Teenage Angst

Yes, yes, I know I’m a long way from my teenage years but things have conspired, over the last few days, to make me think about them.

Firstly, I had two friends to stay for the weekend. We’ve known each other since meeting at eighteen in our student halls of residence. We’ve still got the list we wrote of what we thought we’d all be doing when we were …err..well, old! And none of it has come true (so ‘soothsaying’ was clearly never an undiscovered talent!)

And by coincidence, I’ve had an email from The Guardian to say that my ‘Playlist’ piece is being published on 1st October. I wrote about a song that was in the charts when I first went to University and met my two friends. It still sends a shiver up my spine and whisks me back to the early ‘80s whenever I hear it. But you’ll have to wait until the weekend to find out what it is…!

On Saturday, as part of our busy schedule of activities, we went to see ‘The Inbetweeners’ movie. Not just because we wanted to ‘get down with the kids’ but to be honest, we just fancied a laugh. We did wonder whether the man collecting tickets would try to re-direct us to ‘Jane Eyre’, but no, we got in and we weren’t quite the oldest in there!

If you’ve never seen The Inbetweeners, well… it’s kind of outrageous, unbelievable, disgusting and essentially quite sweet, all at the same time. (But probably not your Mum’s cup of tea).

There’s one scene in the film where they’re all in Greece on a ‘party boat’ and although it was full of tanned, beautiful people, I just thought – ‘Thank God I’m not that age again’! All that angst about how you look, if you’ll ever meet anyone and who fancies you or doesn’t, if you’re wearing the right clothes or drinking the right drinks; trying desperately not to be ‘square’, trying to make the right friends and…. aaagh. Looking back, it was really horrible.

And then this morning, browsing ‘Facebook’ as I you do, I saw that the writer Geraldine Ryan had been driving her son to university at the weekend and she’d heard ‘At Seventeen’ by Janis Ian, on the radio.

So I clicked on the YouTube link here and it made me cry.

Maybe you were a teenage beauty queen and therefore don’t know what I’m talking about but I reckon, for most people, those growing-up, ‘inbetweener’ years were difficult. And because it’s got such universal appeal, if you can capture teenage angst in your writing (which David Mitchell does brilliantly, by the way, in Black Swan Green), then I reckon you’re onto a winner.