Another gloomy milestone passed on the path to the crematorium. I realise with a shudder that I graduated from university 30 years ago this week. Three decades of my working-life slipped by! Where did those 10,000 days go? And, more depressingly, what’s to show for them? Mozart wrote his entire oeuvre inside a 30-year span. Three decades is roughly the time it took Darwin to crack the origin of species. Napoleon got his comeuppance at Waterloo exactly 30 years after graduating from his military academy — but in the intervening years he managed to conquer most of Europe.
I won’t labour the point. You get my morose drift. I am staggering through the black mist that descends when a chap with more than half his life over realises that, had he never been born, the world would be exactly the same as it is now. Leave me alone in a darkened room for a while and the fit will pass.
Time slithers away so insidiously, doesn’t it? It’s like a cat burglar spiriting away your valuables in the dead of night. Consequently, your perception of your own age tends to lag years, sometimes decades, behind the grim reality. I was 40 before I stopped thinking of myself as a boy. Another decade on and I still catch myself trying to maintain a veneer of strenuous laddishness that is frankly ridiculous, coming from a man whose wrinkles are massing like mould on an ancient cheese. “There should be a word to describe this sort of delusion,” I remarked to a friend last week. “There is,” she replied. “It’s called irresponsibility. It’s an incurable mental illness that you find in a lot of middle-aged men.”
Well, maybe. But that sweltering Saturday when I strode forth in dead rabbit fur to collect my hard-won honours degree in drinking and procrastination certainly doesn’t seem like 30 years ago. It seems like only last month. Which is a dangerous illusion, of course — because 30 years is not only the time-span separating the frazzled Morrison of today from the carefree Morrison of 1976. It’s also the average age difference between middle-class parents and their children. Ours are, respectively, 29, 31 and 34 years younger than we are. Perhaps you can see where my thoughts are heading. Because three decades seem to have disappeared in the biblical twinkling of an eye, it’s seductively easy for me to imagine myself at the age that my children are today. And because they are going through the same rites of passage as I did 30 years ago — terrible college food, love tangles, bouts of hedonistic excess, all-day hangovers, swollen glands — it’s also easy for me to imagine that they are experiencing the world exactly as I did 30 years ago. Which gives me a very tempting excuse to interfere in their lives and offer unsought advice.
But the world isn’t the same. It’s altered out of all recognition. I know that every generation imagines that it has lived through the most disruptive changes in the history of mankind. But I do believe that the experience of being an adolescent and a student has changed more in the past 50 years than it did in the previous 500, and that an existential chasm now separates the life I led at 21 from that of my children today.
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Consider how much the mobile phone and the text-messaging revolution has transformed the process of making and breaking friendships. How much the internet has revolutionised not just the learning process but the whole structure of communication and entertainment for students. How much the atmosphere of the college campus has been normalised by the equalisation of male and female numbers. How much more sexually experienced today’s youngsters are — a joyous improvement to teenage life, no doubt, but one that brings its own stresses and dilemmas. How much more debt students have to run up to get them through university. How much greater are the opportunities for travel, and how it’s virtually taken for granted that you will have hiked round the world at least twice before you pick up your first pay cheque. And, on a more negative note, how much more wary the students of today have to be on the streets of their own cities.
No wonder that my children look irritated or bewildered when I offer them advice. My past is a foreign country to them, and my recollections of what worked or didn’t work for me at 21 might as well be in a foreign language, so irrelevant is it to their world.
But one piece of advice is surely always pertinent. It is Horace’s fine old exhortation: carpe diem — seize the day. If I could reclaim every minute that I wasted in my youth, I could probably have half my life again. The trouble is that when you are 21 you don’t truly grasp the fact that such moments are not infinitely available. And by the time you have grasped it, the moments have flown. As Trotsky observed, old age is the most unexpected thing that happens to a man (apart from being hacked to death with an ice-axe, presumably). Tell me about it, Leon.
Still, if any of the people who were at university with me 30 years ago happen to be reading, could I just say this? If we haven’t seen each other since 1976, please don’t get in touch. Observing how old we all look will only depress me further.
Doctor of nonsense
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Talking of universities, how good to see that rigorous academic standards are being upheld in our ancient seats of learning. This week the University of St Andrews will award an honorary doctorate of letters to ... Michael Douglas. Apparently it’s to recognise his achievement as a “major figure in contemporary cinema”. My God, what next? A doctorate of science to Kate Moss for her extensive research into pharmaceuticals? There’s a bottle of reasonably good bubbly waiting for the reader who sends me details of the most ludicrous honorary degree awarded by a British university in the past five years.
A real turn up
Intrigued to see that the examination board Edexcel is experimenting with a computer program called Turnitin that can allegedly check the coursework of GCSE and A-level students against 4.5 billion web pages for signs of blatant plagiarism. Two things occur to me. First, if the students have been ingenious enough to crib from sources that the examiners can’t identify except with the help of a computer, they surely deserve a few marks for ingenuity. And secondly, I hope people don’t start using Turnitin to check newspapers. Ripping off a rival’s best stories is one of the time-honoured satanic pleasures of journalism. And no, you probably didn’t read it here first.