Sunday 16th October

How often we hear that refrain; actually I heard it when I was a young person of a different today, and down the years ever since.  And it is tempting when you see the baseball cap on back to front and the trousers at half-mast – but that is just fashion; I am sure we looked just as ludicrous in kaftans and beads or loons and tie-die tee-shirts.  I have just come back from visiting my six year Granddaughter.  We actually went to a School Halloween Disco held two weeks early and yes, there was plenty for an old curmudgeon to moan about; the awful disco music, the shop-bought fancy-dress costumes, the whole American nonsense of Halloween, the under 11 girls tottering around in high-heels, the goody bags of Haribo jelly sweets all the kids were eating….and so on.  But the over-riding impression i got was that these kids were having fun.  For them school was not a boring daily drudge to be got through but a pleasure, an all encompassing experience involving parents many times a term in the running of the school, a real community feeling.

And yes, they watch a diet of Disney Princesses and constant cartoons all day long, but unlike the pretty violent few cartoons we watched, these stories all seem to have a moral code, good deeds done and rewarding bravery and kindness.  Yes, these kids all have i-pads but they are full of creative puzzles and spelling tests and information about the world which our generation was hopelessly ignorant of. It is like having a constantly updated complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica at your fingertips.  And the young teenagers I know are confident and rounded, they have far less prejudices than we had, and they are generally better educated than we ever were.  It is always tempting to look back to the past with rose-coloured glasses, and maybe every generation berates the one that follows theirs, but all things considered I don’t think we have too much to worry about out young people of today, except of course the mess we have made of things which they will have to clear up.