Last night, I went to see Noah and the Whale - don't ask - at Leicester University. And whilst I wasn't the oldest person there, I felt a little out of place among students young enough to be my children.
Which raises a thought. Don't we under-estimate the extent to which the generations are foreign to each other?
Put it this way. A typical university student today was born in 1992. To him, Thatcher's premiership seems as distant as Harold Macmillan's did to me in the early 80s. And the miners' strike is as far from him as the Suez crisis was from me. Those people who talked of Macmillan and Suez in the early 80s seemed like remote old farts to me. So don't I seem an old fart to today's young people?
Or put it another way. I was a graduate trainee during the crash of October 1987. I remember a couple of our firm's greybeards - there weren't many - walking round the dealing floor saying something like 'Call this a crash? You should have been here in 74. We thought the market was going to become worthless.' Wise as these words were, they weren't greeted with universal acclaim. 1974 seemed like ancient history to us know-all twentysomethings. But 74 was only as far from 1987 as 1998-99 is from today. I regard the events of that period - the collapse of LTCM and the tech bubble - as lively memories which influence my attitudes even now. But to a young trader they are the same remote history I thought those greybeards were prating about.
I could go on. People of my age, and older, grew up in the Cold War. The fear of nuclear annihilation was, for us, a very real one. This puts Islamist terrorism into a different context than younger people have.
I suspect that one reason why some older folk are more sceptical about climate change than young ones is that they remember talk of global cooling in the 70s, which (over?) cautions them against believing in global climate projections. And then there are the differences that arise from my generation regarding the internet, 'free', and social networking as novelties whereas today's students see them as familiar things they grew up with.
Now, this is not to say that there need be hostility between the generations. As that young whippersnapper Laurie says, 'The struggle going on across the world is not between old and young, but between the possessed and the dispossessed.' But it does, I suspect, mean there is the danger of mutual misunderstanding. After all, our formative experiences make us who we are, and these are very different between a 40-something and a 20-something.
There's something else. If someone had suggested in the late 70s a Saturday night TV show in which teenagers competed to sing songs written years before they were born - in the 1950s say - they'd have been taken away by the nurses. And yet millions watch such an equivalent show now.
As I say, foreign.