ONE of the sad things about our modern world is that high days and holidays are no more .

This was brought home to me several times in the past couple of weeks when at least four people mentioned that they or their children had already eaten an Easter egg.

Not surprising, I suppose, since Easter eggs appear in the shops about three seconds after the shelves have been cleared of tinsel and fairy lights. But sad nonetheless.

At one time Easter eggs were to be eaten on Easter Sunday. You got your eggs in the morning, probably not more than a couple, ate them through the afternoon , were thoroughly sick in the evening and then went to bed with a stomach ache. Now that was a proper Easter. Now we're haunted by Cadbury's Creme Eggs nearly all year round which somehow takes the gloss off the whole thing.

Christmas, which now starts in October, is the same.

There were special things at Christmas, things which were only eaten at the end of December. Boxes of sticky dates which made your teeth ache to their very roots because they were so sweet. Tangerines, which never seemed to appear at any other time. Bowls of nuts left unguarded in the house for anyone to eat. And at least one bottle of stomach churning liqueur made from an unlikely fruits (one year bananas) which were only breached when the rest of the drink had gone and one of the uncles still felt like a tipple. And turkeys, most of all turkeys.

Turkeys were once only eaten at Christmas. In fact you could only get them at Christmas. They would appear around Dec 15 and mysteriously disappear like migrating swallows on December 24. That was it.

Now they are turkey trotted out at Easter, Bank Holidays and even Mother's Day.

Oddly enough, an awful lot of people didn't really like turkey at all even at Christmas. It was, they said, dry. It was, of course, because a lot of people used to cook it overnight which resulted in it resembling bits of string held together by bones. But it was festive, the chipolatas, stuffing and gravy made up for the lack of taste in the bird, and everyone liked to make jokes about the parson's nose.

Now we are faced with supermarkets full of turkeys on every bank holiday and turkeys in various guises and shapes all year round. Turkey breasts, turkey stir fry, turkey sausages, turkey drumsticks, giant turkey legs like a Sumo wrestler's thighs advertised as 'ideal for stuffing and roasting' . Does anyone ever do that? I wonder. Do they carefully stuff a giant turkey leg and serve it for Sunday lunch?

All this multi-season turkey means more leftovers and more people who will proudly tell you they can make a meal in mid-July with turkey cooked on December 25 the previous year. Usually after you've just eaten it.

My former husband was known for cooking two things. His 'breakfast specials' which consisted of anything he could find in the fridge and fry and his leftover turkey recipe which he found somewhere or other, God knows where, called Turkey Fort Lincoln. There was no explanation why it had been named after an American president, or a fort, because it resembled neither, unless one or both had at some time been covered in lumpy mashed potato topped with fairly grey bits of turkey leftovers (mainly dark meat), carrots and a white sauce.

It does occur to me that maybe Lincoln turned up at a fort somewhere around Thanksgiving and all they had to eat were turkey leftovers so the cook knocked these into some form of a meal. Napoleon's chef did the same, only he turned out Chicken Marengo, but then he was a French chef not American. But what can you expect from a country which serves raw vegetables encased in lime jelly as a salad starter?

For a long time I stopped having turkey for Christmas for fear of Fort Lincoln, serving goose instead which never has any leftovers because it is rarely enough for one meal.

Seriously though, I wish we would stick to seasonal food and festive occasions. We've robbed ourselves of looking forward to the first new potatoes, the first fresh peas or broad beans; the first locally grown strawberries or those we've grown ourselves, and the first punnet of raspberries still warm from the sun. Let's keep turkey for Christmas and Easter eggs to pig down one day a year.

Talking of Easter - I found yet another worrying sign that I'm turning into an old fogey the other day. I actually picked up an egg, looked at the weight of it then compared the price with a similar weight of chocolate in a bar further along the shelf and found myself muttering 'disgusting'. Not 'disgusted of Tunbridge Wells' yet, but getting there.

Finally, has anyone applied for a new passport recently? I did last week and discovered that the explanation leaflet which comes with it telling you how to fill in the passport form is now longer than the form itself. It used to be bad enough but now they use computers to do some of the job you can't use a blue pen (which I did on the first form) because computers don't like blue pens (or any other colour except black actually, very a la Henry Ford), and you must only write in the little boxes and not go over the lines or your form will be sent back because the computer can't read it properly.

I wondered why the lady at the post office said 'only one?' when I asked for a passport form. I soon knew why as I trailed back for another one after the blue incident. Faced with any kind of form I immediately turn into an idiot and I gladly paid the post office £4 to have a nice man check it for me before it went off.

I had my picture done in the post office too, equally traumatic but the result was slightly better than the previous photograph which made me look like the sort of person who appears on most wanted posters and got me very funny looks at airports. Now I just look dotty, as befits my age.