My latest Huffington Post blog: "Generation Breakdown?"

"My nine-year-old daughter has started taking me to task for using "wicked" as a form of praise. At 47, she explains, I'm too old to use words and phrases which are the preserve of the young. She also says the punk music I've finally worked out how to load onto the iPod is too loud. For a moment I think she's going to complain you can't hear the words.

I used to listen to a lot of punk, back in 1983. I was sixteen, had left school to the dole queue, and despised older people for messing up my future. Yet now I read that my generation had it easy: "free" university (unless, like me, you left school at 16); cheap housing (unless you couldn't get a job to pay the mortgage); and living in a booming economy (unless you lived in the north, or in south London).

Today's generation - presumably those aged 15-25 - will, I keep reading, by columnists who receive much of their wisdom from press releases, be the first in history to be worse off than their parents. Yet that depends on the age of your parents - or more precisely, the age your parents were when you were born…”

Read the rest of my latest Huffington Post – um – post HERE.