The Law of the Bus Stop

This weekend, east London's Victoria Park hosts a first for the festival circuit, one designed for the under-18s. You can tell it's for the yoot because the line-up has been written by Noel Streatfield: Crystal Castles, Tiny Dancers, Pull Tiger Tail ... man, I am trying to tease pre-teens with reference to a writer that only people over 100 will have heard of. But never minding that, I am surprised by this, as I was when I first heard about under-18 discos. Once you've taken away the booze and started invigilating the heavy petting, what does disco even mean? Large, ill-lit room? The underage festival is an even stranger concept since there's generally nothing to stop your averagely resourceful 14-year-old getting to a regular festival. So this is either an event for pre-teens, or an elaborate attempt to divert the young away from alcohol and other ills with bright colors and loud noises.

Not a chance, I would say. In books about getting pregnant, they always advise, in the Getting Ready section, between Paint Skirting Boards and Reach Accommodation with Dark Past, "Talk to your partner. Do you share the same parenting values?" And then, just as you're thinking "I wonder what a parenting value is?", they give you an example: "Do you both feel the same way if your child turns out to be gay?" My beloved and I, having no quarrel with homosexuality, did have a conversation about where we'd stand on drink and drugs. What do you say to a teenager? He said, "I'd say don't do any drugs, but get as drunk as you like. Because he will anyway. Unless it was a girl. She just has to stay in and watch telly with us." Naturally, I object to this on feminist grounds that I've bored you with already, and not for the last time, but also on the grounds of hypocrisy. I was more than drunk as a teenager. I was the regional under-15s female downing champion of Tenants Super. You cannot make consistent rules because they jar with your own understanding; yet you cannot be frank about that understanding because the thought of anyone you care about exhibiting similar behavior makes you want to call the police. You make this troubled period work by never actually talking about anything and you hope that, at the end of it, everyone is still alive.

This, I believe, is where the media is genuinely doing society a disservice: sod Blair and his "feral beasts". Never mind the Labor line that everybody is totally happy and it's just the press that corrupts everything. The media, whatever their nefarious methods, serves among other purposes that of spelling everything out. Sometimes it distorts, but its very nature is that there is endless room, for debate, correction, clarification - there is always room for more spelling out. The one place where you do not want everything systematized, however, is the situation which is only working as well as it does because everyone's feverishly avoiding it. As soon as the media start discussing the rules around teenagerdom, everyone will say: "Don't let them do anything. Or take anything. Or talk to anyone who does or takes anything." What kind of delinquent wouldn't say that?

But once that becomes the message, what politician wouldn't react to it? What youth-centric organisation would ignore the stated wishes of the moral majority? Public, above-board events get cleaner and cleaner, until they look like something organized by the Woodcraft Folk; the disconnect between those and the way actual teenagers behave in actual bus stops gets greater and greater; and the perception that the youth are getting more lawless becomes more and more entrenched, when they are just as lawless as they've always been. Openness isn't always the best way. Sometimes we weren't asking the questions because we already knew the answers.