A response to my most recent blog posting has set me thinking: that technology is marketed at hyperactive teens, because they have the money to buy it; the time to play with it; and presumably the mental agility to understand it. Knowing that my favourite book-related blogger Petrona would have something to say about this, I discovered that she had, in her very latest post, on the attempts of publishers to meet bookish teens at their level, that is, through social-networking software. All this immediately reminded me of two things.

The first was when I took my elder daughter, then aged about five, to the cinema for the first time. My daughter is of a somewhat nervous disposition so I took her to the most anodyne, bland film I could find.

But being a total cineophyte, she was intrigued by everything – whether the arcade games (for Star Wars I: The Fetid Marmite) or the film posters in the foyer of our then-local Enormoplex (advertising the forthcoming public exhibition of X-Men Cubed: Two Shakespearean Actors Doing It For The Money in Hugh Jackman’s Eyebrows) and asked at each stage whether each event constituted the actual film, and could we go home now? No, I said, more was to come, and in due course (we’d arrived hideously early to minimise stress, you see) we were admitted to the auditorium.

There then followed the adverts. It is said that fathers and daughters have much in common, and it was certainly true in this instance – neither of us had any idea what the adverts were intended to promote. To her eyes (aged 5) and mine (aged … somewhat more than that) the commercials conveyed nothing more than speed, noise, confusion and a sense of unease. To my daughter, cinema-sized screen advertising was completely new, of course. But I had a perhaps more profound realisation – that I had outgrown (or progressed beyond) the target audience of the commercials. In Darwinian terms, I am over the hill, and, having done my bit for the propagation of Hom. sap., I might with justification be taken away and thrown off the end of Cromer Pier.

The second was a 1968 episode of Star Trek in which the intrepid crew finds a planet in which all the adults have killed each other while the children play on regardless. It turns out that the children are in fact provoking the adults to imagine their worst fears, or something, all controlled by some external entity. The parallels with the advertising industry are too plodding to emphasize, so I shall just say that the point is made.

Now, recently I was urged to join Facebook to try out the Bookshare utility. Although this is a nifty site, I have the sensation that sites like this were created for people who live their lives largely in cyberspace (qv. Second Life, only intelligible to people who do Instantaneous Massage and eat MMPORGS for breakfast), and who are at least twenty years younger than I am. Surfing through Facebook and finding without really meaning to the details of the social lives of the teenaged children of friends, I have the squirming sense that I might be considered, in some quarters, a voyeur.

It’s hateful.

It’s hard to know what to do – to throw oneself in to such things is useful if only that one can be as preemptively armed as one can against the linguistic and social assaults of one’s tweenagers (at 9 and 7, they’re so there, and I have been told many times that I am ‘embarrassing’), but one can too easily come across either as Homer Simpson or as the Sad Dad who tries to be ‘hip’ at parties.

The other alternative is to reclaim such things for oneself, to stage a middle-aged coup and invite as many friends as one can to join the fun and exclude the spawn and larvae as much as possible (it might be worth noting that it was Petrona who encouraged me to join Facebook. I think she has my number…)

Now, that thought reminds me of a TV commercial which did strike a chord. The commercial was for a proprietary laundry product (I forget which, but don’t go looking for it, it’s probably not there any more). The scene: a teenager comes home from a rock festival having just enjoyed himself hugely, and dumps a vast pile of extensively soiled clothes on the floor, obviously expecting the Middle-Aged Mum to stir from the sofa and that interesting article in weekend Guardian about keeping chickens and shove the lot in the Dyson Double-Drum. But Mum-On-The-Sofa, who was clearly a hot babe in her time (is one allowed to say such things?) hardly looks up over her varifocals when she says “of course, in my day, we wore no clothes at all.”

By The Sea is 66,000 words done and the sex, violence and violent sex are beginning to stack up with such intensity that I have had to stop for a cup of cocoa and a lie down.

Although the kind folks at LabLit have so far published up to episodes six or seven, you just wait until chapter fifteen. Phew! Old Gits like me may be slow starters, but when we get going, well, all I can say is that I have banned my daughters from reading it until they’ve left home and are sufficiently far from my immediate proximity that they can credibly pretend that we aren’t related. Down, tiger, down.