LAUREN BRAVO: When the internet makes me feel old my memory starts to desert me

THERE’S a trend on the internet at the moment (I know you love it when I start columns with the words, ‘there’s a trend on the internet at the moment’) that involves flagging up the amount of time that has passed since stuff happened.
By The Newsroom
Published 15th Mar 2014, 06:00 BST

It’s done not as helpful practice for pub quizgoers, but with the aim of making us all feel old.

Friends is 20 this year. It’s been a decade since Bennifer split up. The kids from The Cosby Show are all octogenarians now.

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DON’T YOU FEEL DECREPIT? And then we take a misty-eyed moment to reminisce about what we were doing or wearing or eating at the time the particular stuff happened, and reflect on the way time has been relentlessly marching onward again.

Much as everyone loves a dose of ‘weren’t the 90s hilarious?’ with our morning cereal, the ‘bet you feel old’ trend is a smug one because it’s aimed at people who have pretty much no right feeling old at all. In fact, the less time you’ve been on the planet, the more likely you are to see the 12 years that have passed since Girls Aloud won Popstars: the Rivals as a significant chunk of time worth gawping over.

Today’s choice piece of the nostalgia pie was: Buffy the Vampire Slayer started 17 years ago. I’ll admit this one took me back slightly – not at how old I am (I’m well aware of this, I recently bought a posture cushion to help with lower back pain), but at how old I was when I first watched it. Nine. I was nine.

The same year I did my tea-stained topic book on The Romans, I was also watching Sarah Michelle Gellar drive a stake through a vampire’s heart without ruffling her pre-millennial up-do. Probably with one finger on the remote and an eye on the door at all times, of course. I’m not even sure I’d persuaded my parents to let me watch Friends by that point – brimming over as it was with the corrupting influences of caffeine, ugly naked people and improper grammar. I don’t feel old, more impressed at how much popular culture I had managed to consume before I was out of frilly ankle socks.

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It seems to me there are two ways to counteract the feeling. One is to focus instead on how surprisingly young people and things are.

DID YOU KNOW Richard Wilson was only actually 54 when One Foot in the Grave started? CAN YOU BELIEVE it’s been a mere year and seven months since the London 2012 Olympics? It feels like CENTURIES AGO! Doesn’t time trundle by at leisure?

And the other is to simply claim not to remember things at all. ‘Buffy… was she the cartoon rabbit?’ I will say, clutching my lower back for effect. Then the internet will leave me alone.