Juvenalia

Peter Pan was the eternal child - much like Jack Sparrow. In fact it seems that the whole pirate milieu is pervaded by the quest for eternal youth, or at least eternal immaturity. The evolutionary benefit of this approach seems to be that if you take nothing seriously then nothing serious will happen to you. The sword will always be a miss and your one-liners will always be a hit. Perhaps it's unsurprising that the pirate genre would be pervaded by this surreality, as the rose coloured glasses of narrative peering through the celebrated mists of time appear to have transformed rapacious, violent, marginalised criminals into rollicking, witty, just slightly salacious ratbags. The passage of time and the magic of the story teller are amazing in that regard; just ask Ned Kelly.

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is an intrusion into the 'real' world (and I use the inverted commas advisedly - just check out the title of the blog) of this fetish for eternal and protective immaturity. But it's only one of many manifestations of this phenomenon.

One of things that has surprised me most over the last couple of decades has been the rise of adults who take themselves seriously and also give themselves the title of "Gamers". Computer games are - or at least were - for children and adolescents who hadn't, as yet, developed the social or intellectual skills necessary for things like cards. It's a kind of eternal backyard in which you run around with your friends pretending to be soliders or ninjas or car thieves or whatever. This kind of thing for adults used to be limited to "Historical Re-enactment Societies" who, at least, had the decency to try to make what they were doing sound grown-up and meaningful. Calling yourselves "Gamers" is just shameless!

And cosplay. Don't give me "cosplay", it's dress-ups. The only difference is that you, as an adult, are hoping that you look kind of sexy in the Catwoman outfit. And getting yourselves together at a Comicon, dressed up like storm-troopers and getting a selfie with or your butt signed by the actress that played the engineer on Firefly is just a dress-up party taking itself way too seriously.

The final surrender appears to be colouring in. I'm now being told that there are protective benefits to my mental health - in the form of mindfulness - from making sure that my sky is blue, my grass is green, my house has a chimney and I stay inside the lines. Sure, you're trying to make it feel like something meaningful by throwing in some kind of Tibetan mung-bean, organic, vegetarian mandala thing but it's still colouring in. What's next? Join the dots.

It seems like it would have been better not to have graduated from primary school.

And the trouble is that none of it is giving us the real benefits that we want to bring back from childhood The clothes I dropped on the floor of the bathroom are still there in the morning, my shirt doesn't appear magically ironed next to my bed in the morning, I don't get to just scream and yell when I have problems and, worst of all, I can't just curl up and take a nap anytime I feel that it's all a bit overwhelming. 

Which I think would be the thing that would provide me the most mental health protection of all.