A couple of different strands of my life, both important to me, have come together this morning and the result is…brunch.

The first strand is about my wish to be a Curious Elder. I doubt very much if I ever will truly be one, I am far too grumpy most of the time, but the idea of being in the know, even if what I know tends not to be valued by others of my generation, makes me happy. I do try to keep my grumpiness at bay by double checking myself when I do the ‘get off my lawn’ thing. I know full well that I did some incredibly stupid things when I was a younger person…

Highlights of my teen years: Beastie Boys fans stealing Volkswagen badges. Having most of your hair shaved really short except for a ridiculously small ‘rats tail’ plait at the back. Sincerely believing that Thatcher as the UK’s first woman Prime Minister would have a beneficial effect for women…

So when I see teenagers running as if from the scene of a crime, or hear them randomly yelling for no good reason, then I try to pause, remember that I did exactly those same things at their ages, which occasionally leads onto thoughts about that their world is like right now. I have come to believe that the teenage years are actually specifically there for doing stupid, dangerous, pointless things. The problem comes when people don’t move on from those behaviours, they don’t learn from them, or they don’t have people who care enough to provide boundaries and the guidance to get through them.

The second strand is due to my not getting the news from traditional news providers any more. I have sources of news, now filtered through the lenses and opinions of people I trust. I still disregard 75% of what’s on those sites as too much opinion without facts, or simply not interesting to me, or because they are telling me real, traumatic, terrible events that I cannot do anything about except get stressed, depressed and even more nihilistic. But I know what’s going on.

What I also get with those sources are insights into what people, particularly those younger than me, are getting up to these days. I really enjoy seeing them make some of the same mistakes my generation made, because I know I looks back on some of mine with fondness (do I still have some day-glo pink leg-warmers somewhere…hmmmm…maybe…) I have no interest in social media but I still manage to know what the latest (or last week at least) Tik Tok viral delight is. Which is where brunch comes in. Apparently loads of people are raving about baked oats, which intrigued me enough to make it

and now I just have to wait for it to cool down from the lava-like temperature it came out of the oven as.

I went for apple, pecan and raisin because chocolate is a bit much, even for me, on a Sunday morning. (I actually tweaked this recipe if you’re interested).

In conclusion: the young people are right about this one, baked oats works well. Tik Tok and all the other Socials might well be (almost) completely full of toxic trolls, slime, vicious pile-on’s and thoughtlessly anonymous poison but they are also the places we get to see what the younger generations are living through. How can we support and protect them if we don’t know those things?

So I shall carry on clicking on some of the articles that I’m not 100% sure on, just to keep up with what we all need to know. (Maybe chocolate should go into the next one…)

Photo credits when not mine: Unsplash.com