You are a teenager again, your body is little more than a vast reservoir of anxiety, a vessel for self-consciousness. It is the day of your Debs. You stare at your reflection in the mirror. You have never noticed, until this moment, just how unflatteringly thick your neck is. It is impressively thick – I mean, given that you have literally done nothing to ever warrant the development of neck muscles, short of holding up your own head, it really is astoundingly thick – like a sturdy ham. You wonder how your date – a friend of your cousin’s that you know had to be persuaded into accepting your invite – will manage to react to you, and your profoundly girthy neck, with anything other than sheer revulsion.
Such is the typical experience of a teen on the cusp of attending their Debs. It is, for many, a nerve-wracking experience which contains many of the prime ingredients for social embarrassment – a rigid protocol and set of expectations; the attention of dozens of people being focused on you and, an expectation of glamour which you know you will utterly fall short of – they’re all there, it’s a potent recipe.
As such, it’s understandable that a lot of people want to draw as little attention to themselves as possible on the evening of their Debs, and are happy to just plough through the more formal aspects of it, before being given the greenlight to get so drunk that they accidentally end up humping a hedge at 4am.
However, there will always be some, some errant dreamers who buck this trend. Who dare to shirk convention and expectation, and, not only relish in the limelight, but seek to attract sufficient limelight to warrant their featuring on the social media channels of a regional, midland’s newspaper. The natural way to do this of course, and we’re all thinking it, is to utilise some heavy agricultural machinery to collect your date.
Imagine, as your father gestures toward the slightly dilapidated Renault Espace parked in your driveway – your family car – as if to say, ‘Please, board this, as for this night only, it is no longer simply our 2011 Renault Espace, but it shall be the chariot for you and your S/O,’ and you ignore him. Instead of stepping into the vehicle, with its despairingly sullied carpets, you turn and walk away, disappearing behind the house, to emerge triumphantly piloting a large cobalt blue tractor. Once your father has frantically waved you down and unhitched the horse-box full of now terrified and angry stallions that you unwittingly dragged along in the tractor’s wake, you show that this, this piece of heavy agricultural machinery is the only befitting vehicle worthy of ferrying you and your S/O.
At least, we imagine that something similar occurred with one student in Portarlington in Laois who arrived to his Debs, with his date, in a tractor.
We imagine they were in no fit state to drive it home. If you know who this person was, please, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
