You know you're getting old when.....

...the once subversive songs of your youth are now played out as muzak in pub restaurants.

Working at the Southern Manufacturing & Electronics show this week, I stayed in a rather overpriced but ok pub/hotel. Whilst enjoying an overpriced but ok meal in the restaurant, I was shocked to hear The Stanglers' "Peaches" playing in the background. Not the sanitised radio version mind, but the full unexpurgated X-rated version that once caused my mum to go pale and drop her cup of tea.

For anyone who was young during the Punk era, lyrical profanity was the essence of the Punk zeitgeist - shocking, exciting and very cool. Hugh Cornwall's rasping vocal really took me back to that afternoon many years ago when my mum strolled into my bedroom just as Hugh roared the phrase "Oh Shit, there goes the charabang." To say she was unimpressed was an understatement. Sitting in this nondescript pub restaurant, I wondered if such coarse outbursts still had the power to shock in an age of gangsta rap and M&M, when the idea seems to be to fill the entire song with beeps and blank spaces. I observed a family group of granny, mum & dad and assorted children seated across the restaurant; I waited for Hugh's frank discourse upon the anatomical peculiarities of an observed bathing beauty to arrive, with all the decorum of a massive and unexpected fart; But alas, there was not the slightest flicker of reaction. call me old-fashioned, but the word "clitoris" is not one I would normally expect to make an appearance over dinner with granny. Or maybe it is, and I'm more old-fashioned than I thought.