Kara covers her ears. She turned 14 a week ago, but wants to hear no more. Especially now that her mum is speaking — and that too, to some of her (Kara’s) friends. Kara’s cheeks have gone a rich shade of pink. She’d dearly love to have two hands to cover her face as well. It is so embarrassing. “Stop it, mum!” she pleads. Her mother, Mandy, looks taken aback. “What did I say now?” she enquires. “Everything, mum, everything. Just stop. Please.” “What? I only said I love Beyonce. What’s wrong with that?” “Beyonce is so not your generation, mum. Enough already. Could you leave me and my friends alone now? To chat among ourselves? Please? And could you shut the door on your way out?”

Mandy is narrating the details of this episode to us the following day, her eyes glistening with laughter. Listening to her, I realise her daughter Kara and I could never be friends. Firstly, and obviously, we are generations apart. More importantly though is the fact that she is a child of a different time, an evolved era. Kara has caused me, inadvertently, to glance back at my own childhood and upbringing and she has, in doing so, alerted me to how she and I might easily have been raised on two separate planets. Had she been born in my day, her attitude would have been different. For one thing, she may not have blushed, but looked on kindly, even gratefully.

My own mother was — not to put too fine a point on it — up with the times, musically speaking. Her fashion sense may have been rooted in a bygone era even for her day and age, but her desire to keep abreast of the revolution taking place in music as the 1950s gave way to the ‘60s then to the ‘70s — a decade that music critics everywhere more or less agree witnessed some of the finest musical outpourings — well, her desire was never sated. Her siblings may have found themselves trapped in the rut of country music and its endless permutations and variations on heartbreak, love and loss, cheating and dishonesty. My mother never allowed herself to get sucked into that well of depression. Every pay day, she would send me out to buy a record or two. They were called records back then; vinyl. And, happily, vinyl is making a decent comeback.

The songs she asked to buy were always something recent, played on the radio. And importantly, the records were bought after a small discussion — with her 14-year-old son ... yours truly, that is. I felt thrilled to have mum on my side and never for once thought she was trying to merge with an age that was not really hers. In fact that thought only entered my head when Mandy was recounting her Beyonce episode recently.

To turn the discussion on its head and be fair to young Kara, I wonder how I would react today if I was in her place, a 14-year-old, with all the music I desire a mere mouse-click away? I recall when I was that age, wishing I could have access to all the songs of my time and not be limited to just one or two records a month. I’m not so sure now. Superabundance, over-abundance — they are appetite killers. The glut of availability has made gluttons of us all and in the process killed the thrill, the secret longing, the savouring of the aperitif. Desire has been snuffed out or at best it is momentary because everything is, as I said, out there.

I cannot imagine what kind of conversations Kara’s own children will have with her in 20 years’ time. We thought in 1969 that the world was going simply too fast, with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon and all. It is only when one casts a look back over the years that one realises the truth about the relativity of pace.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.