20th Century Victorians

I wanna be your ... parent

I was born in 1982. I am generally categorised as an elderly millenial, and I feel it. I’ve had an MRI on my knees and I can remember playing Bamboozle on Teletext. I like Instagram, but TikTok feels like a room where the music is too loud for me. I understand references to film noir or the summer of love or punk - I was bought up to understand that the 20th century was very important, and each decade had its own style, music, fashion, films and just like assonance or algebra, these were things I should know.

Now, I’m a parent in the 21st century, my children born well into the digital era. My first was born the year Trump became president the first time (still makes me weep there’s a number in that sentence), my second was born during a global pandemic. These are modern babes. But, if you want to scare generation Alpha kids, you simply need to tell them truthfully about the past… “Oh, we couldn’t watch any old episode of Octonauts we wanted, we would have to wait a whole week for a new one! And when it was finished, we couldn’t re-watch it, we just had to remember what had happened, because we never knew if we’d see that episode ever again!” They look frightened, nervous; we creak on like ol-timey characters rocking back and forth in our chairs, “And, if we wanted to know something we had to look it up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica….” my children’s eyes nearly pop out of their heads. “What?? How? But what did you do when you wanted to watch telly?” I stare into the horizon, “We’d just have to sit and wait till the kids telly started…at four thirty…” They gasp at this horror film, hoping this hell I describe will never come back.

But what’s the deal with Tweak and Kwazi? Are the ex’s? What happened to the vegimals and who did it? Why does Dashi wear a skirt but no one minds her being topless? Peso is a doctor but he only has bandage training?

I am constantly reminded in our ever whizzing modern world, that my childhood is more dead to them, than my own parents childhood was to mine. The world they will grow into and understand will always be somewhere I’m learning to live, “Kendrick Lamar, mummy, he’s cross with Drake…” Whereas my parents certainly did live a very different childhood - there were crossroads where we could meet. I don’t know how many of those I’ll have with my children. I’m certainly on a bridge over their dual carriageway, I can see the road but I’m not really qualified to drive on it safely.

When I was younger I was obsessed with years that people were born. I couldn’t get my head round the fact that someone born in 18-something was alive in my century, 19-something. So someone born in 1882, might die in 1956, that a Victorian baby was living as cars were invented. A Victorian baby who had breathed Victorian air full of industrial revolutions and top hats and Boer wars, was standing at traffic lights, waiting for the green person¹ to appear, that time was that close, that collapsible.

Now I am here, 2025, an 80s baby that remembers perms, ra-ra skirts and brick phones, looking at the 21st century bewildered by its speed and changes. I look back to that Victorian baby and think perhaps I have more in common with its world than I do with my own kids. I’m not a practising luddite, I understand the internet, I even explained brat summer to four confused parents by the school gates last year…but it’s the feeling underneath your feet, the pace, the change this century is bringing. perhaps more truthfully, where it’s heading. I am trying to place myself in history to make it make sense. What is this decade, what will a baby born in 2082 make of this moment? As they write their essay on early 21st century Fascism and how it was influenced by the 20th century. As they ask King ChatGPT to mind read their frontal lobe and beam it into the internet air we all breathe. I sound scared, I suppose I am. I wish we all looked back more to understand where we’re going next, I guess I can teach them to do that at least.

Just to make us feel better…Marc Bolan.

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Talking of looking back…some things that have helped me make sense of where we are now, the incredible Empireworld and Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera, the brilliant Empire podcast with Anita Anand and William Dalrymple and a book that is both funny and bleak (and comes out this month), Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis.

1. Yeah I say person, I don’t see why I should add traffic lights as a time I have to be wait to be told what to do by a man.