Granny Mouse was appalled. ‘You’re going on holiday with your parents?’ She said to Young Mouse, my 25-year-old son. ‘We stopped all that family holiday nonsense when your dad was 14.’ And so it was. My baby-boomer parents reckoned that by the time my brother and I became teenagers, their responsibilities to us were essentially over. They’d done the package holidays to Corfu. Now they could attend to their own lives, which in my father’s case consisted of meditating, studying religious texts and visiting India; and in my mother’s, of writing books about the advantages of celibacy. And we would be left to ours. ‘Well, they’re paying for it,’ said Young Mouse, who thinks in strictly utilitarian terms. He is the sort of mouse who maintains a sort of internal profit-and-loss account as far as family relationships go. My experience is a common one. The offspring of baby-boomer parents –...
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