In progress

It's a kind of anniversary for me today. So I've decided, arbitrarily, à propos of this – what is in effect, for the few people reading this, largely an irrelevant and ill-defined event – to journey down ole memory lane. Specifically, my childhood. To calm the nerves of the congenitally skittish, don't worry: no graphic details of a youth subject to inappropriate advances of a perverse and sexual nature towards my innocent former corporeal, orifice orientated existence will be made (largely because they didn't happen and, even if they did, I can't see how to exploit them for commercial gain from saying that they did). Having said that, I do feel they – my memories as I recall them – do convey a betrayal of sorts: a certain degree of exploitation. Deceit, if you will. Albeit, well, loosely intentioned. To get to the nub of the rub: it concerns the misrepresentation of adulthood, to the youth. The idea of responsibility. A mantle to be inherited via a, as yet to be definitively defined, passage of rites. Now, may be it's me, but I was given to understand that at a certain point in existence, though vaguely delineated by scholarly research, you reach the Rubicon of youth and crossover into the fully fledged world of adulthood, together with all that mysteriously implied. The awesome maturational pledge of the educationally ripe: the reasoned and seasoned outlook of adulthood. A taking of precedence over the juvenile distractions and obsessions of youth into the realm of responsibility. But no. My discovery on crossing that so-called “one way” bridge, dear reader - though somewhat based on an ad hoc repertoire of anecdote and incident - suggests youth and adulthood are a convenient administrative fiction and we cannot simply rely on the conventions of age and status to take the place of the actual, demonstrable, mutual realities of charge-taking.