This week I took wise counsel from a bunch of nice 22-year-old blokes in Ramones T-shirts.
On Friday night I found myself in a down-an-alley-way-up-a-rickety-staircase bar brimful with young men born since the advent of personal email. They wore winkle-pickers and their older sister’s cardigans and drank longnecks of Coopers. It felt like it was 1983; I knew the words to all the songs.
At the expense of sounding creepily like Germaine Greer (remember that weird book The Beautiful Boy in which she infatuates over barely-adult boys?), I’ve been in the company of very young men a lot lately and find them intriguingly charming. (A shout out to their mothers – you’ve done a stellar job.) I also find them curiously relaxed.
This, in spite of the fact they all seem to be juggling a crazy array of blog design start-ups, music piracy operations and 17 Twitter accounts. “Do you ever get stressed?” I asked Mike, a cherubic kid who runs two street art galleries and DJs at weekends. He adjusted his ironically dorky glasses and said, “No, because these days it’s cool to be calm”.