I have never felt ‘old’. As a child, I was intrinsically aware of my own dumb childishness; youth and a profound lack of knowledge was just obvious, a part of the furniture no less surprising than the fact that the sky is blue in summer, or that grazing one’s knees falling off a Raleigh Burner is a painful and chastening experience.
It was obvious that a great many people in the world were immeasurably older and more equipped to do things than I was. I remember being struck by the notion that my maternal grandfather – an endlessly kind, brilliantly resourceful, witty and principled man, fond of tea and Araldite, if not a combination of the two – could possibly have been unimaginably ancient ever since time began. In actual fact he was a spry 62 years old when I was born – not even double my age now. As a kid, the fact that my grandparents had been alive during a war was distant and impossibly vague – in actual fact they met in a NAAFI up North when my grandmother sold my grandfather some fags, and what I imagine equated to a Brief Encounter-style crackle of heroically restrained ardour momentarily lit the air between them. What a world they had been teenagers in, I wondered occasionally when I was much older. How unfathomably distant it all seemed.
The signifiers of my grandparents’ seemingly ridiculous longevity were everywhere, from my Grandmother’s unwavering insistence that she could never, under any circumstances get her hair wet, due to the mysterious process of shampooing and setting that her ‘do underwent every five days, to their love of Gardener’s World, DIY and humbugs. The first time I realised that these two ageless entities were in anyway mortal was when I understood just how serious the heart attack my Grandfather suffered when I was five had been. This obviously momentous event, discussed in hushed tones for the best part of a decade after it occurred, barely touched me when it hospitalised him in the summer of 1985. It’s a damning endictment of the selective memory of youth, and a measure of just how protected my younger sister and I were from the news, that I vividly remember Back to the Future coming out that summer, but not my Grandfather’s near-death experience. At that point, I think my Grandfather’s age started to mean something to him, and its effects, both psychological and physical, stayed with him.
As a family, we were, as my Mother would modestly point out “comfortable”, but the sudden arrival in the middle of what was a very happy childhood of a ridiculously extravagant two-week family holiday to DisneyWorld in Florida stuck out even to my seven year-old mind. My family were used to a week in rain-lashed Cornwall, replete with picnics in lay-bys on the interminable journey down, not transatlantic travel, connecting flights, visits to the cockpit, root beer and LP-sized waffles for breakfast. This was the stuff of dreams, and I now feel that my Grandad’s “coronary” – the formal, oddly Victorian descriptor he chose whenever it came up in conversation later – drove him to finance the trip. I’m glad he did – it is still the best holiday I have ever had.
As I grew up, I noticed that my Mum was slightly older than the other Mums who dutifully turned up to the school at half three every day to collect their chattering offspring. When questioned, my Mum averred that she was 24, exploiting a basic lack of mathematical dexterity that left me unable to work out whether that was ‘old enough’ to have two kids in primary school or not. When you’re young, your parents’ word is a absolute; far less questionable that that of, say, the current Head of State, or a visiting deity, so when questioned by my short-trousered peers, I always used to tell them that Mum was 24. She wasn’t, but 24 was a right-sounding number. It turned out that she was a hardly-antique 32 when I was born, and nearly 35 when my sister arrived, but this was the Eighties – everyone’s Mums were in their early twenties when I was a kid. Or maybe they weren’t – maybe it was a national conspiracy. Anyway, I understand what she was doing now, even if I didn’t then. She was probably protecting herself from her own fears about how being a bit older than the other Mums around the school were, and saving us kids from feeling like odd-ones-out. It worked, too. It’s weird that the perception of how old women ‘should’ be when they have kids has changed so much in the intervening two decades or so. Thirty-five is nothing now.
My father, on the other hand, was always pretty elderly in my view. To look into those eyes was to understand that this was a man who had at some stages lived pretty hard, and probably had some stories to tell. He was well into his forties when I came along, with a strange ‘first family’ from a failed marriage that went belly-up before he met my mother. Tellingly we were never introduced to his initial clutch of children – all girls – only meeting one, a haughty and rail-thin thing called Anne when she came on holiday with me, my sister and my dad’s partner and children. Jesus, that was stilted.
My Dad’s early life - also discordant, under-explained and amorphous, contained considerable early tragedy. I only found out about the sister who died in infancy because I did a genealogy project at school when I was seven; I was once introduced to an astonishinglyold man at my Dad’s house who purported to be his uncle Tom, and must have been 90 if he was a day. Dad’s parents had died when he was in his twenties, which I could scarcely comprehend. He had inherited considerable sums of money as a result of these unfortunate events, and from the evidence available, seems to have attempted to spend a good couple of million pounds on the most frivolous things imaginable throughout the early-to-mid Seventies, seemingly cutting a swathe through the unmarried female population of the West Midlands in the process.
After meeting my mum in 1977, things were good: we owned a boat, ferchrissakes. He had a Ferrari that frightened me absolutely rotten when I was a baby, selling it in favour of a Volkswagen Passat estate when my sister was born in 1981, in an act of commitment to family life that, having met the man, he may still regret. The fact is that my father had had a life full of incident and adventure, success, failure, tears and joys even before I arrived. I found it difficult to imagine him younger than his prematurely bald, bulky frame would allow. He was shit at playing with us as kids, but loved us in his way.
He continued to love us even after he’d stopped loving my mother and had left her high and dry with two kids under five, and after the divorce, he just seemed to fade into advanced adulthood as the years went by. I can’t really explain why, but as the years passed, and I grew into adulthood, my interest in his opinion waned dramatically. Eventually, I was self-determined enough to realise that I didn’t need him and his influence, which was never all that good from a behavioural point of view anyway. I got older, he got less mature, and I started to see through him, through to the bitterness, the booze and the sadness behind all that bluster, noise and largesse. I thought he was a fake – out of touch and running out of time. Cruel it may have been, but I didn’t think I needed him any more. Between the ages of 12 and 33, no words passed between us.
This period of ‘radio silence’ between my father and I coincided with a phase of life that was defined by my age – the teenage years. Living in a nice house, with a lovely extended step-family and lots of friends, I was conscious perhaps for the first time of my independence of thought and deed. I have never felt quite as alive, as positive, as sad, as wildly unstable or as capable of everything and nothing as I did then. I was arrogant and insecure and drunk and sober and rushing and slow at the same time. Summers were amazing, everything was impossibly attainable and immediate; girls were ridiculously intimidating and amazingly aloof, but nothing really mattered, because everyone I knew was strong, lean, quick and sure of themselves – at least until they got out of public view and could safely lock themselves away and listen to their home-made TDK90 of sad indie, their eyes stinging in the dark.
Teenage boys, their minds buckling under the onslaught of new and dazzling cocktails of hormones, their thought processes derailed by unchecked emotions basically go fucking insane for about two to three years. It’s hilarious. During this period, not dissimilar to the Pon Farr – an accelerated and, if anything, even more hideous growth process endured by Spock in a particularly memorable episode of Star Trek – the older generation also plan their revenge. Our forefathers, somehow forgetting that young males in this state could probably obtain a ridiculously obtrusive erection browsing bathroom tiles in B&Q, think it best that they map out their entire adult lives – through the medium of increasingly difficult and lengthy tests, no less – in an 18-month period.
The older generation also decree that teenage boys should be made to sit the most important exams of their lives at the height of summer, when teenage girls are, for the most part, ridiculously beautiful. What kind of sadist arrived at this solution?
My memories of late teenage life are, it may not surprise you to learn, massively conflicted. I absolutely loved those summers: the football; the endless oceans of time in which to play the guitar or just hang around; the easy jobs, the lack of any real deadlines, bills or responsibility, and of course, the sunsheeeine. We were the masters of all we surveyed for two whole years, and it felt like we could dream anything up, and it would work. Sheer force of personality is the fuel of this arrogance, and it’s intoxicating stuff. You believe, outwardly, that you’re pretty fucking tip-top. You may not be – you may be able to appreciate when you’re not actually being very nice, or very reliable, but if anyone challenges you, they can fuck off, because they are not you or one of your friends, and hence they are at best wrong, and at worse, cunts. This is the mindset of the teenage boy-man as he lollops wonkily into the next, even sterner test of his wild opinions, unfounded self-assertion and untested mettle: University.
See, I thought I was ready. I was wrong. I thought that, because of my little band of blokes, my little world, my little ideas and my big plans, that I would move into University and would instantly overcome any problems whatsoever, in order to effortlessly continue my confident strut into grown-upness. Fuck me, what a pleb. University is the great leveller, and while I learned many interesting things about Journalism, photography, typography and writing while I was there, the main lessons I took from it were personal ones – how to talk to girls, how to deal with people who are older than you and not be intimidated by them, how to plan and be independent. University was like the shallows of adulthood, where you’re able to fuck up, fail and lock yourself out literally infinitely, until you’re deemed ready and capable of occupying a person-shaped space in the world of adults.
Funny thing is, the transition into ‘proper’ grown-upness, occurs really gradually once a series of milestones are passed (in no particular order: shaving, smoking, drinking, sex, driving, voting, suits, salary, documentaries, spare money). Passing these milestones, however, doesn’t change the person within. For example, as a man in his thirties, I still love playing videogames, perhaps more now than when I started doing so when I was 12. What’s that about? Is it some last-gasp gesture to retain childishness? Or is it that videogames, a ‘geeky’ and niche pastime when I started getting interested in them in the late Eighties – are now, at last, the valid artform that their greatest evangelists argued they’d always been? Have they grown up, or have I failed to? It seems oddly unavoidable that my generation will become the first to have children whose interest in this form of entertainment – which is now more popular and profitable than mainstream cinema, by the way – is matched by that of their parents.
Now that I come to think of it, videogames formed one of the cornerstones of my childhood, and every time I bang an absolutely ridiculous strike in from 30 years on PES 2013, my enjoyment of the moment is fortified by a thousand memories of my childhood. I remember doing exactly the same thing while I was the aforementioned hormone-addled teenager, and running downstairs to show my stepdad, an avowed Bournemouth and Southampton fan whose willingness to support the underdog in any televised match I still find curiously endearing. His delight was couched mainly in the ridiculousness of football games from the mid-Nineties, when 43-yard, swirling freekicks hammered in by the doyen of the prefranchised era, a man by the name of D. Becham. The joy of sharing those offside-free, fuzzy representations of a sporting world strangely detached from the harsh realities of a gritty 0-0 at Dean Court in December remains undiminished. What is that? Nostalgia already? Or apathy? Or just ‘the way of things?’ The older I get, the more ‘adult’ I feel, but at the same time, I can’t help thinking of that quote from Fight Club:
Tyler: We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need."
In many ways, I agree with this. As I approach an age at which my father had already left one family and would soon start another – an age at which my stepbrother, 12 years my senior, had three children and his marriage was shuffling towards its own end, I am still renting, sketching out plans to marry and am realistically no closer to having kids than I was five years ago. What is up with that? It’s by no means just me, either – my peers and I all come from similar, safe, fairly unspectacularly middle-class backgrounds, and have all edged our way into our thirties without necessarily buying houses or having children, and it’s no big deal. I was considering this when I read a piece online (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24173194) which avowed that, effectively, people in their early twenties were still dumbass teenagers, at least psychologically speaking, thanks to the softening of parenting styles in the last few decades, and the fact that some self-determining events, such as learning to drive, or buying a house, could be put off indefinitely. As a result, the psychologist quoted in the piece argued:
"The idea that suddenly at 18 you're an adult just doesn't quite ring true. Alongside brain development, hormonal activity is also continuing well into the early twenties. A number of children and young people I encounter between the age of 16 and 18, the flurry of hormonal activity in them is so great that to imagine that's going to settle down by the time they get to 18 really is a misconception.”
Laverne Antrobus, Child Psychologist, Tavistock Clinic, London.
At the risk of sounding like the ghost of Mary Whitehouse, what will become of the children? To be honest, most of the teenagers I bump into on a regular basis are massively self-obsessed wankers, too busy taking selfies, lowing and farting in eachothers’ mouths to understand just how primal and vital and brilliant being a teenager can be.
Waves of quasi-bitterness aside, and while we’ve already discussed my teenage wankerdom in considerable detail elsewhere, I think they’ve been refining it over the years. If my lot have been allowed to think it’s OK to not have jobs and ‘wait and see’ what we want to do with ourselves until our mid-thirties, what the hell are the next lot going to do with us as an example? If my parents had spent the first thirds of their lives sitting about playing Ridge Racer and trying to make it as flamenco dancers while living off my grandparents, I’ve no doubt that the olds, having dodged bombs for King and Country during their own youth, would have taken roughly three seconds to send them off to the workhouse, or whatever.
Personally speaking, I do consider myself ‘adult’, but not ‘old’. I’m ready for whatever the world has to throw at me, I think. I’m by no means gung-ho, though, and the fact that I can’t yet drive a car means that my aforementioned list of ‘adulthood checkpoints’ needs some work, but otherwise, I’m cool. I’m there. I no longer worry about getting served in pubs, despite having a face that places me firmly in my early twenties in the eyes of strangers. I don’t mind introducing myself to strangers, or telling them a bit about myself. To sound poncy for a minute, I have noticed and enjoyed the fact that my taste in food and culture and music have developed as I’ve got older. I’m braver and better at things that I was as a youngster. And why? Because I’m a man, and I deserve to play in the adult area of the world.
I don’t really understand how I came to this conclusion though – at no point did I receive an email stating ‘congratulations on entering gainful employment and renting a little room in a city you weren’t born in – you’ve become One Of Us!’. Perhaps that would have been handy. A Welcome Pack (perhaps with some basic DIY tips, nappy changing instructions and a pictorial guide to decent cunnilingus) would have been a good idea, and could have been issued to all 21 year-olds, following the compulsory surrender of the keys to their parents’ houses.
I think the main reason I have no problem with the fact that I’m 34 and no longer a kid in any sense of the word is the choices I was given when, as a twattish wannabe journalist in my (very) early twenties, I decided to quit my first, idyllic job. I had loved it – I basically played videogames all day, had no bills to worry about, and got home to a homecooked meal at my parents’ house every night. I cleared £900 a month, paid £100 a month in ‘rent’, and my total outgoings were less than £300 a month. I turned up at work hungover fairly frequently, and no-one minded. I was able to sit in a nice office surrounded by lovely people my age and either edit articles about games I loved, or write things I fancied writing, and as long as they were funny enough to get a laugh out of my editor, they went in a magazine with 40,000 monthly readers. I wore combats and hoodies to work, and spent my lunchtimes down on the beach in Bournemouth, or marvelling at the fact that bikini-clad women would fill the shops in summertime.
I can clearly remember thinking at the time that I was constantly skint (this is a sensation that has persisted thoughout my adult life, regardless of income, savings or anything else), but I distinctly remember paying £40 for a really fucking cool t-shirt and thinking nothing of it, which I wouldn’t do now, nearly 15 years later. A cursory glance at my CD collection tells me that most of my tangible assets during this period were purchased from the music store around the corner from this ridiculously simplistic place of work. I had a lot of free time, a lot of toys and nothing to care about. I got bored, the lack of opportunities angered me, I resigned for no good reason, and was at once propelled into a very real, altogether different world.
As kettles of fish go, this was a new one. All of sudden, there was no pissing about; there was no hanging around with friends who were a little jealous of my stupid creative job. I was unemployed. Still living at home, and still a Mummy’s boy – nowhere near the grown-up yet – and I had thrown my first step on some sort of career away. I had no plan, either - I just resigned out of pure childish frustration. “Screw this”, I said, “I’m off to London, where the proper journalists make the proper money.” And just seven months, roughly one hundred long nights of the soul and dozens of rows with my put-upon parents later, I was right – off to London I went, unprepared, unaware, excited and unlikely to succeed. I thought I was an adult, though. I thought I had the perfect blend of rock-star arrogance, talent, experience and sheer force of will to work out, but I had forgotten to take one quite significant factor into account before slinging the ol’ knapsack over my shoulder and heading to London: adults.
As a 20 year-old straight from university I was obviously cut considerable slack. As a 23 year-old making a large commitment to a new job in a city stuffed to the gills with identically-qualified copyeditors, I grossly overestimated my own abilities, and my alleged experience in the field of magazine journalism. I just went there, and continued to gad about like the teenager Dr Antrobus would no doubt conclude I still was. “London!”, my ridiculous inner monologue bellowed triumphantly, like some combination of Del Trotter, Loadsamoney and Liam fucking Gallagher, “we’ve fucking made it! It’s here! The lights! The music! The people! Look at his shirt! Look at your shoes! It’s all happening!” As you can see from this short but accurate transcript of those times, my inner monologue can be a right dick when it feels the need to be.
So, with this foaming, lunging idiot at the controls, I went to work in London. I moved into a quiet, unassuming little house with a quiet, unassuming girl (hello Cristina, how are you?) and that was all too quiet, so I moved to brash, noisy Shoreditch and lived with brash, noisy Jo, drank a lot, grew my hair and generally behaved like a massive teenage arsehole with no ties and too much cash. I became my own worst nightmare. I went out a lot. I saw lots of bands. I became a big, galumphing child again, and I liked it. Trouble was, after an initial period of getting-to-know-yous, work didn’t.
I forgot, you see, that I had purposely eschewed the unstructured, low-paid, fun job in order to be taken seriously in my profession, which given what actually happened next, seems similar to the bassist from the Courteeners going solo and releasing a six-side modern rock classic that in every way surpasses the unalloyed brilliance of Dark Side of the Moon, but that’s just hindsight. For a while there, my work was pretty good, but familiar problems surfaced: I didn’t like the bosses. I didn’t like conformity, or ‘the man’. Short of actually being in Aerosmith in the mid-Seventies, I couldn’t have had more freedom to write, to edit, to sit around holding court and being opinionated for a reasonable salary – but it wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t enough, because I was still, at heart, a child. In the midst of it all, I hadn’t grown up. The end, when it came, was sudden. I was sacked, properly, for ‘not being good enough’ at my job, despite being told two months earlier that I was doing brilliantly. In a way, the ‘corporateness’, the ‘grown-ups’ that I’d feared would always ruin things by getting their way, had turned up and done just that. Permit me this one aside:
"Poor little boy kicked out at the world, but the world kicked back, a lot fucking harder."
The Libertines, Can't Stand Me Now [Which was out at the time. Ooh, there's prescient.]
The Libertines, Can't Stand Me Now [Which was out at the time. Ooh, there's prescient.]
I look back on that day (18 December 2003) as a major turning point in my journey from childhood to adulthood. It was the first time I had my wings clipped – the first instance of the world being much bigger and more selfish than my aspirations and sheer arrogance would allow it to be. I was powerless for the first time – 100 miles from home, with rent to pay, no cash and the contents of my desk in a black sack next to me on the pavement (this is not an exaggeration).
After that day, I realised that doing a job that makes you feel like a kid is a kid’s game – I needed to be an adult, to live away from home, to earn my own money, however falteringly, and to make something of myself. I realised that journalism probably wasn’t the trade for me, long-term – even though I still love it and would probably return to it now. I realised that to be an adult was to face difficulties and work out a way around them, without constantly calling your Mum and begging for help. I realised that the world is, thanks to the millions of competing opinions and power struggles at play, probably unfair, but if you keep plugging away and get lucky you can go literally anywhere.
All of these themes, which had been building for months previous to the Unfortunate Event in Mortimer Street, suddenly hit me when I returned to my dingy, expensive and brilliant flat in Old Street and wondered what the fuck to do. I remember sitting in the lounge of that place, making a cup of tea, having a little self-pitying weep, packing a bag and leaving for my real home – the one I’d haughtily spun on my heel from 11 months earlier.
Two hours and a world away from that moment I was back in my local, deciding what to do next. It would take a year of indecision and a trip to Asia to teach English before I got my shit back together, but basically, I’d realised that you can’t pretend much past 20, because the world is too serious a place. Sure, there are fancy dress opportunities and stag-dos, there are theme parks, concerts and cup finals, but the world of the grown-up is more difficult, challenging and rewarding than the cheap, short-term thrills doled out to unsuspecting teenagers. It’s the lack of stabilisers that makes the bike’s wheels turn faster. Knowing that failure could be absolute makes success more desirable, and therefore more often attained. Adults can eventually learn to understand themselves and their personalities, using their time and skills to create the world they want to live in; younger people, knowing no better yet, wait for ‘cool’ shit to happen to them, and get arsey when it doesn’t arrive as they’ve decreed.
I really look forward to being older, in a way. The older people I know seem to be, generally speaking, fulfilled, full of life and experiences and somehow calmer about things than their pimply, hormonal counterparts. Is this perhaps because as you get older you steadily realise that, well, this is it, and rushing through it at 300 miles per hour could leave you prone to missing the good bits?
Deep down, though, we don’t change as people, I think. It’s said that we get more conservative in our views as we get older, and as a staunch non-voter who grew up in the teeth of Thatcherism, who comes from a Lib Dem family, that worries me. I have no idea what I’ll be doing when I’m 67, but I have a good idea of how I’ll think about things, the views on I’ll hold, and the friends I’m likely to have. I hope one day to pass on my ‘wisdom’, such as it is, to a son or daughter, and hell, if that happens, they’re in for a busy half-hour or so. I hope I can grow old and stay fairly cool, in the manner of the late, great John Peel.
The fact that I’m in my thirties may have changed many things about me, physically, but isn’t it weird that I still feel the same inside. To get metaphysical on yo ass for a second, assuming that the body is a container (for some a beautiful vase, for others a battered cardboard box, whatever) the ‘essence’ inside that container remains the same. I am essentially still the same me that I was on the day after my 19th birthday, for example, albeit minus the apocalyptic hangover. Inside, behind the eyes, nothing changes, and I find that deeply intriguing. I look forward to seeing what the passage of time does to my general world view, but I’m comforted that by and large my spirit, or ethos if you like, won’t change.
This might sound like the kind of nonsense peddled in the small shops you’ll find in the centre of Glastonbury, but I’ve seen it in action. Even in his early nineties, my step-grandfather Eric – a bafflingly fit man of six foot with an encyclopaedic memory and a love of pipe tobacco and brown cardigans, from what I remember – was casting admiring glances at Steffi Graf as she cruised to victory in the 1992 Wimbledon Final. No connoisseur of tennis, he was a lifelong cricket and football fan, really, but Eric Arthur Cranidge was still, in his mind at least, the same 19 year old he’d always been, surreptitiously checking out the girls on the TV like he and his mates might have done in decades past. I am heartened to think that in some ways, nothing really changes as we age.
