Month: February 2024

When I turned 50, I started to keep account of the things that happened to me during that year. The list included great happiness and deep sadness.

I hosted a party. DJ Ron was requested to play all my favourite tracks and I was stuck to the dance floor only to leave for a quick visit to the pie van for a cheeky sausage roll.

Due to the encouragement of many, and determined hard work, my physical health improved. As a result I was able to tackle walking up hills with ease. On one of these hills lived some sheep and I bottle-fed one of the offspring – a first time encounter. The bottle was comfortingly warm and I had to keep a firm grip to avoid it being taken with force by the hungry lamb.

My brother accompanied me to some gigs as we are huge fans of live music. We saw the Happy Mondays ( a maraca was possibly featured) and Orbital at Dreamland in Margate. We still laugh about dancing all evening, chatting with friendly strangers and the downside of queueing for drinks and the toilet.

My sad times included the death of a neighbour. I loved her so much. She was a beautiful person – the children in the opposite house, sweetly named her ‘the garden lady’ as she spent much time tending her flowers. When the ‘love your garden’ TV team came to transform a well-deserved Gurkha’s garden in the street she took up home-made chocolate brownies for the film crew.

During the year my mum‘s physical health deteriorated greatly. I felt an overwhelming wash of melancholy for her as she had, in the past, played tennis and hockey for her home county of Essex.

Out of the many happy experiences included watching the whole of 2001 A Space Odyssey, celebrating 28 years of marriage, and supporting my amazing pupils in their music exams.

My 50th year was only 365 days out of a lifetime. A year, like any other year, of taking the rough with the smooth. Yet those days I can remember as my special yesterdays to treasure, like a gift, forever.

Personally, I don’t think adults know what it’s like to be a teenager anymore.

It’s a controversial statement, I know, but it’s just my opinion.

They may understand key terminology, such as peer pressure and bullying, but I don’t think they really understand what it’s like in this day and age. When I say that telling us “I was a teenager once too you know,” is one of the most aggravating sentences you can say – I mean it. We know you were our age once, but you aren’t our age now and there’s a huge difference between the two.

It’s almost impossible to find a group of friends where at least one of them doesn’t vape or has tried a vape at some point. Groups of girls and boys gather in single cubicles to vape with each other as if it’s a social activity. If you don’t vape, you’re left out of conversations and plans because you’re choosing to protect your body over your reputation.

The same goes with drinking. If you don’t drink, you don’t get invited to parties. If you don’t get invited to parties, you start to lose friends. If you lose friends, you become a social outcast. Of course, you can watch the parties online, and see what you miss out on, but then you just get fomo (fear of missing out). However, if you don’t watch the footage, you can’t join in on conversations at school which also gives you fomo. In the end, you’re left with the choice of going to the parties and forcing yourself to be in situations where you may make some stupid mistakes, or stay at home and be in a situation where you feel miserable and lonely.

For those of us that prefer to focus on our grades don’t have it easy either. Obviously, adults know what it’s like to feel the pressure of work and exams, but I don’t think they realise how much worse it has become. Failure is not an option to us unless we’ve got rich parents, and our schools remind us of that daily. We’re told constantly that our grades are terrible and we’re the worst classes our teachers have ever seen in their 17 years of teaching, making us feel useless and demotivated. We work our hardest, can spend hours studying and yet it’s still not good enough. They show us the grades of the past 8 years of students and tell us if we don’t get better grades than this, then we’re letting down the school, our parents and ourselves, as if we weren’t already drowning in the stress of work and exams.

We’re surrounded constantly by reminders of school through advertisements of revision websites on platforms such as TikTok. We surrounded by drugs, self-harm, eating disorders and sex. We see it online as well as at school. Where home once was a safe space, it’s now as much a prison as the four walls of a classroom. We can never escape the expectations of modern society, and if we don’t succumb to it then we’re considered ‘undesirable’ and are shunned by our peers.

I’m not saying adults were never teenagers themselves, I’m only saying that next time a teenager makes a mistake or does something dangerous, you don’t immediately get angry at them. You just listen to them and understand that many of us are struggling. Even if we can paint a smile on our faces, there’s always a small part of us that holds their breath every time they open their phone – worried about what they’re going to find.

The days are long. Everything is done happily, properly, with talking for hours and hours about the past and its people. This is interlaced with breakfast, washing up, then a cup of tea – Earl Grey or PG.

Take a walk, take in the warm air, the clouds seem whiter, the sky feels bluer. Listen. Maybe catching a woodpecker, a Skylark, if we’re lucky, as we smell the pure fields of Easter. We return for a simple lunch, brought to the table, covered in a white cloth, on a trolley with gold edges and legs.

She sits in her favourite chair, flowery, and soft, in the afternoon, in the conservatory, a cigarette burning to the end, as she talks, just talks. We listen, just listen.

Out of all the Favourites, she is our Favourite. She speaks elegantly only pausing at times to cough into a cotton handkerchief. Her mind for detail is exquisite, every word like a drip of silver. She picks up the telephone and requests, “a table for three, please. Yes, that’s correct. For Mrs Jenkins”.

We let the afternoon slide into the evening.

The evening is long, and everything is done properly.