AS WE get older it is wise to measure our activities in the light of limited time. I have just wasted precious hours on reading Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow. At Hay recently Amis bemoaned the fact that he had become a grandfather, something about the call of the graveyard or similar pessimistic nonsense. When I see my grandchildren, four this week, I scan their eager little faces and wild, confident eyes searching for signs of myself in them. Rather than the tolling of bells I seek immortality through them.

Returning from a fearsome day at work my son was greeted by a worried and precocious Stanley. "I need help with my spellings," he cried. Keen to be needed, my son asked which words. "Spaghetti, broccoli and diarrhoea." Excusing himself for the moment he learnt the lesson that you need to be able to spell in order to use a dictionary. Returning, his heart sank when Stanley greeted him with: "and another one...." To be trounced by a four year old is par for the course he will find.

I have the most tenuous understanding of anyone under 50 and not much over that. Take Glastonbury. My youth was about rebellion and drama but, above all, about secrecy. We marched and argued and generally wanted to be different from any other generation. Once Glastonbury cost a pound and you got a glass of milk free. And a lot else. Now the BBC sends 850 reporters to cover the event and Paul McCartney and every respectable performer headlines. For £8,000 you can rent a luxurious tent for two for three days, complete with Egyptian cotton sheets and a plumbed-in bathroom.

If the young still wish to shock their elders then this piece of information certainly did it for me. Surely one of the beauties of youth is that you don't need to worry about plumbing or spelling.

With so much talk of young German footballers I was reminded of an elderly friend of my mother who was sent a German prisoner of war to help with her garden. He was young and charming. It wasn't until long after he left that in April 1946 the crocuses came up in her lawn and spelled out, 'Heil Hitler'.

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