So my niece turns fifteen on Monday. I'm envious. After all (as is widely known by teenagers and parents alike) fifteen is the exact age when you get to know everything.
Yep - it's the year of omniscience: that moment of complete enlightenment, when nothing at all is hidden from you, and the great mysteries of the universe (the ones that have somehow passed those dreary old adults by) are revealed to you as though they were suddenly mere trivialities, unfolding in front of you in glorious simplicity.
In the light of all that, teachers must look like clueless simpletons; parents too, like aliens from another dimension in which nothing that is cool could possibly have ever existed.
I wonder whether she wonders what happens to us beyond that age. You know, when we stop listening to Radio 1 in the sunshine, imagining that life goes on forever. I wonder what she imagined happened to me after 1993 when I too, knew everything that there was to know.
How did I forget it all? How did it all slip away? What happened? When did I become so naive?
So, yes. Fifteen she'll be and temporarily the mistress of the Universe with nothing left to learn or know or fail to be able to (often sarcastically) point out.
Hope she enjoys it. It'd be terrible to be omniscient and not realise just for how short a time it lasts.
Then again, what do I know?
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