Standing in a field...

Being an old git, who once upon a time enjoyed playing music but now, due to having two kids and no time, I decided to hang up my bass (at least for now, I tell myself) and join a ukulele club. Once a month, we get together and twiddle around, fairly melodiously on something that looks like a child’s guitar.

It’s an eclectic selection of tunes we play, ranging from the Pretty Vacant by the Sex Pistols to Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again (our illustrious leader isn’t happy until we’ve played this one) and quite a few other tracks you’d never think would work on a ukulele. One of the most surprising tunes in the ukulele songbook though is Sorted for Es and Whizz by Pulp.

Pulp was never a band I cared much for back in the day. I was a hardcore indie boy and as such, I never really got into the whole Brit-pop scene. But I have to admit that listening to it now, Pulp’s homage to middle-class teenage drug-taking is not a bad song; it’s quite insightful and it works well on a ukulele with some interesting changes in tempo that make it fun to play.

But the part that got me thinking to write this article was the line: “At four o'clock the normal world seems very, very, very far away”. It immediately struck a chord with me (pun intended) and took me back to those days of standing in a field, not in Hampshire like the song’s protagonist, but any field, off my head, experiencing that adolescent voyage of discovery, convinced that for the first time ever you’re learning something that your parents couldn’t possibly understand. In that moment, you really are millions of miles away from the normal world. You form some sort of unique bond with the other few hundred strangers around you who have also taken god knows what and enter into a collective subconscious where for a few hours you can truly understand exactly what other people are saying. In that field, you learn, or at least I did, empathy; it’s not important who the other people are, but the act of making the connection is. Those moments are wonderful, a learning experience like no other and something that everyone should experience at some time.

And that’s surely one of the greatest parts of being a dad, helping your kids to learn and experience the world around them and to start becoming the people they will one day be. I find it constantly amazing how my daughter discovers new things in the world. Every day, she learns something new, experiences the excitement of discovery, and the enthusiasm she feels when she shares it with me is infectious.

So my dilemma is this: beautiful eye-opening, mind-expanding experiences though they were for me, standing in a field in drug-crazed euphoria, do I ever want my kids to do that? As a middle-aged dad who sometimes looks back on those days not just with amusement that I can still remember them, but with damn-right amazement that I survived them, I’m not so sure that I do. But then again, I’m not so sure that I don’t.

To be clear, I would never tell my kids to do anything similar, and when the time comes I will do everything I can to stop them, but a part of me will secretly want them to pull the wool over my eyes and go and have the same fun and experiences I did. I realise, of course, that by the time we get to those days, I probably won’t be able to do much about it. As we all remember from personal experience, kids are incredibly capable and adept little liars; some of the whoppers I spun on the spur of the moment would put even George Martin to shame. Sorry if you’re reading this mum, but there really is an art form to coming up with a plausible excuse as to why you are so awake and alert, and also so hungry at two-thirty in the morning.

However it goes, I don’t fancy the little bastards’ chances at hiding the smell of weed from me, but I’m sure they’ll get a fair few other things past the old man when the time comes.

But the kids of today have one huge obstacle that we didn’t. Once a lie had been told and a night out been had, the only proof to the contrary existed in what people said. It was your word against someone else’s, and you could probably talk mum and dad round in those cases. But kids today have to contend with smartphones and video evidence of everything they do and everywhere they go. Their greatest asset is also their biggest downfall; technology is a double-edged sword and one which I’m glad we never had to deal with back then. Whatever stupid things I may have done when I was a drunken, stoned teenager exist now only in the hazy memories of me and the people I was with. But for the coming generations, drunken stupidity and drug-induced antics are now recorded for prosperity and saved in the endless and unforgiving memory of YouTube for all to see, again and again, and again.

This makes me wonder how kids today can enjoy alcohol and cutting loose at the weekend. Booze was the great uninhibitor, it freed us from social constraints and meant we could act like a total prat for an evening before going back to normal the next day. Surely now, even well-meaning friends with video cameras are going to change that. If you know anything and everything you do can, and probably will, end up on YouTube the next morning, are you going to be as quick to let everything go in the name of fun, or are you going to be thinking about what you are doing in the cold light of tomorrow morning before the night is even over?