“I feel low-grade anxiety pat about on my insides”

I’M STUFFING an onion up a chicken’s bottom. My husband’s sitting at the kitchen table, surfing for bike gadgets online and peeling potatoes.

“You’ve got an email,” he says. It’s from our 21-year-old son, studying for a year in North Carolina. I turn the radio off quickly with chickeny fingers and ask him to open it.

He reads aloud: “Hi Mum and Dad. Survived the earthquake, now just gotta get through Hurricane Irene and we’ll be fine. Can’t wait for it. All the people here are scared. The one state that Obama has declared an emergency state is North Carolina. Can’t wait to stand outside on the green and feel the winds and stuff. Over 100 mph in Florida already. Don’t worry.”

I flip the chicken over and look up; the last two words don’t sound like him at all.

“He didn’t say don’t worry,” my husband clarifies. “I’m saying don’t worry.”

I butter the underside, flip it over smartly and butter the chicken’s topside. Then I forget what to do with it. Flipping it over and back for a while, I can feel low-grade anxiety pat about on my insides, trying to get some traction.

“He’s fine,” my husband says. “I know,” I say. I’m spooning stuffing into the chicken in a kind of trance. There’s a filmic quality to the image I have in my head; high-definition 3D technicolour: my son is standing up, arms outstretched on the college campus green, shouting “Come on Irene!” under a blackening sky.

I know he’ll have considered the sensible approach of taking cover but he’ll have dispatched it in a split-second because where’s the fun in that? I mean, who wouldn’t want to fight a hurricane given half a chance?

Me, that’s who and, I suspect, anyone else who belongs to the age demographic which is defined — whether we like it or not — by things like feeling stiff and squinting at small print.

The generational boundaries have blurred to the point where it’s sometimes easy to forget there are any. In our 40s we’re fit and look younger for longer; we tend to share values with our teenagers rather than clash over them and we know our way round cyberspace. Instead of being divided by tastes in entertainment, we’re drawn together by them (X Factor, anyone?).

These points of consensus cause a kind of fuzzy, inter-generational homogeneity. However, the similarities do not fool me. Deep down in their bones, people without children, between the ages of 17 and 25, are in fact Mad, Fantastic and Oddly Inspirational Aliens.

Take this for starters: They Don’t Need Pillows. Unlike those of us above the age of 40 (for whom duck-down and memory-foam are needs, not wants), 17 to 25-year-olds are amazingly adaptive; they do without comfort with no complaint.

I’ve seen a teenager wake up after a night on the floor looking box-fresh, with the imprint of a dustpan and brush scored into his cheek and, when I asked if he’d slept ok, heard him answer, “great, thanks… you?” There was no deadpan about the dustpan: he looked surprised by the question. Likewise, sleeping four to a bed, fully clothed and minus bedding, in a camper van parked on a steep gradient doesn’t pose a problem.

Their Alcohol Limit is Made of Elastic; it can stretch to encompass drinking half a pub and waking up the next morning not feeling as if their brains have been dismantled and put back together with important pieces missing.

This next is truly inspirational: Their Worry is Made of Completely Different Stuff. Let’s face it, 17 to 25-year-olds only have to worry on their own account. They don’t worry on their parents’ behalf; what’s the point in worrying about their mothers when chances are, they’re safe and sound in the kitchen, stuffing a chicken?

Parents excel at worry but fear — parental fear — you should just see my fear, and 17 to 25-year- olds have got nothing on my fear. One reason for this is that they have no sense of danger, which comes from a belief in their own invincibility combined with an astonishing ability to live in the moment.

These Mad, Fantastic and Oddly Inspirational Aliens are not like us at all! While I’m squinching my eyes shut, praying that my son sees sense — which feels as futile as pulling the wishbone on this chicken — he’s standing outside in North Carolina, laughing his head off and fighting a hurricane.