Stop, rewind — this isn’t how I pictured it at all. For one thing, the France kit is wrong, it’s meant to be a lighter shade of blue. As for the Dutch, where’s Dennis Bergkamp? Retired? I thought this was the World Cup.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be 500 words on how everything was better in the past. That was my last column. It’s more a reflection on that most malleable time in our lives, when we were still young enough that every experience was new but old enough to think for ourselves.
That period from the age of eight or nine until the mid-teenage years is the anchor around which all future experiences are compared. Music will never be as good again, even if your back catalogue was limited to slightly scratched Now That’s What I Call Music CDs. Football will have peaked, no matter that your Second Division side will later be bought by an oil-rich state and now wins the Premier League at will. And don’t get me started on politics.
The order life happens in matters. If we were born in care homes and grew up as retirees, we might appreciate the first day of work. The pioneering social psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated this with a simple experiment.
Take the following sequence of adjectives about two people. Person A is intelligent, impulsive, critical, stubborn and envious. Person B, meanwhile, is envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious and intelligent. That is, the same but in reverse order.
What Asch found is that person A, the one who begins with positive qualities before turning negative, is more likely to be perceived fondly, as a basically decent person hampered by a few shortcomings. In contrast, person B may have one or two favourable qualities but is essentially unsalvageable.
To be clear, it’s not that everything was better in the past. We’re all perennially party-way through a Stephen Pinker book. It’s just that those formative years lay down a marker. Music, sport, art — it wasn’t new then, but it was new to us.
We all have our own moments of peak experiential fertility and mine was from roughly 1997 to 2005. Anything before that date might as well have not happened. Germany was divided and then reunited? I’m happy for you/sorry that happened. Similarly, modern events are too late to be original, they can only be compared with that unique time.
The phrase ‘red-pilled’ is a case in point. Meaning to realise that everything you know is in fact a lie, it originates from 1999’s The Matrix. That film has somehow stayed with every teenage boy from the turn of the century (I think girls saw through the plot holes as wide as Neo’s sunglasses.) But I suddenly see the term everywhere. Millennials, those aged 26-41 and now dominant in the culture, are leveraging their terms of reference.
Meanwhile, the 12-year-olds of today find our world, with its various distractions and horrors, both fascinating and normal. Like us before them, It’s all they know and the cycle repeats.
Now excuse me while I fiddle with the contrast on my linear television so that I can restore the French team jersey to its rightful hue.
In other news...
I’ve gone out of my way not to take a view on Brigitte Macron. The wife is older than the husband, how subversive. (Yes, we all know how they met). But the image taken of the four of them at dinner during a state visit to the US — President Biden enjoying his ice cream, President Macron pretending to do the same, Jill Biden with a glass of water and Brigitte nursing what I suspect is a fine Riseling — was too good to pass on.
We’ve all been there. Out to dinner with your partner’s colleagues or friends and in dire need of something for the road. Brigitte isn’t running for office — she’s not out to convince anyone in a diner in Dayton, Ohio, that she’s ordinary folk just like them. It couldn’t be clearer. She is drinking for all of us.
