Things You Don't Have to Pretend Are Cool Now That You've Finished Your A-Levels

School's out forever. Image via

For most of us, Thursday the 15th of August 2013 means nothing more than "nearly Friday". But for a whole bunch of you it’s the day you finally collect your A-level results, are either crushingly disappointed or happily bewildered, and transform from “somebody who eats oven chips during lunch break” to “somebody who eats oven chips at home in bed”. It’s a very exciting time. Think of yourself as embarking upon a personal metamorphosis.

If you don’t want to you may never have to do another exam in your life, other than the ones on your tax return, and that's fine because everyone is allowed to get wildly drunk before filling out their tax return. Sure, you might feel bad about leaving behind all your best friends, but don't worry, because there's no way at all that you would have stayed best friends anyway; they'll start acting all weird, one of you will have a baby, a couple will get into heroin, that's just the way it goes.

You will also find that there are some huge piles of life bullshit that you simply won't have to bother wrestling with any more. And I'm not just talking about lecherous teachers or the tyranny of Pythagoras' theorem – I'm also talking about all of the terrible things that rich men in grey suits have been trying to convince you are cool since you were 11 years old. Let's take a look at a list of things that you don't have to pretend to like any more now that you are an ex-child.

SKINS

I know you don't care about this. via

Did you really watch this "religiously" a few years ago when it was still being hyped or did you just read the blurbs on Wikipedia the day after each episode came out and then pretend you saw it, like the rest of your friends? Even when it started it seemed incredulous that teenagers would watch a show entirely pre-occupied with being realistic, yet that was conceived by people who spent months sat in a conference room staring at a piece of paper with the word "EDGY" written on it.

Gone are the days when you need to take sides on Freddie and Cook fighting over Effy. Skins was possibly the least cool thing to happen to sixth form common rooms for an entire decade. Our parents had the Rolling Stones and we had Nicholas Hoult not-even-fatally getting run over. Erase it all.

HAIR GEL

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Why are some people still convinced that teenage girls love boys wearing hair gel? Having paid a lot of attention to a lot of teenage boys (what, I can still do this, it's fine if it's this way round), wet look gel seemed to be one of those things that you were only allowed to buy if you weren't quite old enough to have sex and not quite young enough to impress girls by pushing them over.

When I peer at the strangely proportioned schoolboys on the bus today, I see that the legend of wet look lives on, as if upon hitting 13 all male humans are suddenly possessed by the desire to transform their heads into giant wet armpits. I can't tell you why this phenomenon exists, or conversely why boys' scalps get less thirsty as soon as they're legally allowed to pour alcohol down their throats. Maybe because it only reveals its full-bore shittiness beneath those UV striplights they have in provincial nightclub toilets?

God, I almost wanna slather myself in it purely to experience the relief of washing it all off in the shower. A-level boys, this is something you should be doing ASAFP.

DISNEY TEENS

Simply put: There is very little as evil as Disney's landgrab of teen "coming of age" territory. Somehow we went from Superbad and Porky's to High School Musical and another film with Miley Cyrus in it called LOL.

Get on with unlearning any nauseatingly moralistic life lesson you might have absorbed from any teenage Disney film ever made. After all, that's what all the people who were in them are busy doing.

JAKE BUGG

Alternatively, you spent the last six years desperately trying to prove to your classmates that you have more refined tastes. But the word "refining" refers to an ongoing process and when you're 15 you're still very much at the beginning of that process. So you end up thinking you like stuff like Jake Bugg.

Why don't you wipe that expectant gawp off your face and come join us all revelling in the snide dismissal of all things? Being an adult gives you absolute free reign to reject stuff you think is stupid without the risk of being dragged into a room with a staff counsellor and reprimanded for not "joining in".

PLACES YOUR PARENTS DON'T MIND YOU GOING

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Perhaps the most satisfactory of all the terrible things you can now admit to always having hated are the "safe zones" where teenagers are allowed to go and behave slightly like grownups without remotely freaking out their parents or impressing their friends. Too old to cough up cigarette smoke in the secluded corner of a graveyard but too young to get served in your local 'spoons? Don't stress it, because here are a slew of incredibly expensive fake-American diners and milkshake bars ready to take your pocket money in exchange for uninterrupted MTV Base and the slight chance you'll meet somebody from the year above.

Burn them all down with the vodka and lighters you're now allowed to buy. And have a great results night!

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

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