7 Reasons

Tag: adult

  • Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Grow The Hell Up

    Guest Post: 7 Reasons To Grow The Hell Up

    So you’re a teenage boy. I was one once, and got over it. You can too, if you TAKE HEED of these important points.

    7 Reasons To Grow The Hell Up

    1. You are not special. You are not the first person ever to feel this way. You are not the first person ever to fall in love, or get stoned, or drunk, or listen to music that wasn’t in the charts. You are, in a word, unoriginal. Hurry to adulthood where such tedious conformity goes unremarked.

    2. You look like an animated French Bread Pizza. This is not a good look. Get busy with the acne treatment, and you might find the teenage girls you pine after, bother to look at you. I mean, it’s still doubtful, given you only speak in mumbles or grunts and have the personal hygiene of algae, but hey, it’s a start, no?

    3. You are composed entirely of knees, elbows and Adam’s Apples. While teen girls are so sylphlike they get their A-Level results photos on the front page of the Telegraph, teen boys lurch about like they were made that morning and the glue didn’t take. You’re fitter than you’re ever likely to be again – stop walking around like you’ve a freakishly heavy head.

    4. You need ‘fake ID’. Now that’s just plain embarrassing. To have to proffer some weedy doctored piece of card every time you want to do something normal, like buy Tippex or 12 cans of extra-strength Fusilier Lager from your local shop is demeaning to all concerned. Get old, so you can demand such essentials in a booming, confident voice.

    5. You’re all over the scale. Speaking of voices, what’s up with yours? One minute you’re frightening bats, the next minute you sound like Sauron spotting Frodo. Stop mucking about, boy!

    6. Why so unwashed? Acne treatment is all well and good, but it needs to be accompanied by actual washing. A spray of Right Guard under the arms every morning is insufficient. You’ve achieved success when strangers can enter your room without being knocked unconscious.

    7. You didn’t ask to be born. Sorry, what’s that? You didn’t ask? OF COURSE YOU DIDN’T! Nobody did! It’s not how the system works, for crying out loud! I’m sure this was covered in Biology. To become a man, you need to internalise this existential sense of injustice and only let it out, say, during major sporting tournaments.

  • 7 Reasons That You Can’t Revisit Your Childhood

    7 Reasons That You Can’t Revisit Your Childhood

    It’s day five of the week in which the 7 Reasons team revisit their childhoods – and now the pope has arrived in the UK – so  you can’t say that we don’t live dangerously.  But, over the course of the week, it’s become clear that revisiting your childhood isn’t easy.  In fact, it can’t be done.  I needed to find a way to demonstrate that adulthood is impossible to free yourself from and I have chosen the medium of Top Trumps.

    1.  Environment.

    As an adult, your environment is – usually – substantially different to that of your childhood years.  I spent a huge proportion of my childhood sailing.  I couldn’t do that now though.  I don’t live next to the sea.  There are other distractions here.  And girls.  And beer.  And anyway, I probably wouldn’t be able to spend every waking hour sailing now because of…

    2.   Biology.

    Biology precludes revisiting your childhood.  You can’t spend all day running around the park playing tag/tig/it/whatever-the-hell-it-was-called-where-you-lived, as you won’t have as much energy as you did when you were a child.  And you can’t just stop running for a bit and have a breather on the swings and slides because you’re 6’2″ and you have a beard.  No, that’s me.  I really need to shave (something else that I didn’t have to do as a child).  Anyway, one of the reasons that you don’t have as much energy is…

    3.  Sleep.When you’re a child you sleep for hours and hours and hours.  As a child, I must have been a dream for my parents.  They could just send me to bed and then – eventually – when they realised they hadn’t seen me for a couple of days, they could just wander up to my room and find me there, still sleeping.  But adults can’t sleep like that, because they have…


    4. Responsibilities.


    Instead of spending most of their days playing, adults have to do things that are really, really dull.  You may have noticed that the picture of my ten-year-old self is really blurry.  This is because our scanner just broke and I can’t scan a picture of my childhood self in.  Instead, I had to find a picture of myself on the internet.  And, when I’ve finished writing this, I have to fix the scanner.  And make dinner.  And find out where the council have taken our glass recycling bin to.  And do some washing.  And shave.  And…I’ll stop now, this is only helpful for me.  I’m sure you get the picture.  You just don’t have time to revisit your childhood.  And even if you did, it would be a weird alternate universe, because of…


    5. Events.


    Our child and adult selves are also shaped by events.  To revisit your childhood successfully, you’d have to erase the key events that had shaped you as an adult.  I’m sure there are some things that we’d like to forget:  That time I pressed the wrong button on the remote control and accidentally saw ITV, for example.  But there are other events that are important and very dear to us; events that shaped our personalities.  Events that we wouldn’t ever want to forget.  Events that we want to retain in our memories.  Events crucial to the formation of our character.  Events that…yes, okay, I can’t remember any events to use as an example.  This is because of my lack of…

    6.  Aptitude.

    Your capabilities as an adult and as a child are different.  As a child, you can remember things clearly (usually when adults don’t want you to), and as an adult you can walk in a straight line and look where you’re going without inconveniencing other pavement users (hopefully).  But if you revisited your childhood you’d have to lose whatever skills you’d learned in the intervening years.  And that’ll happen anyway if you live long enough.  And why would you want to return to childhood in the first place?  When you’re a child you’re an…

    7.  Idiot.

    I used to hate nice food and drink when I was a child.  I used to eat Angel Delight.  I didn’t eat Arctic Roll though:  No one was going to convince me that ice cream in a raspberry sponge cylinder wasn’t the devil’s work.  But I wouldn’t eat decent cheese.  And cheese is amazing.  This is because I was stupid and ignorant and didn’t know any better.  Because I was a child.  Why would anyone want to return to a state of ignorance?  That’s why you can’t revisit your childhood.  And also why you  shouldn’t burn books.