DIARY OF A MODERN DAD

I’m only 40, but my son seems to think I’m a relic from the ancient past

Having children really does age you. Within just a few years, you start to feel positively ancient. Not least because your children are always banging on about how ancient you are.

“Mama and me have been watching a film from the old days,” said my son this week. “It was still quite good, even though it was really old.”

“What was it?” I asked, expecting him to say Bambi or Dumbo or some other Disney classic from the 1940s.

“A Bug’s Life,” he said.

A Bug’s Life (below) was released in 1998. I was 17 at the time. As far as my son’s concerned, however, that makes it a prehistoric relic, a faded artefact from a forgotten era. Still, nice to know that, no matter how primitive the film may look to the youth of today, it’s “still quite good”.

Of course, when my son talks about what he considers to be “the old days”, he doesn’t mean to insult me. My great age is a source of genuine fascination to him, and he’s eager to learn what life was like, back in the distant days of his father’s youth.

“When you were little,” he asked me recently, “were cars a thing?”