Let’s do this together
COMMUNITY CORNER
I thought I’d misheard The Dark Lord while we were in Sainsbury’s in town. “I’m going to the sex shop,” she said, waving at me as she wandered off.
“You’re going where?” I asked, shocked, and dropped the box of hard water stain remover tablets I was holding.
Visions of our posh town’s first sex shop selling edible thongs among the shooting sticks and silver hip flasks flashed through my mind. “Aren’t you a bit young for that sort of thing?”
“No, CeX, Mother,” she said, spelling it out. “Ahhh, the gaming shop?” I asked, remembering the bright red second-hand technology shop in the town centre where kids go to get their very own joy of CeX these days.
I know older generations are always worried teenagers know too much about sex, or worse, are having more sex than them, but TDL and her mates are the least sexually precocious generation I’ve ever known. Back in the 1980s, we had nothing to do except snog boys, practise our married signatures and maybe twirl our batons (this is not a euphemism – I was, in fact, a keen majorette).
The closest we ever got to pornography was finding a torn page from a girlie mag wrapped around a hedge. Or when copies of the muchthumbed explicit horror paperback The Rats by James Herbert did the rounds at school, along with steamy bonk-busters by Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins. When you hear that I had the reading age of an adult as a teenager, you’ll know why.
But now, in an online world full of porn around every dark corner of the internet, the kids have had to learn to turn off and tune out. They prefer to nip into the town to buy, sell and (putting the ex in CeX) exchange games and devices.
“Yeah they’ve got the new Red Dead Redemption 2 for PS5,” she said, speaking another language. “It’s a Wild West survival game for my PlayStation,” she translated.
“Why don’t you come with me?” she offered. Well, it’s not every day you get an invite to a CeX shop with your teenager. We walked around the corner to the store, which has a sad air of a closing down shop with racks of metal shelves and threadbare carpets. Picking up a slim plastic box of Red Dead, she walked to the counter.
“Sorry, love, you have to be 18,” the manager told her.
TDL was outraged, and ordered it later online from Amazon. No wonder high streets are dying when they can’t compete with the same rules.
However I did check and apparently the game only has light swearing. Just like home then.
■ Email siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.
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Yours, Siobhan