35 and will be 36 this year.

I guess I would be considered a millennial but an old one that came of age during what could be called the tail end of Gen X’s lime light. In a way I feel more nostalgia for that period of time rather than when I was reaching my late teens/early 20s as by then the things I was into (culture wise) were generally fairly outside of the mainstream, so popular culture didn’t penetrate into my leisure time and meant less to me. This was probably aided by the emerging ease of seeking things out on the internet, which itself feels like a slightly different place to the social media saturated internet of today and the recent past. So still a pretty analogue childhood with a pretty digital adulthood.

Finished university just before the exorbitant rises in fees, first in my family to attend one, entered the workforce just before the financial crash, and although I’ve managed to be almost consistently employed since then and have managed to save home ownership feels the biggest issue that’s out of kilter with the experience of my parents’ generation to my own (I do live in London however, but saying that so did they when they owned).

Although my parents were themselves relatively “alternative” and themselves married and had children fairly late in their lives for their generation, I think one thing I appreciate about being the age I am now is that the pressure to do these things by a certain age probably isn’t as strong as it would have been had I grown up in an earlier time.