India Doyle: Things I Learnt in the Airport

Normally the fact that my flight is delayed by a million hours would make me want to glug a bottle of perfume from duty free and stomp around whining about how easyjet isn’t even good value for money and ‘why didn’t I just sit on the train and spend seven of those hours scheming to steal the sandwiches from the over-pampered smug travellers in first class?’ Not this time. This delay has meant that I am currently in the midst of a life epiphany.

I am listening to a conversation in the airport. It’s between two grown ups. One man is talking about how he bought his ‘missus’ a coffee grinder for Christmas. The other is talking about his book club and how he found that the psychopathic character in the current book reminds him of his wife.

I don’t want to be a grown up.

I never want to be bought a coffee grinder as a present. I never want to join a book club. I don’t want to wear a suit on a plane, or own one of those really useful suitcases with wheels that turn. I don’t want to spend my time talking about how old people look (like the couple behind me) or have to make snide comments about people’s holidays (ibid.). These are the mad depressing things that are looming in graduation. And Kindles: they all seem to have one of those.

Fortunately, I have just read a comforting article in The Independent which said that now, we’re not officially grown ups until we’re 24. How sick is that? That gives me an extra three years to reclaim my lost youth. That means that I can postpone impending practical presents and get drunk and listen to 90’s music – Ronan Keating, I really miss you – with no sense of irony whatsoever.

I think it’s only now that we can really appreciate how great being a kid is. When I was 13, I obnoxiously told my parents that I was an adult and spent the next six years trying to prove it. Now I’m 21, and all I want to do is fuck about and rid myself of the cynicism and trivial boring shit of being a responsible human being.

I don’t mean that now we should all go out and drink until we vomit like we did back in the day; LOL jkz I totes do. But I also mean that it would be really great to reclaim some naivety and ‘fresh facedness’ that we abandoned when we got our first bank cards.

I want to be like the little kid who’s sitting next to me wearing tiger socks and being fed quavers by his dad as he watches the tweenies on an ipad and whilst shouting ‘didgeridoo’ for no reason whatsoever.

That’s how I’m going to spend my last three years of childhood, literally. For many the summer means non-stop interning and climbing up the very important professional ladder. The way I see it though – and how I think we should all see it – is that now that the summer’s coming (as the weather briefly signified) let’s embrace the fact that the recession means we’re justified in doing nothing and start having fun. That way, when we’re 24, we’ll be ready to talk about how much we hate our husbands/wives and we won’t regret a thing.