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. I arrived from a girls’ grammar school, having chosen a university as far from my (much-loved) home as I feasibly could, determined to have Fun. I threw myself into the whole thing. I stayed up night after night drinking nasty wine and talking rubbish and I doubt there was a single pub or college bar that I didn’t try out.
Towards the end of the first year I thought it was time I made the acquaintance of the library, but then they decided that we needn’t take exams after all, so I held back from that area of exploration. We went to the hopelessly hick nightclub and drank filthy sweet cocktails. Sometimes I lay in bed with a crashing hangover, reading Trollope and amazed at my luck — I was doing what all the grown-ups demanded of me and yet was indeed ‘living the life’.
Leaving university, my generation was not much more sensible. We fell into jobs, drank too much at lunchtime, went to rather smarter nightclubs and drank rather less sweet cocktails, gambled and experimented with other foolish things; to be young and employed in London in the 1980s was very hedonistic heaven.
So what has changed with this generation? They go off to university as fully formed people, with barely a mistake left to make.
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