Grumpy Oldie Man
Even though he’s just got a First, he faces an anxious future of drudgery, low wages and unaffordable housing
Novel experiences being so sparse at this dismal stage of human existence, I’d have been quite content with one of them on a sunny Edinburgh morning last week. But within a matter of minutes, there came two.
‘Is this your first?’ asked the Uber driver, of the graduation ceremony to which he was taking us. Our son being an only child, it was both the first and the last.
But his mother (our son’s mother – the driver’s mother wasn’t present; distinct as he was, his uniqueness didn’t stretch to that) chose deliberately to mishear the question. ‘Did he did get a First?’ she mis-reiterated. ‘As it happens, yes.’
‘Ah,’ said Stanislas. ‘My congratulations. You must be very proud.’
I was. In the abstract, I’m not keen on beastly little swots. But in the particular, being fond of the boy, I couldn’t deny it.
Our reciprocal congrats sidestepped vicarious academic success to focus on Stanislas’s fecundity. He has, he told us, eight children.
Yet what impressed us was less his surfeit of offspring than his deficit of limbs.
‘I hope you won’t think me rude for mentioning it,’ I said on belatedly noticing the first of the quickfire brace of novelties. ‘But you appear to have only the one arm.’
With no hint of umbrage, he said that he’d lost the other in an industrial accident at a waste-recycling plant 15 years ago, and finds the prosthetic too cumbersome to use.
I asked if he’d taken legal action. He said that he had, and was awarded more than a million. He bought a house and three shops, which he rents out. He drives people purely to get out of the house.
Perhaps what ensued was indelicate. Unless I misinterpreted the hissed attempt to shush me, our son’s mother felt it was. But I heard myself wondering aloud whether, given the choice, I’d swap an arm for a million quid. On balance, I heard myself answering, ‘I believe I would.’ Typing would be a challenge. Then again, I wouldn’t need to type.
Speaking with the wisdom of personal experience, though again without umbrage, Stanislas politely disagreed. He was stuck at home for a decade after the accident, he explained, and still suffers phantom limb pain.
‘That’s awful,’ I said. ‘Even so…’ A kick to the left ankle ended the sentence there. I hobbled out of the car and into the exquisitely Italianate Mcewan Hall, where some 500 beaming graduates were gathered excitedly in rows, waiting to receive their degrees.
About 1,000 of their loved ones were arrayed around the outskirts of the room, also beaming as their children took to the stage to be tapped on the side of the head with a hat by the Vice-chancellor.
I was grinning myself. Formal ceremonies tend to be gruelling affairs, laced with vacuous hypocrisies. But freed from religious cant about the wonderment of the afterlife, be it in this life in the unflinching chains of holy matrimony or at the right hand of the Lord in the next, a graduation is a splendid sight to behold.
It was so uplifting, in fact, that the grin survived the Vice-chancellor’s reference to the university’s global pre-eminence in the field of MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) almost intact.
What eventually removed it was the massively unoriginal reflection on how incomparably harder adult life will be for my son’s generation than it was for mine.
I can’t recall much about my graduation, other than that it was literally the only recorded day in this family’s existence on which my mother admitted to being other than tired. But I do remember how effortless it was afterwards for the graduate, even one as indolent and feckless as this one, to earn a living, and buy a property.
These young people are infinitely more mature, industrious, sober, undruggy and responsible than we were. Thanks to the intervening decades of free-market capitalitism that have betrayed the young, their expectations of a decent income are minimal, and of buying a home virtually zero. And they of course are the privileged.
After the ceremony, we went to lunch with our son and a friend of his, a brilliant 22-year-old whose first taste of disappointment has been the so far fruitless search for a job serving coffee.
Our boy is about to embark on a similar quest as he enters a world in which the sense of freedom and infinite possibilities we enjoyed has been replaced by drudgery and anxiety.
Not wishing to be a Debbie Downer, I delayed the paternal advice for as long as possible, and when it could be delayed no longer I offered it as tentatively as I could.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve thought,’ I said, when it was time for his mother and me to take our leave of him, ‘about applying for a job at a waste-recycling plant? I gather the opportunities, so far as property ownership go, can be excellent.’