What teen magazines taught me about life
You can keep your fancy universities!
Towards the end of my school years I applied to Glasgow School of Art. I didn’t get in. In typically mature fashion I was so upset in a ‘I have no future!’ kind of way that I did two things.
1. I refused to apply to university or any further educational establishment. If Glasgow School of Art wouldn’t have me, no one would. Whaaaah!
2. I applied for a job as a cleaner at our local hospital. On arrival I was handed a kidney shaped bowl and asked to go into a curtained off cubicle and pee into it. I tried to think of flowing rivers and gushing waterfalls - to no avail. Not a single droplet of pee could I squeeze from my mortified 17 year-old body.
Of course, I’d gone to the ‘Let’s find out if you have a disease’ department rather than the job interview place. This became clear as I blushingly handed back the bone dry bowl and explained, on the brink of hot tears, that I was there about the cleaning job.
You’ve never heard a bunch of nurses laugh so heartily.
But then things improved because I did land a job. Not as a hospital cleaner but something I’d dreamed of, secretly, for years.
Sometimes I feel a tad inferior as it seems like the whole world went to university apart from me. At least, my husband, our three young adult offspring, most of my friends and even my dad did. This world they belonged to, of lectures and semesters and graduations, I have no experience of at all. It doesn’t happen so much now that we’re older, but in my twenties friends loved to reminisce fondly about the hilarious and amazing things that happened when they were at uni. It felt like everyone had been to, say, the Galapagos Islands except me, and all I could contribute was, ‘That sounds great! Wish I’d been there too!’
But actually, I did go to a university of sorts. It was full of young people and, within its hallowed halls, there was much to learn.
It was the University of Jackie magazine.
I imagine normal university as a kind of bubble you find yourself in for three or four glorious, fun-packed years. The University of Jackie was exactly like that. In the three years I worked there we shared flats and threw parties and socialised as a big, marauding group, crashing around the pubs of Dundee.
As an outsider from the academic world, I understand that it’s one of those life stages - like starting school, or having your first baby - when a raft of new friendships are formed. Jackie was like that too. And inside that wood panelled office, one floor up from the Beano and Dandy, we learnt many, many things. Such as:
How to discover your personality type by the shape of your used lipstick. Is it pointy, round like a bullet or weirdly slanted? It can reveal the ‘inner you’!
The meanings of terms such as ‘T-zone’ and ‘apples of your cheeks’ in relation to skincare and make-up application.
The face steaming method: ie, virtually boiling off your epidermis over a bowl of scalding water.
How to ‘nourish’ your face by means of yoghurt mixed with mashed up banana.
How to turn your boring bedroom into a groovy pad by draping (probably highly flammable) scarves over lamps and bare lightbulbs and maybe even incinerating your family in the process!
The fact that one cannot get pregnant by getting into a bath after a boy has been in it.
Or indeed by ‘passing a boy on the stairs.’
As a Jackie staffer my head was jammed with this kind of stuff. Then I moved on to working at Just Seventeen, and another layer of teen information was acquired.
By then my brain was like a tightly packed airing cupboard. Only instead of towels and bedding it was stuffed with pop facts - not only about the likes of Duran Duran and Culture Club, but also the rung below them, and the one below that. I can name all the members of Brother Beyond and tell you the title of Curiosity Killed The Cat’s first album. I know who Amanda de Cadenet dated in 1988, what Johnny Logan liked to eat for breakfast and what EastEnders’ Letitia Dean kept in her handbag.
Never mind academic essays about all kinds of clever stuff. I give you a multi-choice quiz to discover what kind of best friend you are, and instructions on adding a dash of 80s neon to your outfit with lycra armbands and loads of badges.
All invaluable stuff, right? As an added bonus you’d think that having all this teen knowledge would have enabled me to understand exactly how my own teens were feeling, at all times.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. By the time they’d reached the appropriate age, teen magazines seemed as irrelevant and old fashioned as fax machines or phone boxes. They weren’t merely unimpressed by my knowledge of teen-related matters. Like all other perfectly normal young people, they’d actually flee the room whenever it looked as if I might be edging towards talking about bodies, relationships or sex.
It was galling. I really was terribly put out. All those years, as they’d gone through childhood, I’d kept myself going by thinking, ‘I might irritate you now. But one day you’ll regard me as useful resource!’ But our teenagers don’t want us to be a resource. They want us to make food appear magically in the cupboards and fridge and then melt away, so they can conduct their lives without interference. And I was just the same.
‘Why don’t you apply for university?’ my mum ventured, reasonably, after the art school rejection.
Oh my God what makes you think I’d want to go to university and learn stuff? I choked out before rushing out to meet my best friend and drink warm lager in a multi storey carpark.
The fact that I went for the hospital cleaner job to somehow ‘show’ those art school who’d rejected me… well, it shows that the saying is true. Youth is wasted on the young.
Who said that again? If I’d gone to university, I’d know.
Love,
Fiona xx
PS Summer’s not over yet! If you’d like a sun and fun-filled grown up romance, my latest might be just what you’re looking for… you can order here!
This made me laugh! Mizz, Just Seventeen, and Jackie were all my bibles growing up. What a dream it must’ve been to actually work there!
This is fantastic. Needless to say, I think today's teens are in desperate need of a magazine. Tik Tok huh? Nothing compared to the excitement of Thursdays and a mag with you name on it dropping in the newsagent. What have they got to look forward to? They can access everything at any time of day or night...