Hippies from the seventies, Mac and Lottie made a ton of money in the days of their progressive soft-rock band Charisma. But they've got little left apart from the large, grand but somewhat dilapidated house where they raised their family. Mac and Lottie now decide, on a whim, to sell up. They plan to travel the world in style - as flash-packers, not back-packers - and blow the lot.

However, their two elder children, now adults and far more sensible than their parents, see the house as their inheritance. Son Ilex fears they will come home to face a pension-deficient old age. Daughter Clover has plans of her own that involve a bijou second home in France, and the youngest, seventeen-year-old Sorrel, is looking forward to her gap year and would prefer to have a home to return to.

I hardly know anyone with a proper job, complete with full-scale pension and appropriate provision for old age. The people I know tend to be involved in music and media and live very much freelance lives that don't include anywhere near enough spare cash for the kind of investment anyone would need for a to-the-end retirement standard of good-fun wine-quaffing existence. Feckless and irresponsible we (along with Mac and Lottie) may be, but I reckon my generation really will die before we get old because we simply don't 'do' old.