Gen X is entering its grandparent era — and it's hitting different

From Liam "Grandad" Gallagher to Sadie Frost, from glamorous TV presenter-former football club owner Karren Brady to the motley crew in the BBC's hit series about a group of midlife women forming a rock band, Riot Women, there's a new generation of grandparents in town.

- Louise Chunn, The Independent

Karren Brady

And they are clearly not going to be like the beige-clad nanas and pipe-smoking grandpas of old. As a late baby boomer, I was born at least a decade before Generation X-ers like Gallagher and Frost, but consider myself one of the new age of ancestors. My first grandchild was born when I was 63, which is the average age of a new grandparent in the UK, and I haven't for a minute worried that becoming a grandmother “aged” me.

Last month, I went to the Roundhouse to see the excellent New Zealand indie rock band The Beths — standing shoulder-to-shoulder, sipping a gin and tonic, and bouncing up and down through warm-up and main act. My leather jacket was silver and from Jigsaw, but otherwise I thought I looked pretty unremarkable among a crowd of twentyand thirtysomethings. In my eyes, there is nothing that is less than wonderful about coming to this point in my life and I am delighted that grandparenting has gone from being something that signified increasing irrelevance — at least semi-retirement, possibly decrepitude — to a glorious neon-lit cool status symbol that, if it has changed my life, it is only for the better.