Young Fogeys grow old gracefully

In the 1980s, Will Self mocked journalists who worshipped the past. But they’ve remained ageless, while he’s become a burnt-out shell

‘Why are we racing to be so old?’ warbled prematurely-aging punk uber-nerd, Elvis Costello, in Two Little Hitlers, unleashed on the world in 1979. Why indeed?

For the vast majority of Baby Boomers who had any truck with the zeitgeist, the equivalence between miserably old and irredeemably square was axiomatic. Born in 1961, by the time Elvis was adjuring me I was so ensorcelled by the fact of my own avant-garde juvenescence, I couldn’t seriously imagine a world of the future in which people still did any of the following: sing ‘God Save the Queen’; wear suits and ties (or, alternatively, suits and pie-crust collars); not smoke marijuana on a more or less hourly basis.

Then came the 1980s – a matte-black decade, true enough, but for all that still full of suits, pie-crust collars, and ever-resurgent patriotism. I once asked Peter York which era he’d visit should he happen to have a time machine. This was at a party in the noughties – a decade so lacking in self-awareness that people did indeed stand around discussing such things at fashionable parties. The author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook answered with alacrity, ‘Oh, the eighties, darling – I was HUGE then.’ He was – as were other so-called style gurus; for, by then, the teenage subcultures that originated in the 1960s had come of age and we're transitioning into the adult mainstream, so requiring a degree of consolidation and interpretation.