How the boys of today are embracing change

An endearing, but unexpected, little thing I’ve noticed. Whenever my son and his friends meet up outside school – at a birthday party, say, or just going round to play at each other’s houses – they greet each other with a brief, casual hug.

It’s very sweet. But it fascinates me, because when I was their age, growing up in Scotland in the 1980s, I would never have hugged a male friend. In my experience, it was completely unheard of, at that time, for boys to hug each other. We would never even shake hands. The only time we would come into physical contact was when we were beating each other up.

Perhaps the boys of today are less physically repressed, more in touch with their feelings. If so, I wonder where they’ve got it from. Certainly not from buttoned-up dads like me. I still never hug my male friends. Not that I’m in any way against male friends hugging each other. But it would simply never occur to me to do so.

Come to think of it, that last paragraph only goes to show just how stiff and uptight I am. Look how quick I was to add that I’m “Not in any way against” male friends hugging each other – as if to say: “Look how wonderfully modern and open-minded I am.”

But of course my sheer haste to say so suggests the exact opposite. If a male friend ever actually did attempt to hug me, I’d probably react as though he were a vampire with rabies, and hurl myself to safety behind the nearest sofa.

At least my son’s generation don’t have such silly hang-ups. At eight years old, they already seem to be more mature than I am.