Embrace your inner teenager and learn to love being bored

I’m not sure that my former headmistress – a formidable old party with a distaste for teenaged girls – ever actually told us that our schooldays were the best days of our lives, but she certainly gave the impression that she didn’t expect much from our futures. Although I detested school and couldn’t wait to leave, those days provided a benchmark for a feeling I’ve spent much of my life trying to recapture – you could call it happiness, I suppose.

It wasn’t the lessons that conjured this sense of wellbeing, but that moment when they stopped. The absence of education wasn’t so much a negative space as a overwhelming release into a delicious, languorous boredom, the sense of which – though I haven’t felt it in almost 40 years – haunts me still.

There was absolutely nothing to do in my school holidays. My friends and I spent the long weeks of summer hanging about the “rec” in the hope of meeting various boys on whom our fancy was fixed, drifting along the uneventful quarter-mile of Sittingbourne’s main drag (highlights: Woolworths, Pelosi’s coffee bar) or sitting about in each other’s bedrooms, trying out makeup tips from Jackie magazine and then making our faces all streaky by sobbing to Harry Nilsson’s

Without You.

So idyllic was my recollection of our adolescent idleness that when my son was a teenager, it didn’t occur to me to vary the formula. Occasionally, I felt alarmed on hearing about the intensive programmes of constructive activity to which my friends’ children were subjected. But my son had a knack of vanishing when I suggested that he ought to be doing stuff; he’d rather spend his summers making long Tube trips to the end of each line, which struck me as a fairly educational thing to do, in a Betjemanesque sort of way, and I let him get on with it.

Only now, when it is too late to do anything about it, am I beginning to realise the extent of my parental fecklessness. Research by the National Citizen Service, a youth programme for 15-17-year-olds, concludes that young people are not making the most of their school holidays, and to this lamentable state of affairs Ash Rahman, head of Toot Hill School in Nottinghamshire, proposes a remedy. To help teenagers “fully understand the challenges mum and dad face”, he suggests “enabling your son or daughter to manage the family budget for a week, making them responsible for the food shop and planning and cooking dinner for the family”.

Looking back, I suppose that a week spent subsisting on pizza, custard doughnuts and Irn-Bru might have been a small price to pay for the character-forming benefits of exposing him to the challenges I faced as his parent (not least of which was the struggle to get him to eat anything not listed above).

As it turned out, he eventually learned to love vegetables and budgeting the hard way – by going off to university and finding out for himself how nasty life can be without them. For the current generation of teenagers, a summer holiday curriculum packed with life skills no doubt represents a painless opportunity to acquire independence and a sense of responsibility. But somewhere in that curriculum I hope there might be room for a module on the creative art of simply being bored.