Oh poor Kate Adamson.

The 33-year-old mother must have thought that relocating to the opposite side of the planet meant that she could put her past behind her. Then someone invented the internet and now she is a front page sensation, all over again.

Back in the nineties, a 17-year-old Kate was coaxed into posing for a toe-curling picture with Alex Salmond, who awkwardly fed her a Solero ice-lolly at a photo call at Stirling University.

A year ago the picture resurfaced and a global online search ensued. Yesterday, the lady in question was revealed to be living quietly with her young family in Melbourne, Australia, and disclosed that her lolly of choice was in fact a Zoom.

Which begs the question; is there now no escape from the mishaps of youth? When is the grace period where we get to adopt suspect fashion choices, behave badly, try out different world views and generally mess up, without fear of our faux pas coming back to haunt us for the rest of our natural lives.

I try to avoid thinking about my teenage years too much, but I know that a large portion of them were spent sporting the then de-rigueur "spiral" perm, with was always twinned with a poker straight fringe and occasionally a "Fergie" bow.

I know that I had a penchant for wearing bottle-tops on my shoe-laces and jaunty red neckerchiefs of the type you see sported by today's more Bohemian dogs. There is also, in a cupboard somewhere, photographic evidence of me boldly sporting a series of pastel-coloured shell-suits.

My passions veered wildly from Alice Cooper to New Kids on the Block and I was absolutely certain of the fact that one day Jason Donovan would be my husband. Embarrassing, eh?

I am eternally thankful that the most horrifyingly embarrassing moments of my youth exist only in the memories of my cohorts at the time. There were a few cameras kicking around but for the most part our hijinks were undocumented.

Looking back, how wonderfully liberating that seems. Nowadays, your exploits can have reached home before you have and can continue to flare up like a bad back when we least expect it.

Online, there seems to be no natural moving on, no shedding of old selves, no slipping away of old acquaintances.

Everything time you switch on, there is everything you've ever said or done online, every person you've ever met (or not), every photo you've ever featured in is staring right back at you. Stop the virtual world, I want to get off.