The Times paywall is annoying. Because I want to link to this article from Caitlin Moran in Saturday's Time Magazine.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article3691593.ece
The gist being that her daughter is just about to become a teenager, just as Caitlin did in 1988. For her 1988 was boring and dead but it was the lull before the storm of the 2nd summer of love, ecstacy, Madchester, Stone Roses, smiley faces, whistles, the dawn, YBAs, Britpop, trip-hop, neons, beats, cities staying awake all night. That was the last time she was bored for 15 years.

Which brings us to 2003 at which point it had all been done. So then there's 10 years of just filling in the details. Travellers, Ravers, hippies, yuppies, punks, junglists, vintage upscalers, New Romantics, Marxists, Scifi nerds, hipsters, retromaniacs, Beyonce, Les Mis, Freeview, Facebook, Twitter, atrophied politics and on and on. It all just exists, but can you imagine a teenager walking down the street wearing something we would find genuinely jarring, or a new recreational drug creating an entire sub-culture, or a lifestyle springing up that's radically different to anything currently on offer?

So now she's excited for her 12 year old and that we're just on the cusp of the new. Because all over Britain, in bedrooms and at bus stops and on websites people are talking and striking matches and now we're just waiting for something to catch fire.

Except, except, here's another journalist of a certain age, waiting for the kids to start a revolution again. I'm just as guilty of this as her. Standing on the sidelines cheering, demanding that the kids change the rules. But not actually doing it myself. And it's a theme I keep coming back to. We're overdue for a social revolution now but where is it?

It's not hard to see echoes of Retromania in all that!