and fashioning it in our own image.
London began, like a gravitational field, to attract everything from around it and pull it in as it accelerated into the future. Wealth creation was moving into the capital and the cultural benefits we enjoyed from Manchester, Bristol, Stoke, Glasgow, Sheffield, Cardiff and more, were hoovered up. As Alex James, the bassist from Blur, says, ‘Although Britpop made us cringe and Cool Britannia made us want to self-harm, we were just so lucky to live in this tiny country with such a huge city in it. For the whole of my adult life, London has been the engine driving everything. At the beginning of the Nineties I arrived in London for my first term at Goldsmiths College. I’m getting out of my parents’ car with a guitar and Graham Coxon [also a member of Blur] is getting out of his parents’ car with a guitar and that was it – fasten your seat belt! It was, and still is, the place where anything can happen and dreams can come true. And they do, nightly.’
The Nineties were the launch pad for Generation X and we came out of it thinking we were pretty special. But not everything that happened turned out to be so good, and there were consequences that we are only just now beginning to realise. I’m 44, I surfed the media circus through my own career until, in 2002, I landed at the Sunday Times Style magazine where, as editor, I tracked the lifestyles of our generation for the next twelve years. Constantly on the lookout for a fresh trend, I was always baffled that it was our age group that continued to define the culture. I had grown up with The Face and Arena, two great channels to cool that did not survive the arrival of magazines like my own.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to find something unknown, or below the radar, as our generation was busy defining everything and selling it back to everyone. We quite categorically refused to make way for those coming up behind us, by giving them nothing to rebel against. The kiss of death, the goodbye to cool was if your mum thought it was good. Rock ’n’ roll, punk, gender bender, acid house and grunge were not liked by parents at all, which conferred on them instant cool. But as eternal Peter Pans, Generation X-ers have never found anything the kids have done distasteful. We share clothes now with our daughters, get breast jobs done together, even get matching tattoos. What’s the glamour in doing a line of cocaine if your dad does it? So the generation below have had to become dull, they have had no choice. They drink less, have less sex, go out less. The best they have come up with is ‘normcore’.
So are we, finally, in our forties, past it now? As Millennials and tech power us even faster into the future, are we going to get left behind? Many of us are embracing it, plenty of us feel paranoid about it, and some of us are being total dicks about it. One technology executive recently wrote: ‘Millennial is a nice stamp that marketers use, but it’s not necessarily about age. It’s more about looking at the things you have an affinity with, regardless of age. I’m 47, but I class myself as a Millennial because I have Millennial tendencies. I’m a lot more active on social media than my peers, for instance.’
God forbid we should be the sad dad trying to breakdance with the kids, but then how do we make sure our experience and the lessons we have learned meld productively with the passion, energy and excitement of the new youth? Millennials are not going to be able to pay us the sorts of pensions we are currently paying out to Boomers, so if that’s the case, how are we going to find the roles in society where we can work side by side and really benefit each other? How can we ensure we are not ‘bedblocking the best jobs’ (as one headline had it recently) but instead creating opportunities for all, enjoying what everyone has to offer and finding real, meaningful roles for ourselves, our parents and our youngers? What can we teach Millennials from our experiences about balancing work, life and family, job satisfaction, social cohesion, emotional stamina, physical fitness and social values?
And just as importantly, how are we going to cope with life from here on in? What’s it going to look like for us post menopause (Christ!) or when we qualify for our free bus pass? The world is in disruption – our liberalism is under attack on both sides of the Atlantic, the model for everything from fashion to news is breaking down, Christianity is in rapid decline, extremism is on the up, whole populations are on the move, happiness levels are at their lowest ever recorded – how will we emerge?
What I do know is that I will still be working to pay off my mortgage (at least I have one), with no pension to support me in my beach habit (it won’t be golf). Sometimes I put on a miniskirt and (a lot of) make-up and I can go to a club where no one can see very well and I can party all night – but then it takes me a week to recover. I know the hippest place in London to order a slider and I can name Beyoncé’s last single and the first one to leave One Direction (Zayn, my friends). I am on Snapchat (don’t use it) and still collect rare trainers, but the truth is I am also a knackered mum who gets her kicks from surfing the specials on Ocado and shouting at the neighbours to keep the noise down.
Occasionally I’ll book a weekend away, but I’ll look forward to it not for the sex, but the sleep. I still go to Ibiza but these days it’s the yoga teacher’s number I have on Favourites. I have Mary Beard and Madonna’s unauthorised biography on my bedside table. (Mary Beard is filed under Sheryl Sandberg. Madonna’s biog is well thumbed.) I have even begun to order soup for starters.
I live life in between young and old. I am neither Boomer nor Millennial. I am still an absolutely cynical witch who likes to do naughty things and wants to burn down the establishment – except, I am the establishment now. From government ministers to CEOs, the family GP to my kids’ headmistress – they are all my age. Once the rulebreakers, now we are the rulemakers. Like a zombie, I teach my kids to be good and recite their times tables and respect their teachers and work hard so they can go to university and get a good job. For what? – as I might have asked 25 years ago.
So are we just a bunch of directionless cynics who have now hit middle age and feel a bit sad and conformist? Do we know what we’re doing next, or are we not sure, as all the exciting stuff seems to have migrated to either side of us? How have we retained our rulebreaking and innovation, how have we changed the world and how are going to go on changing it? Did we free ourselves from the daily grind as we always hoped we would, or just create a new cage to live in? And do appearances – the threads, the ’do, the language, the who, the what and the where – really still matter?
Here’s my evidence. You decide.*
* Rule Number 1 of a features journalist: it takes three examples to make a trend. And once you’ve got a trend, you’ve got a feature. Features journalism is based entirely on subjectivity and three randomly encountered examples. For the purposes of this book I have interviewed slightly more than three people, but I am claiming equal subjectivity – mine, and theirs. Any time you get distracted, just turn to the Appendix where you can learn fun things about the handful of people I talked to. It’s nice, easy reading – what we features journalists would call a ‘sidebar’.
1
I was eight when the Eighties began. Too young to live them, but old enough to be knocked around by what was going on. I got my info from John Craven on Newsround, Bruce Parker on South Today and Smash Hits magazine. I remember the Falklands War and the sinking of the Belgrano, probably around the time Wham! entered my orbit. Of course, Thatcher was a consistent backdrop (my parents, traumatised by the economics of the Seventies and being utterly broke, were breathless for her and would not hear a word against her in the house). The miners’ strike was a thing, but it was a long way away from Bournemouth, where my dad had taken up a job as a vascular surgeon. He was a big believer in the NHS being run by passion and vocation, and the importance of public services, but Maggie’s privatisation schemes were all good – and private medical practice served my dad pretty well.
Being an adolescent in Bournemouth was actually really fun: there were beaches in the summertime and boys with boats, there was a Wimpy bar that served Knickerbocker Glories and a cinema or two (I saw Desperately Seeking Susan on my first date), and there was an ice rink where my friends would have