David Quantick on Young People

from the book 'Grumpy Old Men'

Babies

Like a Stuka screaming in to deliver a bombload of steaming poop, babies are the mewling, puking, crapping shocktroops of the pre-nursery generation. Are they mad? They look mad. They spend an awful lot of time pointing at nothing. What do they want? They eat appalling food. They make no sense. They make a noise with one end that sounds worse than foxes having it off and they make a smell at the other that stinks like the town dump is outside on the lawn knocking on the front door.

They are more self-obssessed than a supermodel on angel dust and they could interrupt the sleep of the dead. They have terrible taste in clothes. You can't play with their toys, which are weird and boring. They don't do any work, and they haven't any money. And their only ambition seems to be to make appalling smells. Worse, later on they become teenagers (see below.)

Schoolchildren

Schoolchildren are like normal children only psychotic. They are violent, rude, unkempt and obsessed with smoking behind bike sheds. There can be no displeasure greater than getting on a bus and discovering it is full of schoolkids on their way home. Hear the level of wit sink to the earth's core. Observe first-hand violence at its rawest. Listen as young middle-class kids from Esher affect, with little competence, the dialects of gangsta rappers and Yardies. Blush at sexually explicit language that would cause a pimp to curl up and die. And that, as they used to say on the halls, is just the girls...

Teenagers

Everything bad about children meets everything bad about adults in one spot-faced, surly, shuffling tit. Parents spend years of their lives and thousands of their pounds raising these acne cuckoos. They cover them in love, worry themselves sick about them and ensure that the little freaks enjoy a decent childhood. And their reward is this: ingratitude in barely human form. Resentful festering grudges, they should be shot into space until they reach their mid-20s. Here are some things you may well find yourself wanting to say to a teenager.

- 'Stand up straight, do you want to be a hunchback?'

- 'What? What did you say? Stop mumbling.'

- 'Where are you going with that skateboard? You can barely walk, let alone operate a piece of wood on rollerskate wheels.'

- 'What are you smoking? Oh good, now you're even less articulate, mobile and interesting than you were ten minutes ago. Here, have some heroin, it's more debilitating.'

- 'Yes, you can have a car on your 16th birthday. Would you like a Rolls Royce? Or perhaps a humvee. After all, you've done sod all in the past 15 years to earn it. Here, have my cashpoint card.'

- 'It's not fair? No, fair would be me kicking you downstairs and into an Army Recruiting Office.'

- 'I'm not too old to appreciate your record collection, you just seem to have the worst taste in music since Hitler. If these bands really want to offend society, maybe they should try sacking their stylist first.'

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