The Black Dog Years

I wish I was Kevin Arnold.

Kev? You know? The dumpy, goofy little kid in The Wonder Years?

Not only did/does Kevin not live in this shithole of a country, he’s apparently got one of those special paintings in the loft, like that Dorian Gray cove.

Due to an unexpected and, believe it or not, unwanted absence from work for a while, I have found myself filling the dark and deepening void by sitting in front of the Devil’s Lantern more than is healthy. Just as it’s inevitable that if you stand still long enough in any town or city centre some twat will come along and ask if you are interested in changing your god or gas supplier, so too it’s inevitable that if you watch the box long enough an episode of The Wonder Years will come along.

So it was this morning when I reached for the button of distraction. The last time I can recall watching the seemingly never ending saga of Kevin Arnold he had a car and was at high school. Today, thanks no doubt to that attic artwork, he was 13 again!

Schadenfreude had got me looking forward to him hitting his late teens, the show by then having been retitled The Blunder Years. You know, all those 18th birthday parties and that discovering girls stuff? The beginning of that long, painful and drip-drip-drip lesson which would have taught him, too late, that females were not only made of sugar and spice, but also oestrogen and a burning desire for shoes and strife.

What happened to the episodes when Kev hit his 20s? – The Chunder Years. When he burst on an unsuspecting world, full of hope and ambition, only to be trampled down by mile-long dole queues and the dawning realisation that, without an atom bomb, he could not change the world after all. When his diary was full of 21st birthday parties where friends got the key of the door, only to learn that it granted them admission to a world of conformity and drudge.

Then there would have been The Goes-Under Years charting the rolling by of his 30s. The struggling to find a little semi-detached castle where he imagined he could pull up the drawbridge at nights and tell the world to go away. The finding of a partner who, with fingers crossed behind her back, promised to love and honour him for the rest of his days. The “Happy Divorce” presents to buy for his pals. The aching banality of business, bills, Barmouth and badminton.

Then we would at last have come bang up to date and found Kev in his 40s. His hair gone, his teeth as complete as a row of houses in Lockerbie. He would have at last learnt how to spectacularly please a woman in bed, only to find that, like a juggler in an airing cupboard, there was no-one to whom he could show off his skills. He would have become very good at his line of work but found that experience and expertise were no longer wanted – cheapness and blind obedience were all that mattered. He would have become accustomed to regularly dressing smartly and hearing good things said about old friends before attending lavish booze-ups where reminiscences flowed as thick and fast as the beer and the wine. Shame those old friends would not be there – because he had just seen them buried.

Back to The Wonder Years? – wonder where it all went so wrong?

Still, our Kev can just press a button, or perhaps sneak up into the attic, and, hey presto! He’s back to being 13 again.

I wish I was Kevin Arnold.