Greatest divide is between each new generation

AS a child, I used to love hearing about how different my parents’ upbringing had been, convinced the generation gap could never be wider than that between me and them.

My dad was born in one of Glasgow’s livelier East End districts, where the leisure activities included a version of blind man’s buff, played trying to get home in a Second World War blackout, and being offered treats such as a glass of lemonade at his aunt’s house.

This seemed too good to be true in a sugar-rationed Scotland, and it was. He later discovered this ‘lemonade’ was actually Andrews Liver Salts. I once did a taste test during a SodaStream drought, and Liver Salt Lemonade totally works – if you like your lemonade to taste like nail varnish.

My mother, on the other hand, grew up in a Japanese prisoner of war camp with her mother, while her father was in another camp. They survived on tiny rations of maggoty rice, and the hope that the family could be reunited, until the very end of the war.

ONE of the few stories she told was a tiny, tender recollection of the time the Red Cross managed to get Easter eggs to the camp children. My mother had never seen anything so pretty, so instead of eating it, she wheeled it around in a pram like a favourite dolly, until it crumbled to dust under the South Asian sun.

I don’t think that’s a remarkable or unique thought – that this was the ultimate intergenerational gulf – and yet I was utterly wrong.

Here are five things that my nieces and godchildren regard as ancient acts of barbarism in my upbringing. Photographs, not Instagram; On a camping holiday in France, my parents took us to church to join a hushed queue of worshippers filing past the body of an extremely saintly nun. The corpse had been coated in wax, with a nose slightly adrift after being kissed so often by the faithful. In a way, she resembled Katie Price, in THE current wheeze from a fringe of the independence movement is to present Scotland as a Faroes of the South. Does that mean we might win the odd game of football? that only some of what you saw was the original. Except the wax exterior was more organic. At 12, I thought this was a pretty great way to end the summer;

On SodaStream night, we were allowed to choose between ‘both kinds’ of crisps – ready salted and cheese & onion. No Pixar; Five people in a Ford Cortina driving from Dundee to France, and back, while listening to one Beach Boys cassette.

I think we can agree that this isn’t exactly Angela’s Ashes, but perhaps each generation views the past as a foreign country, and each of us drinks our lemonade a little differently there.

For instance, Bill Whiteford, BBC Radio Scotland’s laid-back godfather of news, told me recently he used to sing Waltzing Matilda as a lullaby to his daughter.

At face value, that’s a rather lovely memory of father-daughter bonding, until you remember that is the famous Banjo Paterson’s anthem (set to a traditional Scottish tune), which concludes with a dead swagman haunting a billabong, followed by Bill switching the lights off and tiptoeing out, leaving little Miss Whiteford in total darkness.

Still, at least at least it wasn’t Kylie Minogue’s Do The Locomotion.