Postcards from the Edge

The oldies, they are a-changin’

As rebels like Bob Dylan turn 80, so the cultural generation gap is shrinking, says Mary Kenny

The good news is that the generation gap is over – that incompatible hostility between the generations, described by writers from Shakespeare to Bob Dylan. And now that Dylan, who’s just turned 80, is part of our oldie culture, the generations understand one another better than ever before.

That is one theory arising from the news that in America and Britain – and elsewhere – more young adults are living with their parents. The COVID pestilence may be part of the picture, but it’s been an ongoing trend for some years: in America, more than half of young adults (that is, up to age 34) share a home with their parents.

In Britain, the current figure is 42 per cent, although admittedly the age bracket is 15 to 34, and you’d expect kids to be living at home aged 15. Still, this statistic was only 36 per cent in 1996. Between the ages of 25 and 34, some 17 per cent of younger Brits still share a household with their parents. Across the EU, 48 per cent of young adults live with their parents.

The prolongation of education and the cost of housing have driven this pattern. It’s also because parents have become more permissive, less forbidding and more inclined to be ‘down with the kids’ themselves.

In 1960, when the average age of leaving home was 18 – I left home aged 18 in 1962 – we thought our elders were Victorians who would be appalled if we slept with a boyfriend, drank too much or generally ‘let ourselves down’. My mother wept that I ‘looked like a prostitute’ in torn fishnet stockings and garish lipstick. Now mothers and daughters go clubbing together, sometimes both dolled up like hookers.

The generations today share values, attitudes, music and fashion. Dylan needn’t tell the parents ‘your sons and your daughters are beyond your command’, since they’re now harmoniously ensconced in the family home. Parents forbid nothing, and occasionally the kids are more sensible than the oldies.

Along with this trend of intergenerational living comes another increasing concern: falling fertility. In pro-natalist America, the birth rate has fallen for the sixth year running. All the European countries now have declining birth rates. Martin Amis lamented in his most recent novel, Inside Story, that by 2060 ‘most Italians will have no sisters, no brothers, no aunts, no uncles and no cousins’.

Could there be a connection between intergenerational household living and falling birth rates? Do putative parents now think ‘A baby now – that means 30 to 40 years of offspring-care? Too much. Too long.’ In the EU, the countries with the greatest degree of intergenerational living have the fewest babies.

The times, they are a-changin’, but not as we planned them.

Ireland’s poshest golf club, Portmarnock, ten miles north of Dublin, has voted, after 127 years, to admit women as full club members. It has been hailed as a wonderful victory in the ‘battle for equality’.

May I dissent? How can a golf club whose annual membership fees are over £2,000 be an emblem of ‘equality’? Nobody on a modest income could afford such recreational dosh. No woman on an average income could afford even the green fees for a weekday’s golfing round: 27 holes for £259 or 36 for £345. The concept of ‘equality’ now seems to ignore both class and income. It appears to apply only to gender or race.

Portmarnock had been under pressure for some time from the Equality Authority, as well as from the influential National Women’s Council, to amend its rules. So the change was officially greeted as a great advance for (affluent) women.

When the Troubles first broke out in Northern Ireland, concern was expressed about the disorder that might spread to society at large. That socialist firebrand Bernadette Devlin, then a young MP, announced sardonically, ‘Don’t worry – there’ll be no riotin’ in the golf clubs.’ And indeed there never was.

A friend recently moved from Italy to the Netherlands. It was such a relief, he reported, to be free from Italian bureaucracy, which is wearing, and affects every aspect of daily life. Holland is so different: everything works efficiently and without fuss. But then, where the Italians were generous, he found the Dutch mean, conforming to the ‘Dutch treat’ concept (where everyone splits the bill), and to Lord Canning’s judgement: ‘In matters of commerce, the fault with the Dutch/Is giving too little and asking too much.’

Sometimes national stereotypes are confirmed by experience. Yet it’s nice that all the harmonising efforts of the EU haven’t made everyone the same. And, anyway, you can’t have everything!