Just how crusty are you? Tony Watts OBE wonders why so many of today’s older people make a point of not understanding the younger generation when we had exactly the same response from our parents…

Hands up everyone reading this who has, in the last month, uttered the immortal phrase “young people today”… or words to that effect.

I ask this question having read an article in a North East newspaper (The Chronicle) which labours to point up “15 things older people don’t understand” about their younger counterparts.

It’s all in there: querying trousers hanging off of bottoms, obsessions with social media, takeaway coffee at God knows how much a cup, queuing for the latest trainers, drinking flavoured beers, taking selfies, pre-drinking before a night out, inventing new meanings for words, growing beards…

I just wonder how this article might have read 40 or 50 years ago.

Because I have vivid memories of being pointed at (and occasionally sworn at and told to get a job) simply because of: the length of my hair (which apparently called into question my masculinity); wearing a rather smelly Afghan coat, an old “granddad” shirt, sandals and bell bottoms; growing sideburns; queuing for the latest Beatles single and (later) the latest Pink Floyd album; and deliberately adopting new words that gave us space between our generation and the “old gits” above us (ie, anyone over 25).

There was widespread horror at my generation’s use of cannabis, our total disrespect for figures of authority and our predilection to go on a protest march at the drop of a hippy hat.

And as for our music…

If I’m honest, we saw it as a badge of honour to annoy what we considered to be “the establishment”.

So why are so many older people today concerned about relatively innocent foibles such as beard growing and bum-cleavage showing trousers?

Admittedly, not everyone in my generation went in for the excesses in lifestyle and fashion that my friends and I did – and they were dismissed as “straights”. Perhaps these are the people now leading the charge against today’s rebellious youths.

But we weren’t the first generation to rebel against what went before. I have vivid memories of the outrage in the media against the teddy boys who preceded us – with their winkle pickers, carefully choreographed hair, loud motorbikes and tendency to look for punch ups.

Read back in the annals of social history and you’ll find many other examples. What’s the point of mimicking your elders, I’d ask, when you can be a bit different for a couple of generation-defining years?

The human race never evolved through doing the same thing in every generation but by trying out new things.

You may disagree – and yes, some of the foibles amongst today’s youngsters do seem perverse. But they are THEIR foibles. And growing a beard or queuing up for trainers seem pretty innocent and non-threatening to me…

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