The state of the younger generation

At the risk of sounding like Victor Meldrew I've started to seriously wonder how the children of today are being brought up. In the last couple of days there have been two instances of school children, both boys and girls - who appeared to be about 10 or 11 - using all the swear words you can think of at the tops of their voices in the street/at the bus station.

Maybe I'm old fashioned but is there really a need to use these words all the time? What do they say when things really go wrong? It just heightens the difference between how things were when I was their age and how it is now. I had never heard the F word until I was over 18 though I had come across it in books.

The other incident which caused me some consternation was on Monday. I popped into Sainsbury's on my way to the bus station and having got the few things I needed, visited their loos. There were two girls in there standing around and one in one of the cubicles. I realised very quickly that the one in the cubicle was doing a pregnancy test. If I'm being charitable I would say they were about 16 but could well have been younger.

What concerned me was they didn't seem too bothered about doing it in public as it were - maybe they thought I would not realise what they were doing? But as well it concerned me that there was a need to do it in the first place. Were they old enough to have sex? Why weren't they using contraception? Wouldn't it have been better to have done it at home? I was pretty gobsmacked by the whole thing.

I suppose I ought to have felt glad that at least the one concerned was taking steps to find out early enough to do something about it if she wanted to. Instead I felt uncomfortable that I was a witness to the incident and sad that it should be happening anyway.