They say spending time with young people keeps you young yourself. Rubbish. I’ve just spent a day with four teenagers, and I feel about 95. There is nothing like discovering exactly how ancient you appear to the youth of today to put paid to fanciful notions that one is still – as we said in my day – down with the kids.
Example. I asked Will Spratley, 15-year-old music and drama enthusiast, whose style he admired. He pulled out his copy of NME, and flicked to an article about Gorillaz. “I think Damon Albarn looks good,” he said. And then he added, helpfully, “He’s the lead singer of Blur.” Thanks for the tip, son. Ouch.
But ’twas ever thus. To be a teenager is to live in a parallel universe to the world of grownups and little kids. Teenagers have their own vocabulary, their own jokes, their own heroes. They scorn our rules, but police their own society with exacting systems of etiquette in which the simple matter of making conversation with a member of the opposite sex is as bound by convention on the top deck of a bus as it ever was when Jane Austen was observing a country dance. At the nub of teenage rebellion is their compulsion to flaunt their difference. Why else do you think they come down to breakfast sporting those white iPod earphones (or in the case of 15-year-old Ryan Noel-Hartley outsize headphones in unignorable fire-engine red) if not to tell the rest of the world that teenage lives are lived to a soundtrack we can’t hear, aren’t invited to hear, and wouldn’t understand even if we did?