A Ode to the Teenage Summer

With A-level results about to shape futures and spirited teens changing the atmosphere of my ends, I've found myself tuning into the moment by sliding into YA on the telly

The stars of My Life with The Walter Boys, currently streaming on Netflix

My neighbourhood is currently teeming with teenagers. For the last couple of weeks of July, it was a veritable bevy of young Hughs and Siennas but now all the state school kids have joined for the long summer break, a complete demographic is out on the streets and between the hours of 9-3.30pm, Monday-Friday it feels both incongruous and…lively.

I was a pretty piss poor teen when it comes to any kind of rebellion, but even I went awry over the summer hols. I remember one year, I think I was 14, I made the fatal error of telling my mum the truth about an end of year party I’d gone to (code words: ‘Pizza Express’), that I’d smoked a joint and someone had smashed some furniture. It was very easy to be chummy with my mum, which meant I felt a false sense of mutual understanding. But she was having none of this. Doing a full 360, she grounded me for the ENTIRE summer holidays to our small village. She’d done the maths, and worked out that if she let me go to the shopping centre (shoutout to The Glades and Bluewater), I’d be hanging out with the ‘bad element’ from the aforementioned party, whereas all the girls who lived on the streets close to me were jejune and timid. Honestly, I don’t even think I objected too much, because the truth was all I really wanted to do was watch Troop Beverly Hills on repeat and order Domino’s meal deals. In between my extra homework of course. But in retrospect, six weeks still seems a little harsh.

I’m having a big adrenaline comedown from my wedding and honeymoon travelling. I find falling off the cliff of life’s uppers more physically than mentally disjointing. Anyway, while my corporeal self recovers from the highs of the past fortnight (a ridiculous statement in itself, but here I sit barely able to coordinate my limbs to unpack), I’ve found myself going down a rabbit hole of YA fiction and teen TV shows. I’m clearly clinging on to some kind of sentimental comfort to calm my nervous system and I’ll probably read this back in a couple of months and berate myself for being such a sap. But as they say these days, the body knows.

So, what’s been on my very busy schedule? Well firstly, being a teen and falling in love with brothers, which isn’t just the plot line of one Netflix/Prime series, but two. I started with My Life with the Walter Boys and then upgraded to The Summer I Turned Pretty. To complete the triptych of teenage angst, I dived headfirst into Geek Girl, a series about the escapades of Harriet Manners, an awkward schoolgirl navigating neurodiversity and bullies while also – plot twist – becoming a supermodel via a London Fashion Week scouting. For anyone interested, for all that was totally inconceivable about the depiction of fashion and the modelling industry, there were lots of moments of veracity. I also laughed a lot.