They might be giants, but still so young

We're attending a family friend's 22nd birthday party. The pandemic robbed her of a 21st, so she's making up for it with a shindig in a sheep shed, timed perfectly to coincide with the first mistralesque buffetings of the season from the mountains. The cold wind exposes this rustic structure as something you might use to sieve woolly animals rather than shear them.

Only a few hours ago - egged on by a Pavlovian wood-gathering response to the chill in the air - I was another couple of hundred metres higher than our current, not-unremarkable elevation and found myself alone in the bush when enveloped by a fierce microstorm.

Within seconds, the sunny afternoon turned spiteful, strafing me with millions of frozen pellets. Not snow, yet not really sleet nor hail, either, the minuscule projectiles infiltrated my clothing at my collar and marched south to my underpants. The prized territory occupied without a fight, the raiders settled in to melt triumphantly. Ick.

By the time I made it back to the ute, the storm had passed. The forest floor was white and the dirt road a nascent slush of bogging inevitability. Driving out of the wild and unpredictable zone, I came across a truck which had succumbed to the slippery track. It had missed a corner and careened up onto a verge; front axle buried in soft, red soil, a rear wheel off the ground.

I pulled alongside to find the driver assessing the askew conundrum. On his haunches, then up again, on his back, then up again, he looked like, and had the unhinged energy of Tom Baker's Doctor Who, if Tom Baker's Doctor Who had a penchant for high-vis and meth.

Peering into my passenger-side window, and, it felt, my very soul, three-quarters-baked Baker cocked his head, causing his curly mop - surrendering to the same gravity responsible for his pickle with the flatbed - to drape heavily to one side of his face. Yellow teeth bit a cigarette.

Was he OK? Yeah. Did he need a lift? Nuh. Could I call someone? Nuh. Did he have a phone? Yeah. Did he want me to try and tow him out?

He seemed stumped.

Taking time to survey my two-wheel drive Hilux with a car-jacker's leer, he sniffed a bit, then sneered: What? In that thing?

Made as imposters on the mountain, my deficient vehicle and I left him to it. Rapidly.

I assumed the inadequacy I felt upon my encounter with Doctor Poo-Poo would be pretty much it for the day, but, now, in this draughty shed, mingling with these millennials, the feeling is only worse.

Since when was I so short?

It's not that I'm tall to begin with. I'm a couple of centimetres shy of average for an Australian man (179.2cm) but, in Mexico (169cm), would be officially gigantic and lucky for those hombres, too, I wasn't born somewhere along the Rio Grande, because I doubt I'd be able to suppress the despotic tendencies displayed by those endowed with length, let alone the myriad other superior qualities associated with this gift from the gods. As they (ie: tall people, when alone together) say: "With great height comes great responsibility".

And aren't we half-pints grateful.

MORE B. R. DOHERTY

Despite my meagre proportions as far as our own lanky country is concerned, I'm still not used to being in a room where I have to stand on tippy-toes and wave just to score a G&T, and if it weren't for the presence of my suddenly Lilliputian family, I'd be the tiniest person here.

I begin to worry there's actually something karmic about it because, just this week, I bought Randy Newman's LP Little Criminals, ostensibly to wallow in its caustic opening track Short People.

I've been particularly delighted by the lyric: They got little cars That go beep, beep, beep They got little voices Goin' peep, peep, peep ... but given the embarrassment in my own little car (suitable, apparently, for clown-ferrying and not much else) earlier today, these words have taken on quite hurtful dimensions and I wonder whether there shouldn't be some kind of social media movement (#Meshorttoo) to flush out towering songwriters of the '70s who've been climbing the charts unchallenged all these years while eroding the agency of the undersized.

Thankfully, tonight, as we squeeze past all these knees and shout into various belly buttons, none of the attached young people seem anywhere near as cruel as Randy Newman or James Taylor; they're rather lovely and generous, if not sometimes endearingly naive (my wife, raising Jennifer Grey's infamous nose job for some reason, has just discovered one of them has never heard of Dirty Dancing).

Adding to the exotic nature of this group, is the fact they're all in fancy dress and, as they dance (not dirtily), they move and communicate in alien unison; a single, precious, unfathomable creature swooning through the dark ocean. Mobile phones blink on, blink off; bioluminescent appendages evolved to attract food and sex.

Away from the throb and sway, I glance over to my own children, who are playing darts (a game short people, if they try really, really hard, can be good at, like golf) off in a corner. There's about a decade's difference between them and the Gen-Ys and the two age groups prompt me to chart my own journey from childhood to adulthood to mid-life; a modest arc spanned in the time it takes to swallow the dregs of my second drink.

It's probably the gin talking, but being cabled temporarily to such an impressive bandwidth of youth seems to short-circuit the melancholy and cynicism of being past your prime and despite a lazy habit of buying into the generation wars, it's heartening to know we're churning out clever, well-fed and happy humans, who appear far more serious and aware of the world around them than we ever were.

But along with this straitening wisdom, there remains, especially under this old roof tonight, the silliness, ebullience and optimism you'd expect from fledgling adults, quite remarkable considering how unfair the past couple of years have been for this most social and adventurous of cohorts.

As I crane my neck with affection, I wish upon my freshly charged Tanqueray that, very soon, those wonderful rites we took for granted in our day will be reinstated for these youngsters.

Perhaps some overseas travel? Even a few sweaty music festivals?

Surely, not such a tall order?