Sitting here, right now, I don’t feel 42 years old. What’s more, the face that stared back at me from the shaving mirror this morning was not 42 years old either.

When I was a child, people of 42 walked slowly, had many ailments and thought that all the world’s problems could be solved with a clip round the ear. They wore those jackets that are neither brown, grey nor green but a curious mix of all three. It’s a colour found on no chart or spectrum. It’s a colour known as “old”.

Whereas look at me. I still wear the same clothes that I wore at 19. I think like I thought at 19. I drive like I drove when I was 19. I am 19 dammit. I just am. I know what is at No 1 in the charts. I can recognise hard house. I can operate electronic games. And this makes me a Volkswagen Golf GTI.

It is 25 years since this little car leapt into the world, as frisky as a foal and as lively as a Hawaiian barbecue. It could drink till dawn and after a Bloody Mary for breakfast, drink all day and still be at work for eight on Monday. It could run and carry huge loads over enormous distances.

In winter it was to be found in Val d’Isère, in summer outside the White Horse in Fulham. Goodwood, Ascot, Henley ... it did the lot, often in a single day. It lived life at the limit.

But look at the forlorn creature that wears the GTI badge today. Twice the size and twice the weight of the original, it still thinks of itself as a lean, mean skiing-and-drinking machine.

But one late night and the poor thing’s laid out for a week.

Ask it to run like it used to and it’ll have no answer — it can’t. The current GTI takes two full seconds longer to get from 0 to 60mph.

Oh sure, you get more luxury and peace but that’s what makes it so fat and lazy. When it was young it had muscles, not arms full of yellow goo.

This is the sad reality of middle age. I can’t run either and if I get up from my chair and try to do anything I’ll be out of breath in a moment. I got the coal in last night and was so exhausted I didn’t have the strength to set fire to it.

This is what I hate so much about being 42; I feel 19 in my head but my heart thinks I’m more like 90.

Today, though, you can buy a new type of Golf, a Golf that’s spent the past 25 years in the gym. It’s called the R32 and it has three doors, rippling flared wheelarches, big wheels, big blue brake calipers, twin exhausts, a deep front air dam and a brand-new heart.

Over the years VW has fiddled with all sorts of engines for its venerable warhorse, none of which has put it back on top. So now it’s gone for broke with a 3.2 litre V6 that develops a simply enormous 240bhp. To put that in perspective, the Ford Focus RS wades into battle sporting 212bhp and the Honda Civic Type-R has to make do with a mere 197. And there’s more: unlike the Ford and the Honda, the Golf has four-wheel drive.

Interesting, isn’t it? The R32 weighs twice as much as the original GTI but it has twice the engine, twice the grip and more than twice the power. So does that mean it’s twice the car? Well, it’s still a hot hatchback, but only just. The whole point of hot hatches, back in the early 1980s, was that they did two jobs for the price of one. First, they were normal, family runabouts, which meant that they were cheap to mend, easy to park and commodious enough to handle a filing cabinet.

But thanks to lowered and stiffened suspension allied to a beefy engine, they were also an absolute hoot to drive. All of a sudden traditional sports cars like the MG looked a bit daft. Why put up with the rattles and the leaks and the draughts when for the same money you could have just as much fun, along with space for five and folding rear seats? Of course, things were never going to stay that way. Pretty soon the car makers got into a mine’s-bigger-than-yours race to screw more and more power from these pocket rockets until we ended up with the four-wheel-drive Escort Cosworth, which was more biplane than car.

They were so fast and so desirable that people started taking them without the owner’s consent and doing handbrake turns all night in Woolworths. Insurance premiums went mad, the sports car came back in the seductive shape of the properly built Mazda MX-5 roadster and the hot hatch, in its original form, withered and died.

Only recently has it started to stage a comeback. But now the cars into which the big engines are fitted are no longer cheap and simple. They have luxury carpets and air-conditioning. They are steered and run by computers. They might actually be hatchbacks but in reality they’re as luxurious and as comfortable as armchairs.

Ford has got round the problem with its new Focus RS by fitting a hardcore front differential which makes the driving experience as lively as being wired up to the output socket at Sizewell B. And Honda’s Civic Type-R is like a turbocharged Zimmer frame. But, for the most part, today’s hot hatches are nothing more than warm saloons.

The Golf is a classic case in point. Back in the late 1970s it had no power steering, no electric windows and the sunshine roof was an extra. It even had swathes of painted metal on the door linings. Whereas the R32 has traction control and heated leather seats.

So, while it may have been to the gym, the R32 still feels like an old man. Ask it to power slide and it looks at you as if you’ve invited it for a threesome with the vicar. Ask it to change direction suddenly and the power steering jams up like it’s got a bad case of arthritis.

Sure, the Golf is hugely fast in a straight line: it will sprint from 0 to 60 in 6.6sec and not stop accelerating until it’s up past 150mph. But throw in a few corners and it all goes wrong. On a track, the triangular-torso’d Ford and the narrow-hipped Honda run rings round the muscular but ageing Golf. Youth and guile, it seems, do beat age and wisdom.

It’s not that the Golf is slow. It isn’t. But you don’t feel connected. It’s soft and wallowy where the Ford and Honda are sharp and precise. We can’t ignore the price either. At more than £22,000, the Volkswagen is at least 10% more expensive than any of its rivals.

However, I liked it enormously and not just because I feel it would be the more rewarding companion over time. Certainly on a long run I’d rather have the Golf than just about anything else that £22,000 can buy.

There’s more to it than that, though. I feel the fast Golf is a part of me. We’ve grown up together. When it came along, all simple and full of fun, I was living in a flat in London. Now it’s soft and luxurious and I’m slouched in a house in the Cotswolds.

It’s like 1970s rock music. New stuff comes along which I’m sure is cleaner and better produced but it doesn’t have the heart and soul of the original. Biblically, as well as musically, the Golf GTI is Genesis. And the R32 is Mike and the Mechanics.

Vital statistics
Model Volkswagen Golf R32
Engine type V6
Capacity 3189cc
Power 240bhp @ 6250rpm
Torque 320lb ft @ 2800rpm
Transmission Six-speed manual
Suspension (front) independent, McPherson struts, coil springs, anti-roll bar (rear) double wishbones, trailing arms, coil springs, anti-roll bar
Tyres 225/40 ZR18
Fuel 24.6mpg (combined)
CO2 276g/km
Dimensions 1735mm width, 1439mm height, 4149mm length
Co car tax £3,130 for a higher-rate taxpayer
Acceleration 0 to 60mph: 6.6sec
Top speed 153mph
Insurance to be confirmed
Price £22,340
Verdict Huge power and speed, but the hot hatch that started it all is no longer the most responsive of the pack. With age and time, weight and luxury have been piled on, but the R32 still deserves a place in the enthusiast's heart

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