Young people aren’t driven by fun, but by fear

Family legend has it that when I arrived in Durham, a fresh-faced ingénue from deepest Somerset, I called home. ‘This is the life,’ I said, after a bare 24 hours in the frozen north, and they hardly heard from me again.

I would have expected my first daughter to have a similar experience, but by the time she set off for university I had already learned how very different the new generation is from ours.