Time and tide

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?

2 thoughts on “Time and tide

  1. don’t beat yourself about not being able to party, Simon. You forgot to mention that we watched “Question Time” and “The Week” with Andrew Neil whilst drinking malt whisky. Lightweight students would never cope with that…

    Hardcore…!

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