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'Our hood had a serious penknife problem': How to make your middle-class teenage years sound street

ZOMBIE knives in the news make you feel pathetically cosseted and middle-class. But by tweaking the facts, you too can have the benefits of a rough upbringing: 

Turf wars

To the credulous, sounds like a battle for territory between drug gangs. But a feeble scuffle in Congleton park between representatives of two rival schools, resulting in one being pinned to the floor within a minute and having his bag thrown on a shed roof, still counts. Although your opponent could exercise Machiavellian cunning and not turn up.

Knives at school

It’s no lie that you were sternly warned off bringing knives to school and kids you knew carried them. Usually penknives, but you would treat the dull, 6cm blade of Gareth’s Swiss Army knife with the same awe as an Uzi. Could it be used to kill? Theoretically. Given time. Though it may be easier to snip them to death with the tiny, tiny scissors.

The posse had guns

Oh, several kids you knew had guns. Yeah. Admittedly air rifles which, while dangerous to eyeballs and frogs, tend not to be favoured by cocaine importers but still. And the five-minute reload time means drive-by shootings took hundreds of passes and left the victims badly bruised.

Terrace weaponry

There was always a twat like Marcus showing you how to turn a Coke can into a slashing weapon (fold it, obviously), sharpening a 50p or making the infamous skinhead weapon of a newspaper tightly folded to make a rock-hard corner which is painful to be hit with. Marcus did not at any point run with any local firms. He’s a feng shui consultant now.

Everyone was in a gang

Omitting that these were primary school gangs recreating the adventures of the Famous Five, or the Red Hand Gang for daredevils, and they ended badly. There were no smugglers, no kidnappers, and the den you build got trashed by 14-year-olds. Essentially you sat in bushes.

You knew dealers

Both technically true and pleasingly reminiscent of Top Boy. Just change the drug from ‘25 keys of uncut Colombian’ to ‘a sixteenth of Moroccan black Steve got off his hippy brother’ and you were practically hanging with Tony Montana. And you can still roll a smokeable joint one out of five tries.

ET, and six other films that would have been undone by one minute of responsible parenting

COUNTLESS cinematic classics in which children roamed magical worlds with fantastic companions only happened because parents were lax and lazy. Each of these is a tale of neglect: 

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, 1982

Poor Mary Taylor is doing her best as a single mother of three, a number of children that apparently distracts you from a turd-headed alien living in the closet. Before long her son’s progressed to riding a flying bike. This is why parents should talk to children about drug use.

Twilight, 2008

Strict parents judging their daughter’s potential boyfriends are the worst. Until you see this film, where the 17-year-old daughter is seduced into a vampire cult by a much, much older man, and realise they have a point.

 Mamma Mia, 2008

No need to shame Meryl for her summer of unprotected shagging. There is a need to shame her for her flat refusal to open a dialogue with her daughter about it, to the extent that the poor girl resorts to inviting three possible dads to her wedding. That dysfunction stems from unresolved trauma, and ABBA songs.

Batman Begins, 2005

All that wealth, and the Wayne’s didn’t bother to hire bodyguards? Or come up with a better plan for their bereavement than ‘I dunno, could the butler raise him? You know, the ex-SAS one who killed 12 men in Belfast?’

Jurassic Park, 1990

As a child, it was tough to even negotiate permission for a sleepover. How exactly did Lex and Tim persuade their parents to let them go to their grandfather’s experimental dinosaur island, chaperoned only by horny palaeontologists? Mum and dad must really have needed that spa break.

Stuart Little, 1999

Granted, the talking mouse was very charming. But perhaps the exorbitantly wealthy Mr and Mrs Little could have considered whether their son was ready for him as a brother. After the movies comes decades of therapy for George, unable to understand why they classed him with vermin.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974

Allowing a carload of teens to drive across rural Texas alone is reckless parenting. Contrast that against Leatherface and his brothers, who care for their Grandpa by allowing him to lick fresh human blood. Now there’s a family who take the time for each other.

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