Bloggers note: Quite unexpected to find that today’s reading fits so well with my blog site title……. Generation Gap. I spend a lot of time (and sometimes writing) about the gap between various generations, and recent weeks have seen a lot of comment in mainstream and social media about how people of different ages handle the current pandemic in their daily lives.

“Every Day with William Barclay” William Barclay – Reading for 17 May

THE GAP

It would be wonderful if parents could indeed always be called the friends of their children. There is so often a strange and almost unbridgeable gap between parents and children so that they are almost strangers to each other.

There are reasons for that gap.

I repeat here the story of May Sinclair, the author, who said to her little girl that, when she was a little girls, there were certain things that she was not allowed to do. “But you must remember Mummie,” the little girl said, “you were then and I’m now.”

Of course there is the gap between then and now. Parents do not bridge that gap by being determinedly “with it”. There is in fact, nothing more embarrassing than, in the old phrase – “mutton trying to look like lamb!”

Gap there is, but each generation must be itself.

Age trying to behave like youth is worse than youth aping age. We must begin by being ourselves.