I am seventeen today. Seventeen! Proper ancient! I thought seventeen might feel different, like suddenly I’d wake up feeling well mature and start watching Emmerdale and enjoying brussels sprouts and doing word-searches but it ain’t like that at all. Seventeen just feels like sixteen.
When do you suddenly start feeling like a grown-up, I wonder? When do you suddenly get all your grown-up brain cells and know whether you’re doing the right thing with your life and where you’re going? When does that all come?
I asked my mother about it this morning and she said the moment she knew she was a grown-up was this day in the early ’90s when she found herself in ShopRite in Romford and Cava-Sue had just started school and I was only a toddler and Murphy was just born and her mum had just died and suddenly she was in charge of everybody and she still felt like a kid herself but she weren’t no more and she was staring at this packet of rice pudding like her mum used to make her and she realized she didn’t know how to cook it and there was no one to tell her anymore and she had a panic attack and the manager had to take her to his office and make her a cup of sweet tea.
“Anyway,” my mother said, chucking me a card in an envelope. “Don’t worry about that now. Happy Birthday.” Mum gave me a card on behalf of everyone in the family with a £20 gift card for TJ Maxx, then my Wesley came round tonight and took me out to Pizza Hut.
Wesley bought me a gold bracelet from Elizabeth Duke which sort of matches my locket. He is such a nice person. It’s proper chunky though. “’Ere, Mum,” I said to her once he’d gone. “You don’t think this is a bit too bling if I wear it with the locket and the hoops is it?”
“Don’t be soft,” Mum said, “You can’t never wear too much gold.”