This is my mother dabbing.

If you want to mortify my daughter (always very tempting), dab.

This mortifies her even if I do it in the privacy of our own home when there’s no-one to see. If I really want to mortify her, I do it when one of her friends will see me doing it. Double mortification is when her dad joins in.

‘You and your mates dab,’ I say.

‘Yes but we’re doing it ironically,’ she says, as if I do it with the seriousness required of a U.N. security meeting.

Dabbing, in case you didn’t know (and are getting worried) is what is being demonstrated by my mother in the photograph below and I’d explain its origins except that the wikipedia article is a bit too long to summarise. It started in 2015 as a youth thing. Nowadays, according to my nearly-seventeen-year-old daughter, you only do it if you’re a kid (e.g. from her perspective, anyone under fourteen) or being ironic. You do not do it if you’re a parent.

I read a blog post about the meaning of ‘old’ (link below). When does one become old? Is it an age or an attitude? Part of the author’s aim was to raise awareness of fiction aimed at or written by people over forty and whose characters are older than, say thirty-five and who yet have adventures, fall in love, exist in the real world without needing slippers and a cup of tea.

There is a prevalent attitude in western society that youth is king and that getting older means no longer being switched on to the modern world or able to keep up. It’s total nonsense.

I am sure, if you’re beyond forty-nine and watch ‘The Apprentice’, you shout at the television when the candidates are asked to market things at the over fifties and start assuming a complete IT incompetence and general out-of-touchedness, despite the fact that the IT revolution was started by people now in their seventies or eighties. I’m in my fifties and surprise, not only do I know how to use a mobile phone and various computer programmes but am working in a digital modernisation project. At this precise moment, my husband is helping my mother with her laptop (see – she’s eighty and has a laptop). In reciprocation, if I need help with photoshop, I ask Mum, because she’s an expert. It’s all relative.

The generation gap is quite different now to what it once was. When I was a teenager my parents watched ‘Top of the Pops’ in despair, complaining about hair length, make-up, high pitched screeching (and that was just the boy singers). Nowadays my children and I enjoy the same music without anyone (generally) criticising the other’s taste. I don’t care about anyone’s hair length or who’s wearing make-up or what anyone’s gender identity is. I envy the clothes my daughter wears but won’t copy her. I don’t want to look mutton dressed as lamb and anyway, ripped jeans would give me cold legs. But we do share sweaters and coats sometimes (although they’re just a tiny bit looser on her). Any suggestion that ripped jeans and perfect, identical eyebrows will one day be looked back on with derision is met with the confident assertion that this year’s fashion is different and classic and eternal. I have learnt to keep silent, having grown up through the 70s and 80s with the terrible photos to prove it.

Sometimes I feel younger now than I did when I was in my twenties. I was out with colleagues last week, all but two of whom were over forty. We felt that we are lighter hearted now. We may be more … cynical… realistic… (call it what you will) than the two twenty somethings who possibly wondered why they’d come out with a bunch of giggling middle-aged people, but we know we’re more inclined to laugh at ourselves, not to mention forgive ourselves than we once were. We know that life won’t be roses all the way, we’ve seen enough change to know that there is nothing new under the sun whether it’s an appraisal system or a theory or a plan or a political crisis.

I know I am very fortunate to have been born at a time and in a place where I have had access to free healthcare since birth, in a place where efforts to reduce pollution and limit artificial additives in foods have meant that my environment is better than many. I had parents who were able to physically, mentally and emotionally nurture me. All of those things mean that my life expectancy is better than huge numbers of people round the world, particularly other women. Believe me I don’t take that for granted.

Anyway, the point is that while my body is starting to send out little signals that I’m getting older, inside, I’m still a girl, just a grown-up girl who knows that I can make a fool of myself without the world ending. All being well, one day my daughter will jump over the invisible generation gap and take a simple delight in embarrassing the generation below hers and maybe we’ll high five or whatever the equivalent will be then.

Right now, I’ll keep looking for characters of my age in books and writing them too. The book I’m working on now is set in AD190 and has two women who have somehow, against the odds lived to their early sixties. One is deliciously nasty and the other delightfully wise. I have a teenage girl character too, who naturally thinks these ‘old ladies’ know absolutely nothing about anything. I think I need to make one of them mortify her.

Back in the 21st Century, I am sure you can imagine my daughter’s horror at being asked to show her grandmother to dab so that I could take a photograph and put it on my website.

All I can say is mwah-ha-ha.

Words and photograph copyright 2017 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission

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