I received an unexpected reaction from two young women who, as long as I had remembered them, right back to primary school, had been so reserved as to be almost invisible. They were attending Melbourne University by then and one of them phoned and said they were returning to the bush for a weekend and inquired whether I would care to join them for a drink to discuss my column. Puffed-up by the knowledge that anyone had actually read the piece and that it suddenly seemed interesting enough for university students to wish to discuss it with me, I very nearly fell over my conceit. When the two young women arrived at the local pub, they insisted on buying the drinks - something that was so unusual at that time it ought to have put me on guard. They spent the next two hours neatly slicing and dicing my pretentiousness and explaining in the nicest possible way why I was a dickhead for writing such garbage. The word misogynist may have been used, though I'm pretty sure I would not have understood its meaning. They also explained in detail the articles of faith that I would learn to call feminism, how it had granted their own lives confidence and meaning and why men had to begin rethinking everything.

Those hours were so terrifying and humiliating and illuminating they had burned themselves into my consciousness, I told Greer, and I had had to reread her book and all sorts of related material with new eyes. ''Well,'' she said, much amused. ''You were young. We all were. You live and learn, and only the very stupid can't change their minds.'' Happily, my first columns were written long before they could be uploaded to the internet, and their crass and ill-formed opinions reside only in dusty, rarely visited archives, never - with luck - to be recycled publicly. They are recalled only by events, like that ramble through the streets with Germaine Greer, that dislodge them from the memory. The subject of youth's ever-waiting entrapment got a run this week when Treasurer Joe Hockey, mired in the difficult task of selling a budget that imposes higher fees on all sorts of things, including tertiary education, found himself face-to-face with old television footage of Young Joe the fired-up university activist railing against the imposition of a $250 administrative fee. The end of the free education, he fumed, this young man from the age of entitlement who would grow older and declare an end to it. We might thank the fates that most of us at the age of 22 were not filmed and our words and deeds carefully archived for later recycling.

In the past 27 years, Joe Hockey has changed his mind about free higher education. Whether we like the ideas he has changed his mind upon or not, all of us ought to be granted the right to grow older and wider and possibly wiser and to alter our views as circumstances change. It is only those whose minds are little more than tattoos inked early who avoid the opportunity. The new age of Twitter and Facebook is likely to bite a lot more of us on the bum as the years go by, just as the age of television has caused Joe Hockey a bout of bother. Just about everyone these days is born with a mobile phone to hand, the pictures of the birth itself often enough fired into the ether, and hardly has a child learnt to communicate before he or she is shooting pictures and opinions to their homepages and accounts, there to exist forever - short of the world annihilating itself - within the cloud. By the time those children are in high school or university, it is likely they will have their own blogsite onto which they will pour out whatever they are thinking. There are upwards of 100 million blogs already spinning around out there, and more power to them.

It is a privileged and wonderful thing to have the means to broadcast to the world your latest discovery about life and to theorise and think out aloud. We ought to celebrate this universal carnival of jabber. But while doing it, we need to make allowances for the human condition. Our ideas change over time. Call it evolution, not hypocrisy, even if pictures and words frozen by camera or keyboard can be used to argue it.