It’s ice and easy for the snowflake generation

ICE on the inside of car windscreens in the cold snap made me think of the touchstones which separate each generation, those things one experiences that the next will never know.

Raised in Wigtownshire, our balmy south-west thanks to the Gulf Stream, I never saw snow – let alone frost inside my bedroom window.

Different story in Corby, Northamptonshire, where ice on the interior of panes was regular when we visited my paternal grandparents.

Their house had one open fire with a back boiler. There was a stoneware hot-water bottle as a nod to luxury and a treat for us kids was to have our pyjamas toasted by being wrapped around the pipe that ran up the chimney breast to the hot water tank.

I sit now in my double-glazed home where a combi boiler, sundry radiators and big bills mean the temperature never dips below 22C. I tell my duvet-cosseted children, who have seized the thermostat, of those distant days. They think I’m making it up.

When I worked in Dublin, colleagues assessed your social status by whether you had ever been given Findus Crispy Pancakes by ‘your Mammy’.

you were posh if not and their followup question rooted out those trying to fake humble origins.

‘What do you remember about them?’, they’d ask. We veterans instantly recalled the skin being singed from the roof of our mouth by steam trapped in the pancakes, just as a wallpaper stripper leaves old Anaglypta dangling.

Today, my children know more of focaccia than Findus.

It’s natural that each generation considers previous ones less enlightened and the next one soft. ‘What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?’

No, not a sheriff in the bench last week but Plato in the fourth century BC. This intergenerational angst is as old as mankind.

My lot must have been judged, too. What did my grandfather, who moved to Corby for work in a steel mill having fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front with the Royal Scots Fusiliers, think of me going for a bar meal (remember those?) with my parents?

yet each new generation rises to the challenges – some old, some new – it faces. People not much older than me won the brutal battles of the Falklands; half my Sixth year class took up arms in the Cold War; people younger than me came through two Gulf Wars and the savagery of Afghan ambushes.

THERE will come a day when my children shake their heads in wonder at their old dad with his antediluvian chicken katsu for dinner and a clanking gas-powered boiler. No bad thing – times change.

Ice inside the glass ‘never did me any harm’, as we superannuated are wont to say. But there’s no harm either in the progress which means that’s a minor hardship beyond the ken of today’s youth. They will face challenges we can barely imagine – competing in a global marketplace for jobs; coping with the rise of artificial intelligence and all life’s ‘unknown unknowns’.

And they, too, will watch as their avantgarde becomes museum fodder when another fresh generation arises.

yet what links the generations is tenacity, adaptability and optimism.

A snowflake generation? The kids will be all right.