"Have you not got broadband?" the small voice floated across the hall. Then my husband stumbled into the kitchen, fazed and muttering darkly about junior valley girls and who did they think they were anyway, with their swishy, flicky blonde hair and their teenage attitudes. My daughter had her friends over to play. Six years of age and all utterly mired in the consumer paradise that is 21st century Ireland.
He had been putting on a DVD for them to watch and had been roundly humbled by their mockery. Apparently, broadband is the only way to go. DVDs just don't cut it. Nor does our big old black telly. I didn't like to tell the little girl that actually I'm far too mean a mammy to buy a new telly just cos the old one doesn't look right any more. Save money? For what exactly? For a rainy day. I, like, don't think so. Saving for a rainy day is so, like, '80s. Get with the programme Mom! The latest stuff, that's what these girls are all about.
And they are not the only ones. They are picking it up from us, their parents. They are picking it up all round them. We are all at it, spending money we have, and from the reports of the lending agencies, money we don't have, like goodo.
It's not who we are any more, or even what we do. It's what we buy. We identify ourselves by our stuff, by the type of clobber we put on our backs, by the cars we drive, by our houses, by our children and the type of clobber they wear, by the sports they play, by our accents, by the kids' activities, by our choice of holidays, by our books, our gardens, our furniture. The list is endless and the choice is endless.
Yet a sameness creeps in. Cos when everyone can have the latest, when it's cool and "in" for about five whole minutes, then everything, even the latest thing, loses its value. What's the point, if everyone has access to it, if the exclusivity goes? What's the point if you can't tell the world about your fabulousness, that you had the nous, the exquisite taste, the perception and the jamminess to get in there first. The implications are huge. It's what our consumer society runs on. The tiger could be headed for the doghouse.
There are whispers in the housing market that people don't always like spartan modern houses. That homes with a bit of personality shift faster. Course, you could be taking a huge gamble on that one. You might be selling your gaff, full of what you think is cool 1950s furniture and some new kid on the block might think it was terribly naff, terribly mid-1990s.
I was a teenager when the pope called by, so I've half a generation on the pope's children. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, everyone was just surviving. Yes of course we had labels, but they didn't mean as much cos we were all out of work; nobody had any money for labels. Designer goodies were too far beyond the pale to be widely acquired. It didn't matter then whether you wanted the latest this, that or the other. You got by without it. It was okay because everyone was in the mud.
You got some of it, of course, but not the huge quantities of everything people have now. You waited, saved a bit, did without. And it didn't really hurt, or make any great difference, that we had no iPod, or PC, or DVD, or Bebo or GamesStop or internet or new clothes week in, week out.
What did make the difference was Dublin airport and Shannon and Dún Laoghaire. And the awful poignancy, the scenes at Christmas that would make a stone wall melt. The difference was, everyone left. They finished school or college and left. There was not much stuff and not many young people left to buy it.
Back then you could zip through check-in and security in Dublin airport in 10 minutes, on your way to your crap job in London or Berlin or Boston or Munich. Now people are beginning to rethink trips if they involve airports. The boat looks the easier option when faced with hours of airport chaos. But life is, for the most part, miles better. I drove to beautiful west Cork last week and the prosperity, the sheer vibrancy in the air, was palpable.
And I'd rather queue for hours any day than face the prospect of waving goodbye, for months at a time, to my loved ones. We have much more choice. Surely a good thing. You too can drive a car the size of a living room. In fact, I'm only waiting for the day when a Yummy Mammy drives a double-decker bus in through the gates of the school car park. All the safer for Alex and Iseult and lots of lovely room for the ballet run and Tesco. And, of course it operates on garden waste! What fun!
Or you could just keep the huge old telly that works fine. That speaks volumes, too; how you can toss your head and proclaim that you just don't care about acquiring stuff. How you don't need it, secure as you are in yourself that you are fine without it. Good for you!
Ultimately, none of it will matter. To us. Our kids, though, are another story entirely. The pope's grandchildren will be sorting through the detritus. We'll do it differently next time round.
Now, enough! Where did I leave my new Furla handbag?
• John Waters is on leave