19

Just over seven years ago, in our after lunch registration, our form teacher announced that London had won it's Olympic bid and would be hosting the games in the summer of 2012. I found the news only marginally less exciting that I found it up until my epiphanic viewing of Danny Boyle's opening ceremony (see previous) but what did fascinate me was thinking about the date itself. 2012? I'd be...two years into University (being a precocious little sod I'd already assumed University would be an inevitability). I'd be a hip and happening semi-adult, able to drink and drive and put my penis inside women with reckless abandon (though not, I reasoned, at the same time, even if the image of myself perishing in a car accident clutching a whiskey bottle with a screaming hooker on my lap did have a certain poetic appeal).

And now 2012 is here - and in only a few hours time, I'm turning twenty. Sitting in registration, dreaming up morbidly awesome car-crashes, I was twelve. The entirety of my teenage existence lies sandwiched somewhere between these moments - every drink I've had, every woman I've failed to cop off with, every stomach-full of half-digested gunk I've ejected into a friend's garden hedge is about to be filed away in the defunct 'teenaged' folder of my memory, consigned to the foggy ruins of time. A bit like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the first Indiana Jones film.

At these junctures, it's customary (for me at least) to look back, take stock and think 'did I get what I wanted? Did I succeed?' But it's hard to quantify what succeeding as a teenager might look like. At twelve, I'm sure I had no idea. Beyond a few treasured goals such as 'grow a moustache' and 'touch a breast' I had no wider scheme in mind, no sense of a bar I was reaching for. So I don't need to feel guilty about not achieving some standard I'd set myself.

Yet if there was something I'd thought I would have gained, it was a sense of having arrived. I felt sure that at some point during the next seven years I'd have worked out that special trick it takes to really 'do' life, and I wouldn't have to think about living; it would come naturally. But now I'm almost twenty, I can confidently attest that there has been no point in which I thought life was getting easier. It's fucking difficult, man. I still don't even know what trousers we're supposed to wear.

In Martin Amis's novel The Rachel Papers, the main character, Charles Highway, creates the narrative of his life on the eve of his twentieth birthday from diaries and journals. What he ends up with is a rather limp story of a past love affair, along with an awful lot of himself being a pretentious, filthy-minded little arse. But maybe this is the point. I can't say I've succeeded at anything in particular, but I've fulfilled a lot of the teenage stereotypes. I've stormed upstairs and slammed doors, worn the same pants for weeks at a time, lusted aimlessly, written tiresomely wank teenage poetry, and generally pratted about. Holden Caulfield would be proud of me. Maybe it's doing these things that point of the whole venture.

And If I may be permitted a pinch of earnestness on the edge of my innocence, maybe it's not about 'arriving' during your teenage years, but all the ways in which you don't. And please kill me now, because that is the most awful thing I've ever written. Dear God. I'm am sorry x x x

Daft Punk, Asterix and Croissants

After watching almost four hours of Olympic opening ceremony last night I've woken up with one abiding impression; fuck other nations. No, seriously, fuck them. What other nation on Earth can claim to come even vaguely close to the sheer ragtag madcap spangled brilliance of the British Isles? France? Fuck off. Go sit in the corner with an onion or something. No, don't get up til I say so. Don't even fucking look round. I'm not kidding.

I haven't written anything on the blog for an embarrassingly long while, and one of the reasons for this was apathy. Sure, I'd spent a good few dozen posts honing and establishing a serenely satirical, comedically ranting style. I had the Platt-blog framework down to pat. I'd take a topic, get a bit angry about it, make a few jokes, clangingly drop in a masturbation metaphor to please the hardcore fans, and the job was done. Except after a while, I ended up looking at things and thinking, you know, what's the point? Why bother?

Over the last few weeks I've tried desperately to think of something to say about the Olympics that's worth people taking a two minute detour from their Facebook feeds to read, and I just couldn't. Too corporate and shonkey to be praised, too earnest and genuinely heartfelt to be derided, there was no side to come down on. It was like anticipating a nativity performance involving an infant relative; it will no doubt be adorable, and he's put too much into it for you not be be proud of him, but he can't sing for shit and even under his shepherd's robe you can still see the gentle bulge of his budding man-tits. I had no angle to take.

And then I watched the ceremony. And it was amazing. It was inspiring. And it shook me to the core because it did what nothing about the preparation thus far has been able to do; remind us that, hey, wait a minute, we're fucking Britain.

Amongst all the run-up furore - the G4S debacle, the unsold stadium, the thousands of spare football tickets - and all the godawful marketing bollocks, it was hard to shake the infamously pessimistic self-image we've had of ourselves of late. Welcome to Britain, we seemed to be saying; our economy's shit, we're run by dickheads, and everything we do feels a bit second-rate, but don't be too mean about us and we'll promise to stop Phil Collins from emigrating again.

What I loved about the ceremony was that it started out predictably - a large spectacle show that illustrated a rather earnest aspect of our national history and ended up just being a series of raised fingers to the rest of the world. It's as if Danny Boyle did the whole countryside/industrial revolution transformation bit, looked around, saw the pleasant but not overtly astounded faces of the other nations and just wait; well, you know what, fuck it. We've got James Bond. James fucking Bond. And the Queen. In a helicopter. Parachuting. Yeah, fuck you. And you know what else? Free healthcare. That right, free motherfucking healthcare. And Voldemort. Fighting Mary Poppins. Fucking eat it, you bastards! And look! We've got Mr. Bean! And the Rolling Stones! And the Sex Pistols! And Alex Turner! And a Beatle! In the flesh! Are you watching France?!! Are you paying attention. Drink us in, you mothers! Drink, you inferior people of the world, you vermin, you slugs, drink in the might of this great nation! Kneel before us, maggots, kneel before us and DRINK!!!


What made it all the better was the knowledge that, had France been made the hosts in our place, they'd have fucked it up. They'd have got the Cirque de Soleil in, and some teenager with a piano, and a bunch of infants in wigs singing about diplomacy, and it would have been wank. You want to have a killer opening ceremony for the future, France. I've got your best bet right here. Daft Punk, Asterix and Croissants. On a motorcycle. In berets. You'd be set.