Smells Like Teen Spirit

I’m getting old.

I can tell.

Not from the fact that my hair is going grey at the sides (though this is a definite indication of approaching decrepitude). Not from the fact it takes very little these days to give me a bad back. And not even from the fact that if I have to run anywhere I no longer take any pleasure in the sensation of getting there quicker.

I can tell I’m getting old because ‘young people’ annoy the living hell out of me.

Young adults. Youngsters. Teens... OK, OK. To be more exact: students.

I’m now into my last academic year of a part-time English degree that has taken me well over a decade to complete. When I started it back in the nineties I felt I had far more in common with the young full-time students who shared the seminars than the grouchy semi-retired mature part-timers. I felt I was still young and hip and wore my spring chicken-ness with pride along with my indie band t-shirts and my waist-length hair (oh yes, it’s all true).

Now I have short hair, wear sensible boots, clothes that don’t endorse anyone or anything at all and regularly armour myself with an unfashionable waterproof hill-walking jacket (hey, you just never know, right?) – and my trips to Uni make me so grouchy I must surely be walking around with a snarl big enough to make any student’s union rep wet their baggy-arsed trousers through to the gusset.

I can’t help it. They slouch around like they’ve got the whole effing day to waste (which they probably do) – while I’m having to rush around like a maniac to get to my seminars and then high-tail it back to work so that I don’t lose too many hours and therefore too much money. They punctuate every third word with “yeah?” and start every sentence with “Ok right...” They seem proud of the fact that they haven’t done the preparatory reading that I’ve slaved over for the last two days or attended the lecture that I panicked about getting to.

But most, most of all one of them actually complained the other day about getting up “early”. “Yeah, like, I woke up this morning at 8.30, yeah? And it was like, way too early, and I just thought, right, that I only had to be on campus for the New Lits lecture at 11, yeah? And I just thought, right, oh man, I just can’t be bothered, right? 8.30 is way, way too early so, like, I went back to sleep cos, like, I’d had about 7 pints the night before, right, at the union bar and I was totally wasted, it was too much...”

For the last week I’ve been regularly woken up at 5.20am by my eldest boy. I haven’t had a lie-in (i.e. slept past 7.0am) since 2003. Neither Karen nor I stop from the moment we get up until the moment the kids are both in bed in the evening. And we do it day after day after day. It’s no big thing really. It’s just life.

Now I realize I’m probably being unfair and knee-jerk and reactionary and an old fuddy-duddy but I just can’t deny my feelings. And if it makes it sound any better I can honestly say that – hand-on-heart – I didn’t particularly like other teenagers when I was a teenager. They annoyed me then and they annoy me now.

So maybe I’ve always been old?

Or maybe I’m not getting any older at all – I’m just staying the same while the world gets younger?

Who knows? But if these young whipper-snappers don’t learn to get out of my way when I’m walking about in a hurry I shall tan the backs of their hairless little legs with the rough end of my walking stick and no mistake! Harrumph!

The Decline Of Western Civilization

Is this the end of the West? The end of Western supremacy and prosperity?

I don’t pretend to know much about global economics or international stock markets but with all the talk of “credit crunch”, “fluidity” and “the shoring up of financial institutions” even I can suss that things are possibly going tits up in the world.

America is panicking. We’re panicking. Europe is flapping about and looking to Gordon Brown for advice (I’m panicking).

Could this be the end of the world as we know it?

Quite possibly. There’s no money, There’s very little oil. Our military forces and those of the US are stretched tighter than Sarah Palin’s fake smile and Bruce Forsyth is plainly losing it on Strictly Come Dancing...

All in all things are looking bad.

With a couple of youngsters gambolling about the house I’m finding that I’m worrying more and more about what the future holds (or rather what it doesn’t hold). The world they may come to inherit may be far more constrained than ours ever was:

• No more easy travel as oil prices have rocketed skyward. (Or rather have floated upwards like a hot air balloon as no-one can afford the fuel for rockets). People now have to work locally as no-one can afford to commute.


• Food prices increased so much that we start receiving aid packages from Zimbabwe. Suddenly everybody has a vegetable plot in their back garden and those who paved over their gardens to park two extra cars and a gazebo are now desperately digging them up again in time for planting.


• House prices dropped to new affordable lows but no-one can afford to hire the removal men to make a change of address worthwhile.


• Everybody on crap wages that are taxed to death in order to pay for the mistakes of the suited buffoons whose irresponsibility with the nation’s money led to this recession in the first place.


• Bruce Forsyth, now well over his first century, continues to fluff his jokes on Strictly Come Dancing and throw in the odd tap step to hide the fact that nobody is laughing.

I’d emigrate but there’s nowhere unaffected by this chaos to emigrate to.

Whatever happened to “the future’s so bright I gotta wear shades”?

The Meaning Of Matter

In honour of the experiments due to take place tomorrow at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland where two beams of subatomic hadrons will be blasted into each other at speeds approaching the speed of light in order to determine the true nature of matter, the universe and God Himself I too have decided to conduct my own particle acceleration experiment from my modest laboratory here in Leamington Spa.

In order to rip apart the very building blocks of existence and unravel the secrets of life at the subatomic level I shall at some point tomorrow, armed with my own homemade Large Hadron Collider (a pea shooter) be firing matter at speeds a little under the speed of light at the back of my boss’s head when he isn’t looking.

I confess that I do not know what will happen when the pea matter collides with the skull matter. I’m hoping that new particles will be created and / or liberated which will give me clues as to how the universe itself began. It is true also that a black hole may open up in the skull matter and small amounts of blood may be seen emerging from the aperture. What this will mean for the future of my own personal existence I do not know though I am certain I can guarantee the continued safety of the rest of you. Do not be afraid.

My friends, we stand upon the brink of a new dawn. A new Aeon is about to begin for all of us.

Fellow citizens of earth I salute you. Wish me luck.