I’ve not blogged for over a week – something coming up for a record, I think.

It’s not that there’s nothing to report. Lots has been going on, in fact.

It’s just that anything I could report has been either the boring and mundane, the off-limits, or the yet-to-be-uploaded (a few half-decent photos are still sitting in my camera). I’ve hosted a few couchsurfers though, and rounded off serene fortnight hiatus from work travels with a trip to Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

I’m just returning from that trip now, and am blogging on the train thanks to a dongle (a word which I can neither write nor say without smirking). I’ve been at a conference in Edinburgh the last couple of days, and I don’t think I’m compromising my self-imposed “no blogging about work” rule by saying that I heard a presentation on generational theory which was absolutely fascinating and depressing at the same time.

The speaker – an authority on terms like Generation X and Generation Y – explained in a captivating and entertaining seminar that today’s Generation Y have never experienced a recession (until just recently of course), have grown up in a post-Cold War world, and have always known the Simpsons to be on telly. They are apparently digital natives (I as a Generation Xer am a digital immigrant, apparently). They use Facebook. They “get” the new Cadbury’s adverts.

It made me feel old.

Not as much as last night, however, when I left the conference venue, which is on an out-of-town university campus) at around 10pm, taking a bus back to the city centre where I was staying with a friend. Getting on at the same time as me was a large number of students, who not only looked about 12 but were all dressed up to the nines, I presumed after having had a night at the students’ union.

The next morning, another conference delegate told me she’d had the same experience an hour later, with all the students “in their glad-rags heading out to go partying”.

Oh, I said. I’d assumed that, at 11pm on a school night, they were leaving their union after a few pints, in order to go home.

No, I was assured by my colleague. They were actually leaving their residences and heading to town to start their night out.

Good grief… now, where’s my pipe and slippers?