Certain barbed remarks live long in the memory. It must be 25 years ago that a female friend chided me for still dressing exactly as I did when we first met at university.
There had been zero progress in the sartorial department, she was saying, between my late teens and early 30s. Here we were at the dawn of a new millennium and there I was rocking my 1985 look of jeans, trainers and untucked checked shirt.
It would have been a mistake, I felt, to confess that the 1985 look had been in place for at least five years before our paths crossed.
It is a good thing the conversation did not stray to music. She would have discovered that I enjoyed the same artists at 32 as I did at 17.
Or reading matter. US crime thrillers for me. Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard mostly. No change there either.
Or computer games, which had come on in leaps and bounds in the intervening period. Sure, but was there anything more fun than Asteroids, my favourite as a teenager?
A quarter of a century too late, science rides to my defence. According to Cambridge University research published this week, I was still technically an adolescent when I was 32.
Indeed, this is the age where we find ourselves on the cusp of true adulthood and analysis of our grey matter suggests it is the ‘strongest topological turning point’ of our lives.
Many men pick a style in their teens and stick to it for decades
Modern games may look good but do they measure up to old classics like Asteroids?
Armed with this information back then, I could have told my friend that sweeping cerebral changes were surely imminent but, for now, she should back off. She was, after all, dealing with someone who was still basically a teen.
Maybe I’m a late bloomer, I could have told her. Puberty didn’t hit until I was 13 or 14. Maybe my adolescence ends at 33 or 34.
But did it ever end? Here I sit typing at my computer and I note that I am wearing jeans, trainers and an untucked checked shirt.
I would argue that my musical tastes are as broad as anyone’s and that, in middle age, I’m much more forgiving of genres which didn’t appeal to me as a highly opinionated teen.
But, when push comes to shove, does anyone match The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd, all of whom I was crazy about 40 years ago? This triumvirate still rules. I don’t anticipate a change of heart any time soon.
Holiday reading? US crime thrillers, mostly, but now Ed and Elmore are gone, I’ll settle for Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke.
And, yes, I remain partial to a cheeky go at Asteroids.
Adolescence? At the age of 57 it seems to me I’m still going through it. More than this, I’m in no hurry for it to end. Quite the reverse: I’m clinging to it by reintroducing teen pursuits.
A few years ago, I bought a turntable so that I could know once more the joy of a stylus hitting vinyl, hear that familiar crackle on the outer grooves, feel the anticipation of track one about to play. This was how I remembered it from my teens.
This year, I returned after a four-decade break to table tennis, and found my game surprisingly intact. Now that I’ve had a couple of months of regular practice, I reckon I could give the 16-year-old me a run for his money.
This is reassuring. It tells me the competitive instincts forged in youth, when beating my older brother was one of life’s central imperatives, remain undimmed.
I feel them burning in me still with every match I play. I hate to lose in the 2020s as much as I did in the 1980s, and reconnecting with this tempestuous teen – knowing that he never really went away – is glorious.
Maybe in time I will grow out of it, tell myself it’s only a game, go easier on my creaking body and dulled reflexes, but I doubt it. One of my regular opponents is 80 and it hasn’t happened to him yet.
Classic rock from the likes of like Pink Floyd has stood the test of time for many listeners
So much for the revival of teen pursuits, but has emotional maturity made itself known in the decades since adolescence was supposed to have been left behind?
I experience bouts of it, but it is a work in progress.
In the workplace we try to ensure our adult masks do not slip, but most of the rivalries, jealousies and passive aggression we see in office life are straight out of the teen playbook. Many are barely distinguishable from those of our school days.
In fact, I’d suggest that, if anything, workplaces are becoming less grown-up.
How else to explain the paper-thin skins so prevalent now among employees under 40 – a generation educated in the age of trigger warnings for course material which may make them sad, no- platforming for speakers with whom they may disagree, and nonsense terms like ‘my truth’ for validation of the observably untrue?
Some of them are as hypersensitive as 15-year-olds and prone to behaving as this age group does when confronted with information they do not wish to hear.
And I do not exclude myself from their number. Who can say, hand on heart, that an adolescent voice does not pipe up somewhere inside them in response to stressful circumstances or life not going their way?
Not me. I hear that teenage voice almost every day but have learned to muzzle it and let the grown-up do the speaking. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Even if, at our core, we are not particularly mature, we know what maturity is supposed to sound like; we take a beat and engage the age-appropriate tone. All of which leads me to conclude that adolescence may be a tougher nut to crack than the boffins suppose – especially among the male of the species.
Do we ever grow up? The delirious reaction of thousands of my countryfolk to Scotland’s (freak) victory over Denmark last week and resultant qualification for the World Cup Finals next year may provide a clue.
Like teenagers with no hinterland of experience of Scotland’s misadventures in this competition, they’re excitedly planning their travels to North America. Adulthood dims their eagerness not a jot.
It is encouraging to learn that I am not the only fifty-something adolescent around – that the kid lives on in so many of us.
Could it be that adolescence is not so much a phase to be passed through on our journey as a setting in stone of who we really are? Does it really propel us forward into adulthood or merely onwards into an extended adolescence? I can’t say I noticed any significant change.
Peel the mask away and find the teenager never left the building.
I am 57 going on 17. And I’d quite like that second number to stay the same.
j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk
