FATALISTIC FLAW FOR SNOOPERS
AT SOME point in a future Scotland of a civil servant’s imagining, all under18s will be monitored for the levels of love, hope and spirituality swilling around in their psyches.
I ’ m alarmed about almost every aspect of Scottish Government health adviser Bob Fraser’s plan to appoint a state guardian for every child, but what worries me most is what the ‘hope inspectors’ might find. In the 1970s, when I was very little, big teenagers with safety pins through their noses repeated punk mantra ‘No Future’, as espoused by John Lydon of the Sex Pistols.
In the 1980s, I was locked away in the bedroom, empathising to t he Smiths’ hit Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.
I’d cheered up a bit by the 1990s, but the teenagers in my wake hadn’t.
They called their morose musical movement shoe- gazing. In the noughties, it was the age of the emo. I sometimes worried my daughter was one.
I’d try to make her smile by calling her an emu, but she was having none of it. She gave that pained expression which confirmed I had just made her life harder. Are you getting a pattern here?
Is i t possible these fatalistic tendencies are somehow linked to teenage years? Or are we all just bad parents? A DAY out shoplifting ended badly for Kelly Pierson because she did not ‘look’ like a Waitrose customer. Something just didn’t fit about this lank-haired, grubby-clothed shopper in a middle-class, stockbroker-belt enclave. Sure enough, when she was challenged, her dastardly scheme was discovered. Let us not fool ourselves, though, that her appearance gave the game away. Waitrose shoppers come in all dress codes. No, surely it was the five bumper jars of instant coffee in her trolley. Ew… smelling salts to aisle five!