AS A teenager, I used to practise my signature. Helen Mead, Helen Mead, Helen Mead, Helen Mead…I would scribble my name on to sheets of paper, with a view to signing autographs when I became famous.

My friends did the same. Sharon Bradley, Sharon Bradley, Sharon Bradley…Debbie Charlton, Debbie Charlton, Debbie Charlton…

We did this on everything, from scraps of paper to school exercise books. We stuck little flourishes on certain letters, to make our names stand out from the crowd.

And if there was a certain boy in whom we were interested, we would practise our married name. I liked a boy called Wayne Diamond (yes, seriously), and would write Helen Diamond, thinking how exotic and showbizzy it sounded.

I haven't seen my own children doing the same thing. Doodling, yes, but no obsessive name writing.

Personal signatures are dying out as the digital revolution has left people no longer needing to put pen to paper.

A study by security equipment firm Online Spy Shop found that more than half of adults say they rarely use their signature and 15 per cent of people under 24 can't remember the last time they signed anything.

One in five adults admit they no longer have a consistent personal signature because they sign documents so rarely, the research found.

The digital age means fingerprints, PINs and passwords are more commonly used as proof of identity than signatures.

I can’t remember the last time I wrote and signed a cheque, although I am still required to sign bits of paper when taking money from the building society.

Nowadays signatures are still needed from time to time, but not often, and will be needed less and less in the future as more Blade Runner-type methods of identification creep in, such as eye or facial recognition.

Anything would be better than those gadgets used by parcel delivery firms, who hand a you an instrument along with a piece of plastic for you to ‘sign’. I usually manage to produce some random marks no better than a toddler’s effort with an Etch-A-Sketch. There is no way anyone could prove in a court of law that such signatures belong to a certain person.

As technology moves on, and good old-fashioned letter writing is replaced by email, signatures may become virtually obsolete. The cashless society we are moving towards could also turn into a nameless one, with only celebrities whose autographs are coveted, having a clearly defined signature.

It is nice to see people still asking well-known personalities for autographs rather than posing beside them for selfies. At Wimbledon, I always warm to those players who stop and sign a few of those outsize tennis balls fans produce, or scribble their name in a corner of a programme.

I still have the autographs I collected as a child, funnily enough mostly sports stars, from Geoff Boycott to Kevin Keegan and Virginia Wade. You can read each clearly, not like some signatures, which could belong to anyone.

Donald Trump’s signature looks like it was done while hanging upside down having electric shock treatment. Yet handwriting analysis concluded that his crazy peaks and troughs ‘transmits wild ambition, dynamism, bravery and fearlessness.’

If that’s the case, the controlled, sensible signature I present, must register nil ambition, lassitude and hopelessness.

Doctors are the worst culprits for illegibility, scribbling what is often more similar to a trace on a heart monitor than a name, on the bottom of prescriptions. At least they’re still signing. The time is sure to come when pharmacists ask to scan our retinas.

I suppose in terms of security, signatures aren’t foolproof, and, sad as it is to lose them, in a world where scams and fraud are commonplace, it’s probably for the best.

AFTER all the fuss surrounding GCSE and A-levels being too easy, now the new ones, that were meant to be more challenging, are being labelled too easy.

Lower grade boundaries mean that in some exams, fewer marks are needed to pass. In one maths paper, only 17 per cent was needed to gain a C grade. Even I would have passed had that been the case when I was at school.

Can’t someone in Government get this right? I can’t understand why they can’t simply go back to whatever system they used in my day (the late 1970s), when only a minority of very clever students got top grades, the majority got fair-to-middling grades and a few got lower grades or fails. That seems to me a system gleaning results that properly reflected how things are in the real world.