For heaven's sake just GROW UP!
Parents dressing up like their children. Immaturity celebrated and the infantile exalted. 30-somethings living at home and the ghastly cult of cheap nostalgia. In an era where every aspect of youth is worshipped, a writer’s fervent plea:
DOCTOrS and advocates and accountants, well into their thirties, consuming their evenings on computer games. Highearning women don blazers and short skirts for ‘School Disco’ nights in our provincial cities... when they’re not brushing their teddy-bear collections.
Men years north of forty shamble up the supermarket aisle in three-quarter length shorts, vast training shoes, a billowing shell-top of lurid hue and an achingly on-trend baseball cap, jammed low over vast, bald head and tufted nostrils, while silicon wristbands artfully remind you they are yet tuned in, turned on, socially aware...
Nostalgia used to be Grandpa murmuring softly about the war, or that bicycle trundling oop cobbles by t’mill in the Hovis commercial. Today, it’s untold hours on Facebook, sighing over 1990s children’s telly.
For those less keen on ren & Stimpy, there are still the coarse and puerile greetings cards of the Purple ronnie range to divert your friends. Or you can, in compromise, buy practically anything f r om mugs and pencil cases to mousemats and backpacks with the pinkly-striped and most hallowed image of Bagpuss.
So many, long out of school, besought JK rowling’s Harry Potter novels that her publisher, Bloomsbury, i ssued editions in dark adult covers.
Corporate outings are no longer to attend earnest seminars, but for bouncy castles, cupcake creation and paintballing games. Last August even headteachers and Free Church ministers felt obliged to submit to the Ice Bucket Challenge.
On all sides, youth is worshipped, immaturity celebrated and the infantile exalted. Any thoughts of growing up – far less growing old – are indignantly repudiated. It is striking, looking around all my media friends and acquaintances on Facebook, how few share their age or birthdate.
We have not even the sense to leave youth to the young. I have known mothers who insist on going out clubbing with their older teens.
For that matter, my generation – school-leavers of the mid-1980s – would have been appalled if our parents had accompanied us to university interviews and open days, occasions which, as almost none other, should powerfully symbolise adulthood and independence.
Yet more and more of today’s young people seem averse to striking out by themselves and building their own nests. Throughout Britain, the US and even the wealthy cities of Asia, people now talk darkly of ‘boomerang kids’ who move out, only to come back, and ‘parasitic singles’ in their thirties who refuse to move out at all.
OF those who do move out, a high proportion refuse to pair off, settle down and have children. There is growing alarm in Japan at the reluctance of young folk to marry and breed. In the US, singletons are the largest growing demographic. In London, four in ten people live alone.
Everywhere, i t seems, we yearn for childhood, celebrate the adolescent, envy and mimic the young. Eagerly we follow Wills and Kate and collapse in joyous wibbles over the latest baby – although Charlotte’s grandfather, and still more her great-grandmother, are far more interesting people.
It has infected our politics, to the point where anyone bidding for our votes now feels obliged to ‘get down wiv da kidz’. While hardly anyone bothered to read the SNP manifesto, so many flocked from all sides to gain a prized ‘selfie’ with Nicola Sturgeon that, we are assured, she can now effortlessly snap a photograph on any model of mobile phone. Never mind the policies, its all about being seen with a ‘celeb’ on your chosen social media platform.
Only last week, we had a general election in which all the leaders of the main parties – and I am not yet fifty – were younger than I am. One reason why Nick Clegg brought the Liberal Democrats to such cataclysmic defeat, Lord Steel argued the other day, was his mulish refusal ever to take counsel from his most experienced colleagues or place them in government. Callow young men and women were consulted, promoted, while Charles Kennedy, Malcolm Bruce and Ming Campbell were banished.
But none of us is immune to this growing retreat from reali ty. In recent years, I have become rather involved in my old schools – researching their respective histories, guddling in their archives, pacing once fraught and still familiar corridors, tracking down and chatting with my old teachers...
It’s important work. The eventual books will make many people happy. They will be genuine exercises in the documentary of social change.
But are there, perhaps, other motives? In r ecent years, American high- school dramas f rom Felicity to Glee have found vast appeal far beyond t heir t argeted adolescent audiences.
‘For those older viewers who still cling to their high- school misfit designation like a badge of honour,’ observed US journalist Joyce Millman, ‘ the bright, perceptive, out- crowd teens of shows like My So-Called Life and Buffy the Vampire Slayer represent one of the fondest wishes of middle age – that, armed with all the self- knowledge you now possess, you could go back to your youth and avenge every hurt, erase every choice...’
Back in 1995, sensationally, one man actually did this. A recent sixth year pupil at Bearsden Academy, supposedly a Canadian orphan named Brandon Lee, was unmasked as 32-year-old Brian MacKinnon, a very former pupil of the school desperate for the Higher passes he needed to resume medical school. And MacKinnon’s exploits gripped the country, because going back to school is such a common fantasy.
IN other shows, such as Outnumbered or Absolutely Fabulous, it is the parents who are flailing and ridiculous, while the children are in charge, or at least evidently more sensible.
The most popular US comedies – Friends is an enduring example – celebrate people living extended adolescent lives. And some go to dreadful extremes to remain in those years, or even relive them, decades later.
In 2009, we all had to swallow hard when Janet and Jane Cunliffe – two tall, uncannily alike
platinum blondes, all curves and pout – strutted before us.
‘Potential boyfriends often struggle to tell them apart,’ wrote colleagues for this newspaper. ‘ Hardly surprising, as both weigh in at 8st and, save for a couple of inches in height (at 5ft 6in, Jane is two inches taller) and different eye colours (Jane’s are brown, Janet’s are bl ue) they are virtually identical.
‘But Janet and Jane are not twins. They aren’t even sisters. They are mother and daughter. And, in what many will see as a depressing indictment of today’s youth- obsessed society, Janet confesses to having spent more than £10,000 on plastic surgery in a desperate effort to bridge the 22-year age gap between herself and her daughter…’
Yet Mrs Cunliffe was defiant: ‘It might sound barmy that I had cosmetic surgery to look like my daughter, but she’s gorgeous. Who wouldn’t want to look like her? The way I see it is that she got her looks from me in the first place – mine have just faded with age.
‘Seeing how attractive Jane is made me want to get my looks back. Now, instead of mum and daughter, we look more like twins. I had good genes and good skin, but I needed a help- ing hand to make me feel better about myself.’
None of this is a recent phenomenon. Its origins can be discerned as far back as the 1960s, from the so-called sexual revolution to the emergence of the ‘teenager’ and, indeed, the teenage consumer. Much of the lately exposed evil in 1970s Britain arose from a feature of the preceding decade, when top models stopped looking like women and began to look more like very young girls.
Social observers struggle to come up with a word for all this back-to-the-gymslip, perpetual childhood stuff. Kidult? Adultescent? Peterpandemonium? Whatever you call it, the trend is baleful and its consequences are appalling.
In a new book, Why Grow Up? – Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age, US academic Susan Neiman nails the central error of our youth-fixated age, t hat we see t he years of adulthood as nothing more t han decay, degeneration and decline.
‘Being grown-up,’ she laments, ‘is widely considered to be a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits of the reality you are given, and resigning yourself to a life that will be less adventur- ous, worthwhile and significant than you had supposed when you began it.’
Of course our bodies age, our jowls droop. Of course, as decades pass, we have quietly to accept that the wilder dreams of our childhood will never happen – that we are unlikely to win Wimbledon, voyage in space, be fabulously rich or desperately famous or ever Prime Minister.
BUT our middle and later decades should be years of accumulated wisdom, of hardwon perspective, of final contentment in our own skins and freedom from the financial worries and career pressures of earlier adulthood – not of pitiable homesickness for years long ago to which we can never return.
We are by no means obliged suddenly to take up bowls, stay in every evening with a nice mug of Bovril or start wearing nothing but beige. But we do not want for role models – one thinks of Honor Blackman, or the Duchess of Cornwall – to remind us that poise, self-belief, shrewd tailoring and a certain easy dignity can bring a bloom, even a beauty, to one’s more mature years. The delusion that we should instead dwell continually in some sort of Club 18-30 time-warp is wholly destructive. The more maniacally we cling to youth, the less we think of our truly aged. Indeed, we can barely stand the sight of them.
Only two weekends back, I was visiting a splendid old man of 90, a veteran of the war, still living in the house where he was born, alongside his wife of 67 years. They were supported by their resident son and daughter-in-law, visited incessantly by neighbours and family – laughi ng grandchildren, adoring great-grandchildren – and sat happily together by a little stove, gazing out through a great window over the crofts and crags of their native island.
JUST a few days later, without the least fuss, he died quietly, in an instant, in that favourite armchair. And on Saturday last I stood and watched as the hearse bore him away from the cottage for the final time.
By the standards of this world, he was a poor man. But, compared to what is coming up the Crow Road for most of us, was he not rich indeed? To the last he was able to live in his own home, with family to keep an eye on him, enjoying frequent visitors, taking a keen interest in everyone and everything, spared senility and decrepitude and a lingering, painful death.
Yet few now can expect to be cared for personally by our offspring in our final years. However wealthy we might be, or however important we once were, it’s odds- on that these appalled fiftysomethings will bundle us into some sort of home, to be spoon-fed stewed peaches by a bored Filipina and endure a token visit from our kids every second Saturday.
Meanwhile, suffering signally in this vapid, bejeaned, teenagey, best- years- of- our- lives culture, are the genuinely young. Even if they do not have to endure parents determined to dress like them or hang out with them and their pals of a Friday night, they will probably find the years of early adulthood are the worst.
They are years of murderous study at school, followed by the strains of college or university or training, trying to figure out who we are, how relationships work, trying for that first job, making mistakes, getting dumped, and trying – a big anxiety these days – to own our first home.
Our thirties might, in theory, be some sort of prime but in truth they are little easier than our twenties. The focus by now is on marriage, career and family. Friends are generally shed by the shipload... there simply aren’t the hours in the day, or the days in the week.
And to be told incessantly that this is the high noon of life, and thereafter it’s downhill all the way, may be a signal factor in the mounting rates of addiction, alcoholism and suicide among our young adults.
‘A culture always l ooking backward, towards the joys of a vanishing youth, cheats everyone,’ warns Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman. ‘ And that is the point. By describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect – and demand – very little from it.’