Teenage Kicks

Why is it. That the default setting. For novels that are written by young men. Who want to appear modern. And 'edgy'. Is to write in these really short sentences. That make everything sound. Like bad spoken word pieces. Delivered by young men in skinny jeans. With too much hair. Who should - by rights - be being bullied. Instead of everyone thinking they're cool.

Because they take drugs.

And write in sentences that make them sound really bored. Or, at best, mildly autistic.

I'm reading one at the moment; I have to meet the author, which I am dreading, as he is actually a teenager. Worse than that, he's already published four books! Not books you or I would've heard of, naturally (they were probably all published via Twitter, in between taking drugs and playing Call of Duty 4 or something), but yes, apparently he's a bona fide novelist. His book is a lot like Skins - it has a variety of drugs (ketamine, mephedrone - yeah, I just checked the spelling of that, that's how in touch I am with youth culture - pills [unspecified, but unlikely to be Anadin]), quite bleak sex and a protagonist who bestrides the likeable/hateable divide like a skinny jean-wearing colossus.

It is of course making me feel at least 104 years old. My teen years were so sedate I lived in fear of my mum taking me to the doctor for tests to see when my hormones were going to kick in. I liked books. I didn't like the taste of alcohol, so I didn't drink (till I was in my early 20s, actually). Having been to an all-girls' school run by crazy nuns, boys were a foreign country that I didn't have a passport to. I couldn't see the point of smoking (I was never going to look cool, so it would've just been a waste of money and a pair of unsullied lungs). My formative years had been scarred by a collection of government warning films (now being expertly exhumed by Charlie Brooker in How TV Ruined Your Life) covering a dizzying array of past-times and their ghoulish outcomes, so I was never going to experiment with drugs. Why would I, when picking up a sparkler could result in nearly losing a hand, and my desire to go swimming in an abandoned quarry had been thwarted by the looming presence of Death - actual Death, with a hooded dressing gown, and a scythe and everything - not to mention the ever-present threat of harmless-looking men in cars offering to 'show me some puppies'.

Man alive, it's a miracle any of the 70s children a/ got out alive and b/ have gone on to have children of their own.

So, despite the fact that this book has been presented to me as a chance to 'relive my teenage years', I'm sticking with the author's view that his book is aimed at people who are 'between 16 and 22' - they're nothing if not madly ageist, 18 year-olds - and I shall just nod and smile, and pretend to understand when he tells me how to market his book via crowd-sourcing or cloud gathering or something. And wonder if the current Government's approach to warning youngsters of the dangers of modern living via just printing the names of STDs on the pants of sexy girls who are going to carry on having sex regardless is a bit, well, tame. They should at least be being told not to have sex whilst touching a pylon and flying a kite. I blame Nick Clegg. Fucking liberals, they take the danger out of everything.