Each generation always had it better than the one before - until now. With the world in turmoil, our Writer at Large says it is agonising to see today’s young face a dark future

I hadn't read Philip Larkin’s poem High Windows in years until the other day. I first came across it at school. Back then, what caught my eye was the punch it delivered when Larkin used the word "f***ing" in its strictly biological sense.

That was 40 years ago. I read the poem again at the weekend after listening to Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, on Radio 4 talking about Larkin. Armitage mentioned High Windows and I thought I’d revisit it.

What hit me now about the poem wasn’t its edginess, but the sadness it stirred inside me. In High Windows, Larkin sees a young couple. He envies them. Sexually liberated in the 1960s, they have a freedom he never had when young.

Then Larkin ponders how “forty years back” he would have been envied by his parents’ generation. They were bound and constrained by religion in a way he wasn’t in his youth. The poem tells us that the old will always envy the young as freedom, prosperity and happiness march onward decade by decade. But that natural state of affairs – that hopeful progression – no longer exists. It’s dead now.

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