THE author Geddes MacGregor said that to a Scot the past sticks like wet sand.

As I approach a certain age I must admit he was right. But my propinquity to reminisce has nothing to do with age. I was a nostalgist from birth and I’m sure waxed lyrical about the womb as soon as I was lucid enough.

Burl forward through five decades then, to this week where I find myself on the Côte D’Azur for a few days, reliving my childhood holidays.

I am based in Nice and trot blithely from hotel to beach to railway station as I did with my parents 55 years ago.

We were biannual visitors, Easter and October school holidays, regular as clockwork. My mother had it all organised like a military operation, long before emails and websites.

Although we arrived shattered after a 48-hour train and ferry journey from Scotland via London, Dover, the English Channel and Paris, the sun and sea energised us.

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It was magical and if you cut me open and have a swatch inside, these holidays are what you’d find.

And I’ll admit the tears rolled somewhat freely the other day when I saw that while fascias and logos have changed, Nice’s old familiar buildings are still there.

The smells and sounds are the same too. Despite the advent of electric cars, fumes smell the same as they ever did.

No big barista high street chains will be used by me here while the coffee from the wee café down the road assaults my nostrils as before.

The men who empty the bins and hose down the streets (far too) early in the morning, make the same noises.

The hot sun on my neck is the same as it was in the 1970s and the pebbles on the beach have not changed.

All that has changed is me. I sit and reflect on the civilian and military careers I plotted with amazing prescience here as a holidaying child.

I didn’t quite become the hero of a Frederick Forsyth novel as I’d envisaged, plotting the assassination of the French president with traitorous hoods in a smoky Menton bar or the overthrow of an African dictatorship with mercenaries in a Cannes hotel room.

Nor did I captain Scotland at a World Cup.

But over the next five decades I did pretty well everything else I wanted to do as soldier and civilian, married a fantastic girl, travelled the world, joined the military, worked in television news and wrote books.

And I know that when I return to Helensburgh at the end of my holiday, I will savour these Riviera days as never before because there are far fewer of them remaining to me.