- You switch on Blue Peter, and quickly realise you don’t recognise a single presenter.
- You realise that you have just entertained an irritated thought beginning with “young people today…”.
- The album you think of as the soundtrack to the summer of your A-levels, celebrates its twentieth birthday this year.
- It becomes impossible to suppress the overwhelming impression that a stroppy irritating teenager with attitude problems might possibly not provide the best TV role model for your six-year-old daughter.
- You formulate “Harmer’s Law”: the hypothesis that a young actress who makes a stock-in trade of playing stroppy irritating teenagers, will be doing so well into her twenties.
- It occurs to you that you took typing lessons at school… using typewriters.
- When you tell your six-year-old daughter that you didn’t have YouTube, DVDs or even those big black plastic “VHS” thingies when you were her age, she looks like she’s expecting you to crop up in “Horrible Histories” as a Tudor.
- It dawns on you that thirtysomethings with guitars and a penchant for 1970s prog-rock, might possibly not be “the next big thing” for the music scene of 2011.
- You live in fear of the day when your child will show you something new to do with computers, instead of the other way round.
- You’re thinking about any of the above nine items in the first place.
Yeah… I was the last in my school to do typewriting on typewriters.
I tell my girls that CDs are like iPods that spin round.
Re: point 7 – my husband’s mum tells a story about him as a child asking, “Mummy, did you go to school with Anne Boleyn?”
I like that story – my daughter occasionally makes comments along those lines, but I’ve learned not to take them to heart 🙂
Thanks Helen!