What became of us

we’re uniquely lucky too. We’re the have-it-all generation. We’re the first real products of the pill because as soon as we were sixteen doctors were handing us little green packets of Microgynon even if we’d come about an ingrowing toenail...’ Laughter.
    ‘... and we had several years to have tons of sex before AIDS arrived.’
    A few sniffs of disapproval.
    ‘We’re the ones who looked at our mothers and thought, I don’t have to be like that...’
    Awkward shifting of bums.
    ‘…we were even the last generation to leave this town with no real fear of unemployment. It was possible then to be a real student, have a good time, do very little work and still expect to rule the world in twenty years’ time. We had free education and equal opportunities without ever having to fight for it. We had ambition. We had the two most powerful forces guiding us — our mothers’ expectations, and women’s magazines. Education, liberation, ambition, advertising... it’s a pretty potent cocktail...’
    Annie took a sip from her wine glass.
    ‘D’you remember cocktails? Do you remember how cool you thought you looked with a paper umbrella and a wedge of pineapple stuck up your nose as you tried to sip lurid green froth?’
    Laugh.
    ‘... of course, our generation’s chunk of metaphorical pineapple was choice. That great Thatcherite buzz word that falls out of the lips of Blairites just as easily as the novelty straw in your first Pina Colada did.’
    Smiles of recognition.
    ‘You know what happens when you drink cocktails too enthusiastically? Well, we drank our cocktail of ambition, education, freedom and choice just a bit too recklessly, and what did we get?’ Pause, while people wonder what the answer will be.
    ‘... I’ll tell you what we got. We got a massive hangover called angst. How much of your day do you spend worrying? I don’t just mean about whether the world’s going to end tonight — I think it’s tonight, isn’t it, according to Nostradamus? — I mean every day. Let’s start in the morning. If you’re single, it’s trying to remember how many alcohol units you consumed the night before, and if you’re married with kids it’s how much fibre there is in your breakfast. You go to work, or you stay at home, and if you’re not worrying about whether you’ve come as far as you wanted to, you’re worrying about where you’re going. If you’ve got a family, you worry about whether you’re a good mother to your children, you try to remember all the hamburgers they’ve eaten and whether they were before or after the new food regulations were brought in, and whether gelatin in fruit pastilles counts, and even if you convince yourself that they’ve never eaten a BSE prion in their lives, you’ve got genetically modified food to contend with which you may have been inadvertently consuming for several years. If you’re single, you just worry about whether you’re fat. You worry about getting a suntan, and then you worry that you’ll get osteoporosis if you don’t, and then actually you begin to worry about worrying. You wonder whether you should get yourself analysed, or whether you should be on Prozac. You buy a crystal, you join a yoga class, you splash out on a facial, and that leads to more worry about whether you’re following a skincare routine properly or flossing your teeth often enough...’
    Laughter. Got you, thought Annie.
    ‘…and whatever your circumstances your biggest worry is getting old. Be honest, isn’t it? Even if you couch your own worries in terms of how long you’re going to be around to look after your children, your primary fear is your own mortality, which you didn’t even think about until somebody called you an elderly primigravida, or you had that awful realization that you could no longer get away with Top Shop clothes, or your best friend died...’
    No coughs now.
    ‘... you see lines on your face and you try vitamin E and when that makes no difference, it’s on to AHAs, and then you worry that if you start plastering on the retinol, you’ll have to do it every day for the rest of your life. You suddenly understand why film stars inject their lips with collagen — you never knew that you were going to get lines round your mouth too. And whenever you see your friends you end up discussing the politics of plastic surgery, and whether any of you would be daft enough to have injections of botulism to freeze your muscles in your forehead to