We hear a lot these days about the strange fragility of our young people. Apparently, life has dealt them such a shameful hand, that they have been forced to remould university life into more of an overage kindergarten. This is where young adults, who terrifyingly, are allowed to vote, are being cocooned from the unbearable realities of real life with their ‘trigger warnings’, their ‘entitlement’ and their ‘existential threats’.

Well. Sorry. They have got it easy. Try being a Middle-Aged Snowflake – in particular a Middle-Aged Snowflake of the female persuasion. We are seriously hard done by.

A woman of a certain age is walking down the road and no one looks at her. No faux outrage here. This is by any standards a heinous act of violence and a classic case of ‘microaggression’. Ouch. To deliberately exclude her from their gaze is tantamount to shrieking ‘Sorry love, but you’re really not worth looking at; do you realize you’ve developed four new wrinkles overnight? You poor, sad old cow?’ And if some eyes do casually swivel in her direction, that is clearly overt sexual harassment.

Millennials are singularly cautious about being exposed to violent imagery. A few timid passages of the literary texts of Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Wolfe have them running for the smelling salts – otherwise known by their contemporary moniker, ‘trigger warnings’. Well, they wouldn’t know violent imagery if it sat on the end of their noses pulling the wings off butterflies.

Every time a Middle-Aged Snowflake scurries past a reflective surface (forget mirrors, no MAS is stupid enough to do that), it is as if her heart has been pierced by an intercontinental ballistic missile.

Mere ‘trigger warnings’ simply won’t cut it; from now on anything shiny that is capable of reflecting her careworn visage and pillowy curves should be covered with a non-reflective material. Women are busy creatures. They don’t want to be constantly reminded that the clock is ticking on their cover-girl viability. Covering up the offending surfaces is the only sensible option.

In fact, Middle-Aged Snowflakes don’t need ‘trigger warnings’. No. They are far too sensitive for that. They need ‘hair-trigger warnings’. It’s been a doom-laden couple of years and our ears are frankly traumatised.

Phrases such as ‘opinion poll’, ‘stealing your super’ and ‘bedwetter’ need to be expunged from the vocabulary or ‘hair-trigger warnings’ posted weeks in advance to warn us to shut the newspaper, switch off the telly and throw our electronic devices into the septic tank. We’d welcome alt phrases though; ‘truly free speech’, ‘abolishing the renewable energy target’ and ‘digging up coal’ would be a good place to start. Unsurprisingly those same phrases would be an apt hair-trigger warning for those who want to stay in government.

Youth doesn’t have exclusive rights to victimhood. In my guise as a Middle-Aged Snowflake, I am frequently victimised by cases of vintage supermarket red. Those evil bottles of aged, alcoholic flavonoids threatening my sanity with their unopened, uncorked, full bottled existence, hour after hour until I am forced to act. But do I complain? Yes, loudly, no one plays the hung-over victim like me. Although frequently hidden in euphemisms like ‘dodgy Indian’ or ‘brain tumour’. I’ve even got away with it once or twice.

When those drippy Snowflakes are finally delivered from the sanctity of the educational womb, they are in for a shock. The feeblest meltwaters will head home, unemployable, back to Mum for tea and sympathy. Not on my watch. Mum, I kid you not, is entitled, and entitled to a Safe Space. A Safe Space from immature whingers for a start. And in that Safe Space there will be no unwashed clothes, no grease encrusted plates and gummy cutlery and no filthy hoarding, occasioning council visits and fines over the state of the offending Snowflake’s personal quarters.

It will be an alt Safe Space of happiness and calm for their poor frazzled parents, who had no idea that investing their life savings and any hope of ever having an overseas vacation in the illumination of their charming Millennial, would result in a wuss with the moral fibre of, well, a snowflake and the reasoning abilities of a cauliflower.

The Middle Aged Snowflake wants to be free to enjoy her privilege, while it (and Western Civilisation) lasts. And we were privileged, weren’t we?

We were encouraged to use our brains, to question and to form our own opinions, not to take the coward’s way out, revelling in the echo chamber of political correctness. We were privileged to have a sense of humour too, and we might yet get the last laugh. What happens when our miserable little Snowflakes grow up and have progeny of their own?

It’s true that the poor little mites might be homeless and dependent on the diminishing largesse of the state.

What a hoot it would be then, if they, out of existential necessity fought back and culturally re-appropriated Western Enlightenment. Hair-Trigger Warning indeed.

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