THE RANK GENERATION

There is a swing park near me and I was amazed that it is completely unscathed; no broken seats on the swings, no twisted chains, no muck on the chute and no painted slogans anywhere. I began to wonder if the teenagers in the area were all angels but soon discovered the real reason why none of them vandalised the swing park. They need it for their own kids!

This led me to think about teenagers nowadays. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, which I actually am, it's not like it was in my day! In my teenage years, and well into my twenties, I, and most other folk my age, revelled in not having any responsibilities. All you had to worry about was money for going out. You handed 'keep' money to your parents and never worried about food, electricity, rent or any of the other things that 'grown-ups' needed to panic about. Whether you were working, on the dole, at college or at university your main concerns were drinking, smoking, records and going to see bands. Oh, and the opposite sex; but I never had much luck in that direction.

What is worrying about teenagers these days is that they are so boring! My parents used to get all worked-up about me going out with old clothes, held together with safety-pins and festooned with zips and chains. The music we liked sparked debates on TV and the papers were full of shocking stories about Punk Rock. It was great! Our parents understood nothing and we were never going to turn out like them, even though we did.

Equally, our parents' parents were up to ninety about Rock and Roll, Elvis, Teddy Boys. It was the end of civilisation. The same thing happened in the sixties with hippies.

The thing is that each post-war generation found a voice through their music and clothes and frightened their parents to death in the process. But now? The music's boring, the way they dress is boring and they're interested in nothing. We had things like Rock Against Racism; the hippies had the Vietnam War to demonstrate against. To listen to a lot of teenagers now they're actually riled about the kinds of things that our parents worried about: immigrants, dole-spongers etc etc. The sorts of things that old men that read the Daily Mail usually moan about.

I might be doing teenagers a disservice and there might be some just as radical and fancy-free as we were. But most of the youngsters that I've encountered, I'm afraid, fit perfectly into the stereotype that I've painted here!