Do Teenagers Ever Sleep?

It was my pleasant duty at the weekend to accompany 38 teenagers to Alton Towers. We left at 3 in the morning and returned at 12 Midnight the same day (but only just!) and not once did several of them actually sleep. Where do they get their energy? They just kept going and going.

We may have been a formidable sight on entering Alton Towers. Two of the boys wore kilts and most of the others had painted Scottish Saltires on their faces. Be afraid, be very afraid.

I have to admit that I am an absolute wuss and the closest I got to going on a ride was going on the cable car from one end of the park to the other just so I could say that I had been on a ride (of sorts) at Alton Towers.

I did however conquer my fear of Oblivion. Oh yes; I managed to stand beside it as squealing adults and teens hurtled to their doom. That was scary enough so there was no way I was actually going on the thing itself.

Myself and the other leaders spent the day on a restaurant crawl and it’s best that I don’t think of the calories I must have consumed on the day. Perhaps calories don’t count on crossing the Scottish Border. It would be nice to think so.

The homeward journey again echoed that of the outward one, with 38 teenagers all screaming and shouting when they should have been sleeping. Someone had won a giant red dinosaur and the bus driver was none too happy at midnight when all the stuffing came out and went all over his bus. The dinosaur was last seen adorning our village roundabout.

It was on getting home that I got my first real fright of the day. I was confronted by a massive spider. It was so big that, had I managed to catch it, I could have kept it as a pet. I chased it round the room to no avail. I was only going to safely catch it in my spider catcher and deposit it out of the window but I assume that it thought that I was about to mercilessly kill it. It shot round the room and eventually found sanctuary underneath my bookcase. I decided to leave it there as I knew that the only way in which it would prove lethal to me was if I tried to move the bookcase, with the result that it came crashing down on top of me.

I finally collapsed into bed sometime after midnight and was dead to the world for more hours than would normally be necessary. As for the spider, I’m sure it is still crawling about the house somewhere waiting to pop out when I least expect it.

Scratching at the Surface

You may remember a blog post of a few weeks ago dealing with mysterious goings on in my street. I felt under an obligation to uncover what I felt was the murky truth of the matter, for research purposes only of course. Sadly I didn’t uncover the truth of that particular matter but in attempting to do so, I unwittingly stumbled upon a much bigger and altogether darker story.

Picture the scene if you will. A young teenager full of the joyful anticipation of young love gets a nasty wake up call when she discovers that her beloved is seeing someone else. Obviously she is distraught and keen to find out who the “other woman” is. Imagine her horror on discovering that the “other woman” was in fact her own mother. They say that “blood is thicker than water”, but so enraged was the teenager in question that spilling blood was in the forefront of her mind.

One day while her mother was gardening the girl saw her chance. Finding some handy garden twine (they don’t tell you in the shop but I believe it’s pretty good for this kind of thing) she attempted to strangle her mother. In the words of my 16 year old informant she “strangled her TO THE GROUND!” Quite why to the ground should be any more lethal than any other kind of strangulation I’m not sure but our 16 year old friend seemed to feel that it was. *

Happily (for the mother anyway we can assume) the strangulation itself was not lethal, the mother survived and the young man in question is now seeing neither the young strangler nor her mother (wise chap).

So you see, you may think that you live in a very quiet and unassuming street but to quote one Charlie Rich “no one knows what goes on behind closed doors”.



*To be honest there is just the outside chance that young J. has made up the whole thing but I hope not.

Exam Stress

I was out last night with friends of mine who have teenage kids. Talk turned to the exam results and one story really made me laugh.

A. is a very clever girl, expected to get 1s or at the very least 2s in her standard grades. She was away on holiday with her parents on the day the results came out and didn’t trust going onto the internet to find out how she had got on. Subsqeuently her gran had been despatched to her house and instructed to call her and tell her how she had done.

The fateful day arrived and A. was on tenterhooks. She had studied hard and just knew that all her friends would have done really well and she just couldn’t be seen to have done badly. Not only that but she was on holiday with two of her friends who had already found out that they had done well by accessing the internet on the previous day. As an aside I thought that everyone under the age of 25 was fully comfortable with the internet these days but it just goes to show.

The phone rang and A. dived for it, breathless and barely able to contain herself.

“So gran, how did I do?"

“You did really well dear you got, now let me see, I’ll just adjust my specs and, oh here we are, yes.”

“Come on gran, what did I get?”

“You did really well dear, like I said you got a 5 for everything.”

“WHAT!!!! A five! That’s a fail. How? That’s not possible, it can’t be."

By this time young A. was in hysterics.

“This can’t be happening. What will all my friends think? My life is over? All fives, and I studied so hard.”

“Well dear” continued her gran “That’s what it says here. I thought that a 6 must be the highest mark and so I thought that you had done really well."

“What, so as well as telling me how badly I have done you also think that I wouldn’t have got the highest mark. Just what are you trying to say here? Do you have any idea that my life is now officially over. I’ll have to leave school. I’ll be destitute. What am I going to do?"

By this point A. had got so hysterical that her mum intervened and a voice of a little more reason spoke to gran.

“So mum, not good news then? Can you read me out what it says exactly.”

“Gran starts to read from the sheet - French Standard 5, History Standard 5 etc etc.”

As she does so a little lightbulb had come on in A’s mums head.

“Are there any other numbers after the 5’s on the list?” she asked.

“Now you come to mention it, yes there are. Now let’s have a look, French Standard 5 and then there’s a little 1, History Standard 5 then a 2. Does that mean anything?”

“Well yes, it means the difference between my daughter consigning herself to the scrapheap or not. Those are her actual grades Mum. 5 refers to the Standard Grade Level she sat not the grade she got in the exam.”

“Oh dear” said Gran “I hope I haven’t upset her too much then.”

“No, nothing that the right information and some chocolate won’t cure. Thanks Mum. You’ve given me a good laugh today if nothing else. I’d better go and let A. know.

I believe that Gran’s now back in the good books, but come A’s highers she may not be asked to repeat the same “favour”.

Never a Dull Moment

Perhaps it should have been a dark and stormy night. In actual fact it was a bright and sunny evening but real life isn’t like the movies and let’s be honest, who would want it to be? Fighting off the advances of Hugh Grant while Batman and Spiderman try to outdo each other in the superhero stakes isn’t my idea of a good day, but I digress.

It was Saturday evening and all I was doing was innocently carting computer equipment into my garden shed (maybe another post if it becomes an interesting enough story) when sirens began to wail and police cars and an ambulance raced along our road until they very quickly realised that it was a cul-de-sac and skidded to a rather abrupt halt.

Thoughts of “the PC’s mine officer, it’s not knock off, honest” came to mind but the policemen and ambulance men had other things to think about.

Thankfully this time their thoughts did not concern terrorists but the ubiquitous “group of teenagers” who were milling around in the way that they are wont to do. This does, in the minds of many, constitute them playing havoc with law and order, so had someone called the police and the ambulance just on the strength that they might be about to commit some heinous crime like well, standing in the street and talking?

A serious faced policeman, who didn’t look much older than his interviewees, took statements and the youngsters tried to look innocent with a well practiced attitude of “it wisnae me what done it sur”. Of course, by this stage I was wondering just what been done and it was at that moment that a girl was wheeled into the ambulance. She looked a bit older than the other teens so had they been with her or had they just seen something happen to her and called the police and the ambulance. Should Hercule Poirot have been on the scene with his little grey cells?

A couple of people passed with dogs and I really wished that I had had a dog as it would have given me an ideal opportunity to walk past, nonchalantly like, and hopefully find out what was going on. I could even have trained my dog to do its business near the policeman so that I could dawdle longer and hear more. Sadly it was not to be.

The ambulance drove off and the police and the youngsters were still deep in conversation. At one point someone held up what appeared to be a small yellow box. A detonator perhaps?

Much later when everyone was away and I was hopeful that aimlessly ambling along the street wouldn’t appear too nosey, I took myself off to the spot of all the excitement. I’m not quite sure what I expected to find. Blood? Broken Glass? A hand grenade? Sadly there was nothing there to indicate that anything untoward had happened. There was however a faint, intermittent siren like sound which lasted all night and into the early hours of the morning.

I never did get to find out what happened but there’s never a dull moment in these here parts.

Hi-De-Hi

The campsite which perhaps at some stage in its life could have been called terra firma was less than firm now, having been beaten into a muddy pulp, and that was before 400 teenagers descended upon it. The rain started the assault on the campers, drenching even those with waterproofs and the wind finished the job, blowing a chilly wind through wet bones. Just a normal summer’s day in Scotland then.

The rain started on Friday and didn’t stop until Sunday. The grass turned brown with mud, and the mud seemed to permeate through our whole camping experience.

Fortunately we were not camping under canvass and had sensibly decided on the log cabin option. We are actually talking camping luxury here because the cabins had central heating and showers.

Within minutes of moving in, the girls’ room looked like an explosion in a beauty salon. Make – up, hair care products, towels, clothes and iPods were liberally strewn on every available surface. Soon the devastation had extended to the bathroom and the hall, with clothes soaking in the sinks, all manner of toiletries ready to topple off ledges, and 20 pairs of shoes strewn about the hall ready to trip up anyone foolish enough to cross it.

All the other teenagers at the camp seemed to be wearing welly boots and other assorted sensible shoes. Not ours. Silver pumps, beaded pumps and stilettos waded through the mud and will probably never look the same again.

Activities had been organised for the kids, but those that had not been cancelled due to the bad weather were not deemed cool enough for our youngsters so they spent most of Saturday having sweetie fights in the cabin.

I took myself off to a “Youth Leaders Seminar” where I managed to fall asleep, waking up just in time to ask a few pertinent questions, in the hope that no one would notice my lack of wakefulness.

The seminars were held in strange little huts, which although very basic, had curtains which could have graced a grand house, held back with fancy tie backs. The floors got progressively muddier and then the mud started climbing the luxury curtains. Whose idea was curtains?

In the evenings the campsite had a “Cinema” which was basically another hut with black bin bags on the windows and a DVD player. Despite the DVD player (possibly on loan from George W Bush) refusing to play “An Inconvenient Truth” on Friday night, I saw it on the Saturday night on a second DVD player. I also saw The Last King of Scotland and Hotel Rwanda. All are excellent films and well worth seeing.

Of course, our youngsters were not at the cinema, preferring the disco where the music was rotten but the boys were cute.

At the end of our stay the girls cried uncontrollably on leaving a friend who had moved away. She, however, seemed strangely unmoved, and was more interested in her mobile phone as she was driven off.

I arrived home on Sunday night with some song by Justin Timberlake and “Eye of the Tiger” ringing in my ears. I still maintain that for teenagers they have some strange musical tastes.

Teenagers with Attitude?

On the basis that I can fit into a minibus with an inordinate amount of hair straighteners, iPods and make up I am away this weekend to camp with a group of 20 odd teenagers. I will be taking a couple of good books with me (Michael Chabon – Kavalier & Clay and John Le Carre – Absolute Friends) for reasons of sanity maintenance.

The last time they saw me they thought that they would “introduce me” to the joys of modern music, so were a little surprised when I said that I had actually already heard of Maroon 5. I personally think that Maroon 5 is a bit tame for a group of teenagers. Should they not be listening to something a touch more rebellious? Mind you now they know that I have heard of Maroon 5, that band’s “cool” appeal will be lost and they will hopefully find something more appropriate. They then let me listen to something called Akon (I think). Again I had to admit that it wasn’t too bad. I’m not sure if that went down with them too well either. As an adult who likes the music they like, am I not gradually destroying their faith in it? Well I jolly well should be. They should be out there listening to cutting edge difficult music that I haven’t any hope of understanding never mind liking shouldn’t they? They don’t make teenagers like they used to.

Anyway, if I make it back in one piece I shall see you here again on Monday.

Have a lovely weekend.

Punk'd

Isn’t the English Language a wonderful, ever evolving thing? To illustrate this I’d like to share a new word I learned yesterday at my Monday Night Youth Group – Punk’d.

The context was as follows:-

The Group: Are we being Punk’d?

Me: Are you being what’d?

The Group: Punk’d.

Me: You’ll need to tell me what Punk’d means before I can tell you if you are or not.

The Group: You know, being played a trick on. (They snigger, realising that this silly adult doesn’t know the meaning of one of their words and consequently isn’t as with it as she would like them to believe she is).

The Group: Well are we being Punk’d?

Me: No you are definitely not being Punk’d.

The Group: Cool! (well at least that’s one word that hasn’t changed then.)

What I really wanted to know but was too afraid to ask for fear of further derision was how does Punk’d come to mean being played a trick on. Any enlightenment would be appreciated. When I were a lass Punk (without the ‘d) meant something entirely different. Admittedly it still does, allegedly, although the lyrics just aren’t the same nowadays. Anyway back to the point. Where does this term come from? Could it be from Johnny Rotten’s infamous words: "ever feel like you've been cheated?" Well I might not be Miss Cool, Hip and Down with the Kids but at least I know my music history.