh.

Many of us grown-ups went to schools where we were tested every week and our actual physical position in class depended on our test results - clever clogs in the back with a sweetie as reward, dullards in the front under teacher's eye and close to the cane. All change again after every Friday's test. Now that really was competitive.

There are all sorts of reasons for indiscipline in schools - some to do with teachers, many more to do with parents.

Parents are encouraged to teach their children so much - shops and shelves full of test papers, home teaching aids, revision guides.

But perhaps the biggest thing that parents could do to assist their child's education is to make sure that their four year old could start school capable of sitting still and listening for ten minutes at a time. Come to that, maybe secondary parents could ensure the same.

OK, for many years I was madly in love with Mick Jagger, even after I'd bumped into him in a Chelsea off-licence and realised he was really a skinny little slip of a man. But a knighthood? For what - services to sex, drugs and rock and roll?

Or, maybe with seven children by four different mothers, he's been nominated by Mothercare.