Generation gap is the same yawning chasm it ever was

It’s a sobering realisation to find yourself at an age that – when you were a teenager and looked at your own father – you once thought qualified as officially ancient.

Inside you’re still 21 and full of the divil – although less frequently for sure, given that it takes three days to recover from three hours of excess – but outwardly, if you were a horse, the kids would probably have you shot.

You have what – in a context that had nothing to do with hurling or indeed anything else – the Galway hurling legend Joe Connolly once described to me as furniture disease.

Your chest is slipping into your drawers.

What’s left of your hair is growing more freely from your ears, nose and eyebrows than the top of your head – and all that continues to fight the good fight up there is coming out in one of fifty shades of grey.

You catch a glimpse of your more ample self in the mirror and you think someone else is standing behind you – and still, because most of us don’t live in a house of mirrors, it’s only an occasional reminder that we’re approaching that sell-by date at a rate of knots.

When you think back to your own father in his fifties, you saw an oul fella….admittedly one you were more than fond of, but an old bag of bones nonetheless.

So why should it come as a surprise that your own sons would see you now in exactly the same light?

You may know a bit about computers and you might even hum the chorus of an Ed Sheeran song, but you’re stuck in the eighties with your Levis and your loafers and your view of the world in which change isn’t always a good thing.

The next generation embrace technology with relish; you look on it with a degree of suspicious mixed with trepidation.

Our parents’ ambition for their offspring was a permanent and pensionable job that offered you the chance of relative comfort in your old age – that would be your average young person’s biggest nightmare.

They want to see the world, and not just for two weeks in Torremolinos; they either want to move in with the Aztecs or party until they drop in Ibiza.

The Leaving Cert was once the examination that determined your future – and for many, even as lately as the eighties, it was an unnecessary step because AnCO or an apprenticeship offered you an early exit.

Now it is a stepping stone, a staging post along the way in a world where they talk of under-graduates after their first degree as opposed to what we used to call members of the workforce.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.