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Freshers Week - The Cure for Craving Youth

I can't seem to Google 'celebrity plastic surgery disasters lol' these days without coming across yet another attempt by a formerly beautiful star, attempting increasingly vainly to cling on to their youthful, long-gone, previous self.

Insert gratuitously schadenfreude-filled photograph of wonkily botoxed/botched boobed actress on the downswing of her career here

Now obviously growing ever closer to death is a bit chilling. And even a generous mind might admit that sagging skin, haggard bags, and balding pates, are not what immediately springs to mind when getting into the mood for a quick flick of the wrist. However, is it really so great; that younger fresher self? I spent most of my teenaged years ultra depressed and wildly unshaggable. The two overlapped to a great extent in the Ven Diagram of life has to be said.  

I suggest, as a cure to all of this youth obsession, attending any freshers fair currently underway. The truth of what it is like to be young will hit you as a nauseating wall of fear and self consciousness. Get face to face once more with that horrible feeling of helplessness, mingling with hastily hidden homesickness, and weighted down by the certainty that you must try to fit in with a building full of shouting, somehow super-confident, bargain basement Abercrombie and Fitch catalog models. Remember those agonizing drawn-out days of trying to find someone, anyone to talk to. And those lonely nights of banging every damned five minutes, so that the blissful oblivion of sleep, where for eight hours you can forget your failure to resemble an exciting lead character out of a Channel 4 original British drama, is robbed, and exhaustion must now be heaped on to the pile of misery as well.

Come face to face once more with the frightened vanilla conformity of 18-21 year olds. Legion sporting the exact same haircut, T-shirt/skinny jeans/wristband combo, and unsmiling face. So self consciously unconfident in their own body that they must paint themselves in makeup the texture of Dulux emulsion, or buy £30 a pop cans of whey protein and do push ups until their still forming frames are a sad simulacra of a soft porn actors. Three minutes in the company of myriad Kate Middletons and homogenised Brent Everetts, is enough to have you running, screaming, for a sunbed, jumbo pack of Benson and Hedges, and subscription to Reader's Digest.

This is of course a gross exaggeration. The freshers I have met this week have all been, as they always are, diverse, polite, nervous, enthusiastic, individuals. I just wish they did not have to feel so pressured to conform, just as we older generations, having gone through the same, should not feel pressured to conform to a bastardised nostalgic version of it a second time around. By all means eat by candlelight. But put the Botox needle down and pick up something you just enjoy doing instead. Nothing is so universally eternally ageless as having fun.  

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