CLARE FOGES: I imagined having a lifestyle like my parents. Now I know I never will

This week, UK writer Clare Foges compares her life to that of her parents
READ MORE: Market town declares ‘housing crisis’ with residents forced out as rental rates soar to £1,499-a-month – half the average local salary

Here’s how things were meant to be by the time I hit my mid-40s. I would be living in a house overlooking a village green with wisteria round the door, an Aga in the kitchen and a Labrador dozing in the book-lined study.

Every summer we would go somewhere lovely in France, to eat moules frites under vine-covered terraces. In the winter, we and our children might dig the ski goggles out for a trip to the slopes of Kitzbühel or Courmayeur.

Later we might be in a position to check out the local private schools, the headteachers laying out the riches of the Mandarin club and Olympic-style sports facilities. When they had finished their A-levels, we would wave them off to university, coughing up for bed and board with a little bit extra for beer money.

Meanwhile we’d have been dutifully stashing away money in the pension each month so that retirement would open up new vistas: a bit of antique collecting, those river cruises where I imagine they eat a lot of blue cheese and drink a lot of red wine.

This is what I expected because we all expect our lives, materially speaking, to run on roughly the same lines as those of our parents. Or, to be honest, to be a notch up.

This week, UK writer Clare Foges compares her lifestyle to that of her parents. Stock image used

But I and others of my generation — 30 and 40-somethings born to those famous ‘baby boomers’ — are undergoing what I’d call ‘The Great Expectation Shift’. With an economy limping along in third gear, a cost-of-living crisis and horrendous mortgage hikes, the expectation that if we worked hard enough, we would be able to afford our parents’ lifestyles is vanishing.

The Great Expectation Shift came to mind this week when I read prices have plunged by up to £20,000 in the last month. True, what goes up has to come down; some argue that a house price correction is long overdue. But for those on the wrong side of that correction, such as those trying to sell starter homes thanks to an expanding family, it’s just another reminder of the huge gulf between baby boomers and us.

In the halcyon 1970s my parents — then a trainee architect and nurse in their 20s — could buy a three-storey townhouse a hop and a skip from London’s Hampstead Heath for around £20,000.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, more than 60 per cent of people born in the 50s and 60s were homeowners by the age of 30; for those like me born in the 1980s, it was 36 per cent. Indeed, houses are more unaffordable than at any time since 1880.

My own house — a beige pebble-dashed semi — is not exactly the stuff of property porn. However much I tell myself that I’m fortunate to have it, I can’t help but feel it measures up poorly to the homes I grew up in.

In the 1990s — partly thanks to the government’s Assisted Places Scheme, which gave money off fees — my mother (then a single parent following the death of my father) was able to send four children to private school. Yet between 1991 and 2016, school fees soared by 550 per cent, meaning this is now a no-go for most middle-income families. My mum was also able to help fund our way through university, partly because three of her children did so in the days when the state picked up the fees.

Though our holidays weren’t lavish, a gaggle of us would annually hop on a ferry or plane; this year my husband, three children and I have managed three days in a caravan in Weymouth. To afford a foreign break for a family of five in 2023, you need to sell at least one kidney on the dark web.

As for saving for a pension — ha! Every penny is being poured into the huge gaping maw of the monthly mortgage bill.

‘Want more, work harder!’ some industrious baby boomers might cry. But salaries have stalled or fallen backwards compared to our parents. This has a major impact on how families are raised; in earlier generations a family could be more easily supported on one income — now this would be very difficult for most.

This isn’t written out of bitterness. But it can take some time to get used to the new reality — and it seems to be a semi-permanent one. As the World Bank recently warned, young people today will not enjoy the same living standards as their parents without a growth ‘miracle’.

Thankfully my children, aged five, four and two, are too little to be concerned about the quality of our holidays or why we no longer buy branded butter. With the wisdom of the very young, they know what really matters: not the value of your home, but who’s in it.

Festivals? Rather you than me, Kate

Kudos to the Princess of Wales for joining the glow-sticks and gurning brigade at a music festival. Kate pictured at a boxing event when she was younger

Kudos to the Princess of Wales for joining the glow-sticks and gurning brigade at a music festival. Rather her than me, though.

My last foray was Reading Festival in 1997. Metallica were headlining, the mosh pit was moshing and some drunken joker decided to push over a line of portaloos like they were dominos. Alas, yours truly was in one of those loos at the time. I do hope HRH did not suffer such indignities.

Meghan needs a sausage roll

Meghan has been spotted wearing a patch that promises to calm users by slowing down brainwave frequency

Meghan has been spotted wearing a patch that promises to calm users by slowing down brainwave frequency. No offence, but at this delicate point in the Duchess of Sussex’s career, perhaps a brain-slowing device is not the best idea.

For a simpler and safer ’emergency calming device’ guaranteed to make cares float away, can I recommend instead a Greggs sausage roll?

We must bring back dog licences

Another week, another young child, five-year-old Farrah-Leigh Nichol, is brutally attacked by an out-of-control dog. Last year I required physio when another park-goer’s mutt —built like a small rhino — smashed into my knee. Given that the number of dogs has exploded in recent years, and given the fashion for scary breeds like the American Bully XL, isn’t it time we brought back dog licences?

Devastating: Five-year-old Farrah-Leigh Nichol, pictured, was brutally attacked by an out-of-control dog

The latest stop smoking wheeze (excuse the pun) is to put cards into cigarette packets warning of health risks. I’ve got a better idea. How about an app that shows how fast your face will age after years on the ciggies? People are far more likely to be motivated by vanity than by health.

The super-rich are now going on private jet ‘cruises’, hopping from city to city by plane with a select few, rather than on a ship packed with thousands. I can’t think of anything worse than being cooped up at 40,000 ft with entitled people whining about the wine vintage being served — paying £130,000 for the privilege. Still, it’s cheaper than the £169,000 government wants to spend on sending each migrant to Rwanda.

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