Derek remembers the day in 1957 when we boarded the Dominion Monarch to sail from Australia to New Zealand (I don't, I was only three months old). The ship was the last of the great luxury liners, black-hulled and countenancing only one class of passenger - first class. How it was that we, the family of a junior engineer, were afforded such a passage by dad's employers is still something of a mystery.

What was most memorable for Derek was the acute embarrassment of having, under the frank and withering gaze of the upper classes, to struggle up the gangway with the common household articles that mum and dad had failed to pack - such as the clothes-horse. It seems our parents have been embarrassing us for as long as I've lived.

I remember taking girlfriends home and being mortified by my dad's unfaltering ability to steer his conversation with them into what he did during the war. Funnily enough, they found it a lot more charming than I did.

In the last few years the embarrassment has taken different forms. Taking them shopping and noticing that my father has several levels of stains in his trousers is one form. Bringing people in to the house and noticing, as if for the first time, that characteristic 'old people' smell is another. Taking mum or dad out and hearing them mumble and stutter, falter and repeat themselves when we talk to waiters, bank tellers, check-out girls, and so on is a third.

But that last paragraph should really be in past tense. Embarrassment's redeeming feature, along with most emotions, is that it recedes after a while, even when the stimulus remains. My attitude now is 'You don't like the way my dad dresses? That's your problem! You don't like the way my mum talks? Well, bugger you!' I know the rest of the family thinks the same way.

You realise, as you watch your preceding generations struggle, that the world is just not set up for old people. Moreover, they are constantly being held to the performance and behaviour standards of people in the prime of life. Fail to match up and you'll get some off-hand or patronising twit fifty or sixty years your junior telling you what to do. We do not treat the very young this badly, why do we do it to the very old?

I like the image of the battling granny who looks at you with that 'I've farted. So what?' expression, who pushes in at supermarket check-out queues, waves her stick around to make space, and shouts 'get out of my way, you cheeky young whippersnapper!' I'd like to see a lot more aged aggro, actually. I think it would help to straighten out a few more of us young whippersnappers who grew up with the idea that old people were, somehow, something to despise.

The 'you'll be just the same one day' threat just doesn't seem to work for a long long time, but finally it really does hit home. Then, you grow out of being embarrassed by the elderly, precisely because you realise the truth of the words, precisely because you realise that life is still good to have, even in that straitened form it takes in later years, even with the bodily betrayal, even with the nagging confusion. Even then, you won't want to let go of it.