A recent BBC survey indicated that 31 per cent of teenagers have problems with depression. Well, of course, they have. No one is happy as a teenager. It’s a uniformly terrible time. You haven’t yet found your signature perfume, your income is around £12 a year and you spend the whole time riddled with acne and in love with someone ghastly. And you think “ paradigm” is pronounced as it’s written. And you have no access to fine wines. And you think wearing a ratty pork-pie hat is a good idea. And you can hear whenever your parents have sex.
Whenever I see the figures for adolescent suicide and self-harm, I’m surprised they’re not higher. It’s only that teenagers haven’t got enough perspective to see how awful their lives are that stops them cutting their heads off, en masse. And 69 per cent aren’t depressed? I think we can conclude, from this, that 69 per cent were drunk on cheap, non-fine wines at the time. However, a more worrying statistic thrown up by the survey was the fact that 87 per cent felt that society didn’t value them. Clearly, these guys weren’t drunk at the time. Indeed, they’re abnormally observant. We don’t value teenagers. Or if we do, it’s within a narrow set of parameters: we like beautiful teenage celebrities (Lindsay Lohan, Charlotte Church) and sporting teenagers (Theo Walcott). But that’s it as far as admiring the little guys go. Yet we get sad and dismayed when young people uniformly announce that, when they grow up, they want to be “a celebrity”. Well, really, those kids aren’t dim: aside from drug-dealing or inheriting a large fortune, it’s their best bet for status in the modern world until adulthood.
We don’t really like young people. Most of the time we’re scared of them — or at least a bit resentful about them. Why must they hang around alleyways in menacing sports-gear, giving little or no indication whether they’re one of David Cameron’s hoodies — the huggy ones — or the other kind, who are mental on black-market horse-crack and about to steal your phone? And it’s not just the kids on the streets we suspect of skullduggery. If they go to university, we act as if they’re about to do something sneaky and intellectually underhand that will give them an unfair advantage in later life — the kind of advantage that might mean they have a nicer house than us! — and sting them for £13,000 in tuition fees to hobble them a while.
Given the way we view the small folk, it’s easy to forget, that, by and large, your teenage years are actually the years you’re at your goodest. Some youngsters might well be hoodlums, but most believe in world peace, quack on about dolphins, are kind and gentle to small children, spend 98 hours comforting weeping friends and pretty much intend to overthrow all unethical free-marketeering multinationals, once they’ve got their GCSEs out of the way. Given that we, their elders, constantly moan about what selfish venal bastards everyone in the world is, apart from us, it’s amazing we don’t put greater value on this boundless, energetic do-goodery and idealism in the young.
Or harness it more effectively. One of the best ideas this year has been the suggestion that we treat oxygen production and carbon-storage as commodities, and pay the Brazilian Government to preserve the Amazon rainforest, on the ground that it would actually be the cheapest way to stop us all literally going to hell in a very hot handcart. Could we not treat teenagers’ giddy optimism and desire to do good as a similarly valuable commodity? We could, say, pay them to hang around multinationals’ offices, earnestly saying, “We can make the world a better place!”, and reminding everyone that it’s actually very exciting when someone brings in sandwiches and new pens for everyone. I do not think I am being controversial when I say this world would be a better place were we all mindful of the thrill of a new pen.
Once the guys had successfully ramped up pen excitement, we could move on to Phase 2 of the plan: paying young adults decently for the kind of tasks that are presently volunteer work. Hospital visits, children’s play schemes, decorating community spaces, equal-rights campaigning, counselling, sending texts on behalf of parents, setting up wireless networking systems for those over 40, and wide-ranging dolphin-bothering.
It’s not just young adults who could benefit from this shift in attitude. Let’s face it: as a society, we value the following: rich people; hard people; sexy people. That’s about it. Everyone else — housewives, mothers, children, elders, the poor, the frail, the slightly stumpy and boss-eyed — is pretty much waved, from a PR view, on to the bus marked “ Losers”, however happy, gentle, considerate, clever, patient, practical, amusing and enduring they might be. I know it’s a pretty selfish idea to propose that we pay people for being great (clearly, I’d make millions) but if we knocked tuppence off income tax for parents, grandparents, community workers, health workers, campaigners, Scout leaders, Samaritans, story-tellers, inventors and those we deemed — maybe in a glamorous award ceremony! — inspiring, it would still, surely, cost less than the more venal world we have for undervaluing them.
There I am, in the circle of Dave's life!
I self-google, even though it is one of society’s great taboos. Personally, I was disappointed when Madonna opened her current show on a giant glitterball crucifix. Catholic sexual repression, yadda yadda yadda. How 1986. Open the show furtively googling yourself, however — maybe with ignominious search-strings such as “Madonna + genius” — and that really would be a moment of modern societal boundary-pushing.
Anyway, I was googling away at myself when I found a press release by Weber Shandwick PR, showing David Cameron’s “circle”. It lists Boris Johnson, Oliver Letwin, Lord Sainsbury, Peter Lilley — and me. Me! “Red Ken”, as I would be called, if my first name were Ken. I struggled to work out how anyone could think such a thing, and concluded that a throwaway comment, made six months ago, that Cameron was “quite fanciable”, was what had granted me this intimacy. Had I only known it was so easy! The years I’ve wasted trying actually to meet someone, or get to know them as a friend! By this criterion I am the only lover and confidante of Jack Bauer, of 24, and the widow and sole heir to the estate of Doctor Who!
Mind The Sun, Wills
Why is everyone on at Prince William to wed Kate Wossit? Being pressurised into marrying for the sake of the throne (like his dad) and at a very young age (like his mum)? And to a nice middle-class girl called Kate — traditionally bolters, as the rueful first husbands of Kate Winslet and Kate Beckinsale can attest? Do we learn nothing from the wise, wise pages of the tabloids?
