"What was it like growing up in the 'Olden Days' Daddy? And other questions designed to destroy your self-esteem...

It was a relatively normal morning, getting the middle child off to nursery after a 5.12am wakeup call to request an episode of Paw Patrol (or maybe Blaze and the Monster Machines) Rushing home to my five-year old daughter who looked at me with a warm, loving smile and then asked...

"Daddy, what was it like growing up in the olden days?"

That question hurt. I want to be clear that I am not old, well not in the grand scale of things anyway. Admittedly, I do have a mortgage, I seem to creak a little when I stand up, it takes me longer to crawl out of bed and I enjoy speaking about lawn care. At the same time I know all of the songs from K-Pop Demon Hunters and can hide most of the grey hair if I completely shave off my beard. So, I am not that old.

And yet there I was, being asked about the olden days as if I had personally witnessed the invention of the wheel, participated in a shield wall, or had witnessed the Industrial Revolution first hand. As if my formative years were somehow continuous with the Domesday Book where I had my own personal entry.

I then considered the apps and websites that require so much scrolling to reach my birth year that maybe my daughter might actually have had a point. Or the fact that my favourite album was now celebrating its 25th anniversary edition and reunion tour (for anyone asking, Jimmy Eat World's 'Bleed American' album - still brilliant).

The horrifying truth that events I remember as “quite recent” are now taught in schools as part of their history lessons. I wasn't going to let my daughter know that, I needed to arm myself with some facts and show her just how spritely I still am...and what I found was pretty comforting.

The Medieval Period was an astonishingly long time ago

The medieval period, also known as the Middle Ages, ran roughly from 500 AD to 1500 AD.

That’s one thousand years of castles, knights, tournaments, dramatic facial hair, and extraordinary insults (there will be quite a few blog entries on the latter subject).

It also ended more than five hundred years ago.

Five hundred.

To put that another way: the people building castles and charging into battle on horseback are far more distant from us than most of us realise. Some castles were built prior to the Aztec Empire being founded in 1428, ok so that is actually most castles. That's how old they are.

I am not from the olden days. I am not even near the olden days.

The olden days are so old that the people living in them would have had their own olden days.

This was excellent news.

So when did it start?

Historians usually place the start of the Middle Ages around 476 AD, when the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Rome had dominated Europe for centuries, bringing roads, laws, aqueducts, and the sort of public infrastructure modern councils can only dream about (if this blog ever takes off I am 100% using it to push the local council to take a more active role in pothole repairs!).

When Rome fell, Europe gradually broke into smaller kingdoms. Over time, castles rose, knights emerged, and the medieval world began to take shape. Like most history, it didn’t begin neatly on a Tuesday morning, just before a nursery drop-off. It was a slow, often painful transition.

But somewhere in that late fifth-century reshuffle, the age of knights got underway.

So am I old?

Let us examine the evidence. The medieval period ended around 1500 AD. The Battle of Hastings happened in 1066. My earliest memory is substantially more recent than both.

Therefore, scientifically speaking, I am not old. I am simply a person who remembers a time before smartphones and tablets, used VHS tapes and had to wait for 30 minutes to dial in to broadband. I explained all of this to my daughter calmly and persuasively.

She blinked.

“But you’re still really old, Daddy...and you have no hair.”

Children's words are brutal.