Wilfred De’ath

The café where I take my early morning coffee is full of student oarsmen who have either just come off the river or are about to go out on it. All they ever talk about in their squeaky, minor public school accents – girls as well as boys – is rowing. I have never heard them discuss anything else. I hate them.

Crossing the railway bridge, I run into great hordes of sixth form students, walking from the station towards their college. Their conversations, which are easy to overhear, relate exclusively to what they heard, or saw, on social media last night. They never talk about anything else. If you ask me, social media has a lot to answer for – most of the malaises of contemporary society seem to originate from them. I hate these students, too.

Time for a nice substantial breakfast at the Costa coffee shop (one of eleven in Cambridge). Words like ‘wow’, ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’ proliferate, since the clientele is exclusively young. There was a time when Costa declined to employ boys or girls with tattoos on their arms or faces or elsewhere, but now they have no choice because everyone, except me, has one or more.

I still find it hard to account for this extraordinary phenomenon, which has taken over the whole of the UK. What is it? A search for identity? I have sufficient confidence in my own personality not to require one, but it seems I am the last man standing in this, as in so much else. Tattoos seem to me to make the plain girls even plainer and the pretty ones less pretty.

The Cambridge Union, which I have belonged to for nearly sixty years, and where I go to read the papers at 11am, is full of foreign students. (It is the same at the Oxford Union, to which I also belong). Outside, the tourist hordes crowd the pavements, so that poor old octogenarians like me are driven into the road and the paths of oncoming cars. Last summer, I was knocked over.

I try to remain polite and retain my sense of humour and irony, but it is a waste of time, since the tourists possess neither. I hate them all.

Worst of all are the student pubs in the early evening, when there is not a single oldie to be seen. Where have they all gone? To church perhaps?

I say ‘worst’ but even worse is late at night, when the nightclubs disgorge crowds of drunken youths and nearly naked girls. An old person like myself is in serious danger of assault. Where do they all come from? They can’t all be at ‘uni’, as they call it, or celebrating their ‘gap’ year. I hate them, particularly those on bikes.

Call me a paranoid, grumpy old man, but every one of my days is like this. You could argue that it is my own fault because I have chosen to live in a university town, with its inevitably youthful population. But my sheer hatred of the young gives me energy to live and write; so it is in its way an existential advantage.