It's not who you go with, honey. It's who takes you home.

For people of a certain age, probably anyone over thirty, the very last week of secondary school was a bit different than it is for kids now.  I mean there'd be the standard 'Bring in a board game' or 'trip to local zoo / attraction (delete as neccessary)' type of thing, followed perhaps on the very last day by signing your friends' shirts, throwing eggs and flour around the place and telling the teachers what you really thought of them, then having a bit of a cry as you realised that you'd probably never see 99% of these people ever again.

That's what happened at my school at least... About thirty years ago, when the world was still in black and white and we wrote on slates, with chalk.

But things are different now though, even if you don't have kids, or a calendar, you can track the days leading up to the end of the final term simply by counting the increasing number of limousines driving around the local schools carrying teenagers who are waving plastic cups of Schloer out of their windows and squalking at the top of their voices like sadly undereducated Herring Gulls. (If you live in a particularly tacky area, feel free to substitute 'Stretch Hummers' for limousines)

I'm talking, of course, about 'Prom'. Now, proms have been going on in the US, amongst other places, for just over a hundred years, and anyone who's ever seen an American film that involves teens at High-School (Especially if it was written by John Hughes) will know what one is.  But just in case you don't...

Prom, or The Prom, or The Senior Prom is a dance held at the end of an American 'child's' High School education, when they are around 18 years old.  For weeks leading up to the event, post pubescent teens worry about asking, or being asked by, someone if they would like to go with them (cue multiple teen angst references that you can fill in yourself about self worth etc.) As 'Drivers Ed.' is taught in a great percentage of US schools, many of these kids are now able to drive the family car to such events (Insert here countless images of geeks driving their mom's station wagon to the cool girl with the heart of gold's house) The geek kids is then closely inspected by the father, and veiled threats are made, which are usually interrupted halfway through by a sharp intake of breath from the mother as the girl appears at the top of the stairs in either: A designer gown if the girl is popular, or a home-made, but somehow fit for a Vivienne Westwood catwalk affair if the girl is also geeky, but tiger-flayingly beautiful now that she's swapped her glasses for contacts. cue tears...

After arriving at the dance, several of the following things will probably occur:

1: There will be a confrontation with the girl's ex-boyfriend, which will end with the geek being saved by the girl
2: The lovable but wacky science types will 'spike the punch'
3: The not openly lesbian, but still quite lesbian girl will arrive in a sky-blue suit with navy blue zig-zag edging, and end up dancing with her best male friend. (Because blurred gender stereotypes are edgy kids, and make for good entertainment, but good old fashioned heterosexuality is what you should be aiming for in the end, praise the Lord)
4: There will be a fight, where the geek beats the jock by using guile, a previously stated scientific principle, or running as fast as his little spindly legs will carry him
5: Someone will lose their copy of Grays Sports Almanac 1950-2000.
6: There will be a slow-dance performed by the hero's favourite Metal/Indie band, who just happen to have been booked by the crusty old Principle, possibly due to some mix-up with his reading glasses.

Then all you've got after that is a quick trip to a local motel, some fumbling about with straps and fastenings whilst the room spins around uncontrollably, a quick Google of how to get sticky stains out of organza fabric, a couple of months of worriedly urinating onto a small plastic stick, and a lifetime of regret.

Sounds great,  I can see why we imported it to the UK.

Along with all the other things we've imported from the US (Gang culture, Rap music, McDonalds and Scripted reality TV shows amongst others) we've implemented it in a typically half-arsed fashion.  Most of our kids leave school when they're 16, and we don't have many motels.  Although in fairness, a lot of them do already have kids of their own by 16, so that's swings and roundabout really. And whilst 16 year old girls, with a minimum of makeup, can easily look 18 (or 25 in some cases...) 16 year old boys look like 8 rear olds wearing their dads' wedding suit (providing they're still in contact with their dads and that there was ever a wedding involved)

Then you find out that a lot of junior schools are now having a prom... That's ten year old kids, which is pretty horrific.

I've not heard that any infant schools are doing it yet... But I can't see it being long before we're being cajoled into buying Kardashian styled dresses for our seven year olds so that they can ride a stretched Little Tykes Cosy Coupe to their school with 'Fiddy Cent' blasting out of their brand-new iPhones.

The word for what you're feeling now is despair, or at least it should be...

Although, I say that... A friend of mine who actually lives in the US tells me that back in May, her dog, Waffles, 'graduated' from Puppy training... He wore a mortar board, and there was a certificate, and a cup and everything.  So, we've got that to look forward to.

Now, where's my old Service Revolver?

+-+-+-+-+-+-+ UPDATE +-+-+-+-+-+-+

I've just, via the medium of Facebook, seen that a good friend of mine's daughter has just Graduated from nursery, with a cap and a gown and everything... This begs the question, why is this butterknife so blunt? it's hardly making any headway on my wrists at all.

It's all your fault!

I just read a post on one of those 'Spotted' Pages on Facebook.  I don't know if your area is covered, but effectively it's a page where people can post things about people they've seen in the local area that they would 'Like to get to know better' - I presume that that's what they mean when they say 'I'm rite lyk to smash er back doorz in bruv.' anyway. Or when they find your choice of car or clothes unacceptable or they wish you would close your front curtains whilst you are excitedly banging your spotty buttocked, squealing girlfriend when they are peering through your windows whilst taking their kids to school and suchlike.

Anyway, going off on a tangent there... Don't know where that one would have ended up if I'd carried on with it *whew*.

The post was from someone thanking some kids who had handed her Grans purse into a local shop when they'd found it on the floor.  It still had all the money in it and everything.  Wonderful story, very uplifting - Proving that the youth of today deserves to be looked at as a disparate, loose grouping of individuals with their own special attributes and aspirations, rather than a huge septic mass of snapbacks and hoodies who cannot spell a three letter word never mind have an original thought without putting 'ey' or 'YGM' or something on the end of it.

Brilliant, great post, great event, warm and firm handshakes all around.

However, I started to notice a worrying trend in some of the replies.  Apart from the spelling (which genuinely caused me to try and mouth the words and see if I could figure out what they were trying to say) and the almost apocalyptic lack of punctuation (Really, a sentence that stretches over four lines? - you must have some well hench lungs if you can say all that without stopping to breathe) - Oh! Lookit me! I'm trying to sound like a skinny, spotty white-boy, who weighs 5 stone wringing wet, doesn't know how hats work, thinks 'flipping the bird' is the epitome of human pulchritude, wears a lot of knock-off high-nylon-content sportswear and really wants to have been born, as a heavily muscled black gentleman, in South-Central LA or Compton.

So, apart from them, I kept reading things like 'Ah! they've made their Mums proud.' and 'That's because of the way that their Mums have brought them up' and 'Bet their Mums are giving them extra-big cuddles tonight'

See the theme?

Give you a clue, it starts with the letter 'M' and rhymes with 'bum'

I'm a Dad, and even if I say so myself, a pretty good one.  I appreciate that traditionally, mothers have always been seen as the primary caregivers and I'm not trying to take anything away from them.  I'd say that at least 80-90% of Mums are great, brilliant, wonderful people who inspire their kids whilst teaching them the proper boundaries and don't say 'It's just kids being kids, innit' when Little Jay-Zee gets brought home by the police as they've found him keying cars whilst still being dressed in his primary school uniform at 02:30 in the A.M.

I like to think that I've done my bit, in-between being out of the house for twelve hours a day doing the whole work thing.  I've helped to teach my kids to think for themselves, to be proud of their achievements, to know the difference between right and wrong, the correct pressure to use when you're putting someone in a sleeper hold (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME, there's a very real danger of brain-damage and/or death if you don't know what you're doing!) and, most importantly, respect for themselves and others.

Yet I still get looked at as if I'm either a paedophile, or some other kind of deviant if I happen to be seen outside with my own daughter - I understand from other Dads who have daughters in their late teens that they have a similar but slightly different problem, there's active tutting being directed at them on a fairly regular basis from the more mature (agewise) female members of society.  I know that that might sound a bit sexist, but invariably, it's the classic 'Little Old Lady' that's giving it large with the 'He's old enough to be her Dad' business.

So what do we do about it?

How do we change that?

How do we make people start saying 'I bet their parents are proud' Rather than 'I bet their Mums are proud'?

Buggered if I know - but it might be a start for blokes to start taking responsibility for their children, acting like Dads and not just like bloody spermatozoon cannons. Getting their girlfriends pregnant and then rinsing and repeating with the next one and the next one and the next, wandering through their poky housing estates like a sexually ambivalent typhoid Mary (or Typhoid Marlon perhaps, in this particular case) begatting all over the place without a care in the world and bringing hordes of pale, acne-ridden ginger kids into the world who go straight from their third or fourth-hand plastic coated cots to the dole-queue, not passing Go, but still collecting £200 every bloody fortnight.

Parent who have been together for a long time and have subsequently parted after having kids - I get it, things happen, life's not like it is in fairy tales.  This isn't directed at you.  Neither am I talking about people who've escaped from abusive relationships or people whose partners have died, or mature people who have made the conscious decision to have children but to raise them on their own.

I'm talking about those boys, because they don't deserve to be called men - The 'I'm not wearing a condom, you can't feel anything' brigade, the 'If you loved me you'd let me' types, the ones you see in the adverts who prey on girls with low self-esteem, the ones whose face you would literally never get tired of punching, the ones who grin vacantly at you and you know that no matter how you explain it to them, they will have no idea what you're saying or why they should even care.

The ones that have made women hate men.

The ones that misguided women who don't really understand the difference between feminism and misandry blame all the world's problems on.

The ones that have made women who don't know me mistrust me because I am what is currently known as 'a big bloke.' (people used to use the word imposing you know - Better ring to it I think)

The ones that have made all men into monsters.

The ones that, if there was any justice in the world, would still be contained in a crusty old sock, hidden under their Father's bed.

This is aimed at you...


You make me sick.