I find it hard to look at my son and imagine what it’s like to be his age. This is primarily due to the insoluble problem of memory. I hold a vaporous grasp on my early childhood, little more than a vague timeline of birthday parties, summer holidays and random interactions in primary school, mostly from eras so indeterminate they could be from any year before I turned 10.
His life is also so different from mine I’m not sure if transposing my own childhood on to his would be much use. At his age, my entire life had been lived with my massive family on Derry’s rural border, a place he only knows as a sort of pleasant agrarian theme park that’s been good enough to let his grandad live on site full-time. I look at this small, silly and kind little red-headed person and .
.. I suddenly see myself all too easily My son, by contrast, is growing up in 2024 London, subsumed within a fully connected online age, sharing his time with one sibling instead of 10.
He’s familiar enough with hummus and pomegranate seeds to refer to them by name as he refuses them from his plate, whereas I was 16 before I encountered a curry that was not listed as ‘curry’ on a menu. When he hears friends chat to their parents in Urdu, Polish and Igbo, I remember that I was considered quite the exotic because mine were from Fermanagh. It is possible he has never tasted, nor even heard the term ‘potato bread’ in his life.
It is certain he’s never heard ‘bomb scare’. The reason this is all.