2008-01-05- 6:44 p.m.

"HERE IN MY CAR,
I FEEL SAFEST OF ALL"

I am sitting on the bus after work. We pull up at a stop that has ten youths, or thereabouts, ready to take over the bus with their raucous-ity (s/be a word but its not) and assaultive body odour, peculiar to teens alone.

I am wearing sun-glasses and if I don’t tilt my head or sit unnaturally still I have the luxury of unfettered observation. And observation is required, for survival and defence, the mode one usually goes into when confronted by a large group of the species.

These kids are walking billboards for all that is tragically Eighties. One lass is wearing high-waisted shorts. Denim. Not just any denim: ACID-WASH.

(Nice shorts dickhead!).

A boy has such glorious styled black hair and pale skin and bears a remarkable resemblance to Jake Gyllenhaal. He is wearing tight black pants. Another boy is wearing a checked shirt, some sort of sad shirt pre-cursor to grunge. His hair a hideous mop.

A girl is wearing some bilious dress with a heart-shaped neckline and god-awful pattern.

A somewhat bearably dressed boy in Ray-Bans and Jason Preistley-esque tousled hair and converse sneakers. A girl wearing a dress of rope-tied and sack-like bunchiness and another god-awful pattern. The parade of crimes against fashion continues.

And this would all be doors open for me to march on in with my fucking awesome “I’ve just escaped from a mental institution” partly shaved head and still gross nape piercing and mock the fucking shit out of them all if only they all weren’t so goddamn goodlooking. Impossibly, awfully good-looking and boldly self-confident to boot. Bastards.

I have never seen a bunch of more good-looking kids. They could have just stepped out of a fashion shoot for the tween to teen market magazine. They are so good-looking they fucking sold the outfits they were wearing. On any less attractive or less confident kid those clothes would not fly. I briefly considered the image of myself in high-waisted shorts but the image was so horrifying it gave me chills.

So instead of sneering at the children I turned up the volume of my 9 Euro Walkman (from Europe, no less!) and invested some quality time in drowning out the young-uns hideous screechy talk with Gary Numans “Cars”.

Coz I’m so Noughties like that.

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