How Generation Z made being a grandparent cool

As Britpop wild man Liam Gallagher becomes a granddad, Louise Chunn reflects on her own age-defying journey and looks at how hip Gen Z-ers will cope with the next chapter

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From Liam Gallagher to Sadie Frost, from The Apprentice’s Karren Brady to Jess in the BBC’s hit series Riot Women, there’s a new generation of grandparents in town. 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 oldies. 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 in London to see the excellent indie rockers The Beths -and I was sipping a gin and tonic, and bouncing up and down throughout the support band and main act. My leather jacket was silver and from Jigsaw, but otherwise I thought I looked pretty unremarkable among a crowd of twenty- and 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.

The seas part when I go out with my actual grandchildren. Edie, five and a half, and Mina, eight months, are delightful creatures, with big smiles and peeling laughs. It's important to acknowledge that grandmothering is such a different job to being the mother of small children. A parent is consumed with anxiety about safety, schedules, hygiene, almost everything. As a grandmother, I feel free to relish in their newness, get down to their level and scrawl all over a colouring book, too. But I still work, and as everyone loves to remind you, you just give them back when you want a rest.