with love and violence
Do you remember being a teenager? Do you get that innate sense of terror balling in your stomach when you recollect being riddled with hormones and no sense of identity? Perhaps you've mentally blocked it out, maybe you're wishing you could start it all over from scratch and just make a different set of mistakes, or possibly you're twelve and have stumbled across a blog that's a little too mature for you... If you are twelve, you're roughly the age I was when I was introduced to the work of Rik Mayall. I'd just started high school and it felt like everyone had a 'thing' and having that 'thing' was an act of survival. Whether it was boy bands or football teams, vampires or werewolves, I was feeling the immense pressure of transferring from an environment where everyone liked one another for playing tag and picking your nose, to one where a hierarchal structure of popularity rooted in how you looked and how you entertained yourself reigned. I tri...