No Wonder the Cool Kids Didn’t Like Me: Teenage Years, Societal Fears and Brewed Under License Beers


I went through a curious transition from being a child to a teenager, the same one that, in our own unique ways, I suppose we all must endure to a varying extent. Mine, it must be said, was on the more benign end of the scale. I loved LEGO growing up (buy your kids a massive box of bricks and you'll save a small fortune on toy purchases throughout their lifetime), and I found it really difficult giving it up as I grew older, so I just didn’t. This led to strange juxtapositions like my fifteenth birthday party, which saw a group of similarly aged adolescents in my room all drinking Skol lager (just like at Dave’s party a few months previously) and watching The Evil Dead, surrounded by LEGO models and the echoing sounds of ‘don’t touch them please, they’re fragile.’ They touched them, of course, because LEGO is universally fascinating and they were probably a tiny bit jealous of me having the wherewithal to still have it proudly displayed in my boudoir. Or maybe they just wanted to laugh at me. Regardless, I was enraptured by those bricks long after my peers had passed them by.