MEMORY LANE: Mr. Peter KELLY shared in the March 1999 issue of "Best of British, Past & Present" magazine: "I have retained a great fondness for old newspapers, magazines, comics and annuals. Unlike any programme which comes over the airwaves, a magazine is something tangible which you can feel and even smell as you read it, and then, when it's finished with, you can store it away somewhere safe and refer to it again and again. Even if you forget all about it, a member of some future generation will come along one day and gaze in wonder at the publications of so many years ago. I remember ripping up some old linoleum in the kitchen of a house we'd moved into and finding to my delight the yellowing pages of newspapers which had been laid beneath it many years before. The news pages were interesting enough - but the old-style advertisements were what really tickled my memory... How much simpler life used to be when the major means of advertising, apart from on the packaging itself and showcards on shop counters, was on enamel signs, poster hoardings, the sides of trams and buses and in newspapers and magazines. The messages were usually brief and to the point, often boasting brilliant artwork, and as far as I can see they did the job just as effectively as the complex devices of today. There was a glorious innocence to many of the wonderfully-painted pictures, whether they showed a picnic on the lawn, a game of golf or cricket, a simple domestic scene, workers taking a break, children at play. There were colorful scenes from the Raj and other aspects of Empire, boating and - particularly appealing to British patriotism - members of the armed forces on land and sea. The images they portrayed lasted for generations. Who can forget the GUINNESS toucan and the other colourful animals of that firm's splendid advertising menageries, or the classic "Guinness for Strength' posters showing a man carrying a huge steel girder on his shoulder, or pulling that cart as the smiling carthorse puts its hooves up and enjoys the ride for a change?" Other lasting images are the kilted Scotsman on SCOTT's Porage Oats, the farm horse (or was it a pair?) on packets of Mornflake Oats, the bearded sailor on Player's Navy Cut cigarettes, the little dog on His Master's Voice records, the bull on tins of COLMAN's Mustard, the splendid military scene on bottles of Camp Coffee or the facial expressions on that Five Boys' chocolate advertisement -- images which surely fixed themselves in the mind as effectively or even more so than anything before or since." Note, Mr. KELLY refers to his enjoyment of Robert OPIE''s book, "Rule Britannia, Trading on the British Image" published by Viking Penguin, Inc.