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BACKGROUND MUSIC NOT YOUR SCENE?
YOU HAVE MY PERMISSION TO TURN IT OFF RIGHT HERE!
The age of 14 should be stopped. It should be officially banned. It's so unfair - on the young personages themselves and also on their parents, who have to go~through a period of grief that their darling young Chris or Christina has been taken from them. In his or her place is suddenly a spotty weirdo whose limbs have been put on all wrong and who can't speak in intelligible sentences.
I do remember being 14 so clearly. My body had declared unilateral independence and was sprouting in all kinds of unlikely places, apparently overnight. I was growing bosoms at an alarming rate, but the rest of me didn't change to match, except I was suddenly covered in a thick layer of blubber that was like wearing a diving suit all the time. I felt like such a galumpher.
I can also remember, all too well, my favoured outfit of that very hot summer. I wore an ankle-length Laura Ashley skirt with some kind of weird shirt and a green button-through smock over the top. The smock was 100 per cent man-made libres and really nasty, but I wore it every day because it had exactly the right effect - it hid my entire body. And the spots on my back.
Up until that point, I had been quite a normal, healthy child. I was an unbelievably fat baby, but once the overfed infant of parents who had lived through wartime rationing matured enough to run and jump and generally shake off the excess adipose, I was a svelte little thing.
I have pictures of myself, aged about eight, jumping in and out of a swimming pool like a shiny brown seal, everything in the right place. Then, suddenly, I was rendered a blob. Just as suddenly a couple of years later , it all shape-shifted again and I was a bit of a slinky teenage dirtbag babe. It was just those years in the middle that were terrifying.
Over the past few years, I have watched my sister's two daughters go through exactly the same process. For quite a while, one of them was happy only in her extralarge parka and the other was like a junior version of Fay Weldon's shedevil - all oversized limbs and extremities. Even their faces went all weird. It was quite alarming. Now both have emerged into their gorgeous swan states and are just as pretty as their childhood potential hinted they would be. It's such a relief.
What I have only just realised is that the terrible 14 effect is just as bad for boys. My beloved oldest nephew is now at that terrible age. Gone is the dear little fellow who used to send me his home-drawn cartoon strips and in his place is this alien being. With a cold. And an attitude.
It could be worse. He has a really cool spiky hairdo, a prototype six-pack on his tummy - from the endless hours he spends perfecting spins, wheelies, jumps and turns on his bicycle (his fifth limb) - and a CD collection that includes the complete works of Korn and Slipknot, but he's still a geek.
His voice has finally broken properly - he's over the cracked violin stage - but still he's unable to communicate in anything more sophisticated than grunts and sniggers. Trying to have a conversation with him is like listening to Beavis and Butthead on a loop tape. I still love him madly, but it will be a relief when he re-emerges in about three years as a grown-up version of the adorable little man he was at 10.
All I can say to 14-year-olds - and their bewildered parents
- is that it will change. Think of this as the chrysalis stage of your development, from which you will emerge as beautiful butterflies. If only we could spend those years in an actual chrysalis, it would be so much easier for everybody.
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