Wisdom

It's my niece's 20th birthday today.  I'm scudding round to my sister's after work this evening to gather en famille and anoint her now adult head with Bacardi Breezers and premium lager.  Of course, she still seems like a child to me, and always will.  That's the nature of generational succession.

It's odd, and rather unhelpful, how one constantly reassess one's maturity in retrospect.  At twenty I was pretty much the man I am now (don't laugh).  I may have been less well educated than I am now, but I was certainly as intelligent, probably more so.  And I seem to recall being quite mature then, apart from occasionally charging around the place, pissed-up.  When sober, I was interested in art and culture - again probably more so than I am now.  But when I look at my niece, I can't help hearing the words "frivolous pigeon".  I'm being unfair, of course.  The truth of the matter is that I just don't know her that well as an adult.  I didn't know her that well as a child, but nippers is easier to blithely categorise, aren't they?