THE GREAT THING about the clock of life is that you can't turn back the hands. Otherwise, I'd be sorely tempted to do what I once did to a particularly irksome alarm clock - drown it in the toilet.

The thought of being able to treat one's steadily aging carcass as a sort of H.G. Wellsian "Time Machine" is about as appealing as using industrial acid to dissolve the lint in your navel. In either case, best to leave well enough alone.

Youth, it is said, is wasted on the young. For this, as with Vienna sausages, Kingston Trio music and reruns of "Calamity Jane," I am everlastingly grateful. What I would not wish to do is to spend my youth - even a revisited one - listening to Tina Turner or wearing jeans that look like a beggar's discard.

This train of thought was provoked by a headline in the newspaper before me, "Eternal Youth Potion," over an article that starts:

"The secret of eternal youth could be unlocked in an experiment by British scientists to turn back time for cells in the human body."

It quotes "experts" as describing it as "the Holy Grail of scientific research." If so, I suggest the grail, together with the key to eternal youth, be melted down and turned into a paperweight for anchoring overdue bills from the telephone company.

(Anyway, I'm always a bit leery of folks who are described as "experts" in this, that and a couple of others. It's worth remembering that experts already have given us the nuclear bomb, plastic milk cartons and mobile phones for the boss to track us down in the privacy of our neighborhood bars.)

The idea of being young again is simply appalling. As they say, I've been there, done that and got the T-shirt, plus enough pimples and athlete's foot and hormone imbalances to do me for one entire lifetime without having to go back and do the whole ghastly thing all over again.

At least, let it be said, mine was a childhood and youth spent, or misspent, in a much simpler and far happier age, even if it was only a decade or so from the end of a world war. TV was barely a flicker, cigarettes sponsored "Your Hit Parade" on radio and no one flinched, and Aids were things you wore for better hearing.

Grass was stuff I loathed, because my dad made me mow it every two weeks, and we lived on the steep slopes of Sharp's Ridge. "Gay" was the name of the main street in Knoxville, Tennessee, where I grew up and guns were things that Gene Autry used to subdue the black hats every Saturday down at the Strand Theater on Gay Street.

Hypodermic needles were reasons to stay healthy, because if you got sick some bloody doctor was sure to come along and stick one in your arm with a vat load of penicillin. It never occurred to us to voluntarily shove a hypo needle in our own veins.

We hung around on the street corner down at Raleigh Avenue and Broadway, did I and Bryant Metler and John Newton and Twerp Kerr and Harold Ailor. But we were debating what to order from the soda fountain at the Arlington Drug Store, not whether to rob the place or maybe trash it.

We went on our youthful own to baseball games at Caswell Park, to watch the rather hapless Knoxville Smokies do battle with the Anderson Rebels or the Asheville Tourists. We walked back home at night, and never once were we accosted by men in raincoats offering us sweets or rides in their cars.

Now fast-forward life's VCR about 50 years or so, to today's version of youth - seasoned couch potatoes who don't seem to realize that only catchers wear their baseball caps back to front and that when your jeans get frayed at the knees and have holes in the butt, it's time to make cat basket liners out of them.

Music to this lot is a cacophony of atonal git-fiddle whanging and lyrics reminiscent of tone-deaf parrots on speed, to the accompaniment of a stageful of gyrating bodies with bits of metal hanging from navels and various orifices.

Schools are practice arenas for urban warfare, not to mention survival of the fittest (or the most well armed). Buses and trains are meant to keep the spray paint industry in business. Street corners are HQs for planning the next switchblade sortie against the "Jets" or the "Sharks" on the next block.

A few days ago, my wife Elizabeth and I went to the cinema (the Brits' word for a movie house), for my first trip to the flicks in 17 years. The occasion was "Pearl Harbor," and when the sound came on, I first thought they had taped the original back in 1941 and turned the volume up.

"What the devil are they playing at?" I yelled to Elizabeth 10 inches or so away. "Is something wrong and the amplifiers gone berserk?"

"Calm down," she screamed. "That's the normal volume level for all movies these days. It's the way things are."

The way things are is likely to be the way things will be from now on, because this is a generation that has grown up with a set of earphones clamped to its collective head with the screeches of Tina Turner and the dreadful Michael Jackson, turned to jet engine decibel level.

They're not just tone-deaf - they are just deaf, period. Nor can they spell, if the quality of the graffiti I've observed is anything to go by. And as for sartorial sense, I reckon their taste buds are somewhere on the soles of their feet.

So do I want to be young again? I'd sooner cut out my hemorrhoids with a paring knife.

Thought for the Week: Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.

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