Colleen Smith

READERS of this column should know I’m not a prude.

And I liked the idea of giving out flip-flops to teenage girls tottering out of nightclubs. It seemed like an appropriate way of approaching vulnerable young women to pass on safety messages.

And I know teenagers often don’t listen until it’s too late, so health professionals are desperate to find new ways of grabbing their attention to get vital protection information across.

But I think passing around squishy willies with smiley faces gives entirely the wrong kind of message.

Sex isn’t just a bit of a ‘larf’.

Well, obviously, I know it can be — but not if you’re only 13, and scared, don’t really know how to say ‘no’.

And not if you don’t understand about contraception or protecting yourself from sexually transmitted diseases, or you’re off your face, or just doing it because of peer pressure.

Teenagers act as if they know it all. But often they know more than they want to know. And they’re surprisingly squeamish, shocked and ignorant about the details.

And the fact that so many of them are getting pregnant, or catching Chlamydia, shows how this generation is still as naïve as ever about the real facts of life.

Teenage mum Kizzy Neal may have a 22-month-old son, but that didn’t stop her feeling embarrassed when a health professional produced six-inch, squidgy rubber willies as part of a talk on Chlamydia screening.

Kizzy, from Paignton, said her first reaction was ‘Ew! Why are those on the table?’ Her second reaction was a fit of the giggles. Entirely appropriate for a 16-year-old girl.

The setting for the workshop was the young mums’ home where Kizzy now lives with her little boy, Kaylib.

She and a couple of other teenage mums attended the talk voluntarily and Kizzy said the Chlamydia screening nurse did a good job, getting them all talking and thinking openly. She found it useful and informative.

“Because she was a woman and we were all girls together we could really ask anything we wanted,” Kizzy said. “It was surprising, really, some of the things we didn’t know about.”

And she said she wasn’t in the least bothered by the Day-Glo sperm key fob, which was another free gift to get over the message about getting regularly tested to avoid infection.

It’s a serious issue. Chlamydia is the most commonly sexually-transmitted infection in the UK, affecting one in 10 people under the age of 25.

As Chlamydia sometimes has no symptoms in both men and women, it can often go undiagnosed unless it leads to complications. In some cases it can lead to infertility.

Kizzy has learned the hard way about risks and consequences.

She was only 14 when she had Kaylib. She is now living in her own supported-living flat with her toddler and admits it’s hard work now she hasn’t got mum around to help her all the time.

And it’s also been tough because she and her family made a decision to be very public and open about Kizzy’s situation, because they didn’t want to be just another statistic in Torbay’s dreadful teen pregnancy figures.

They wanted to help publicise the teen pregnancy problems in the Bay.

That decision has brought its own problems. The whole family has had to endure bullying and name-calling and at one stage thought they would have to move out of their Paignton home and leave the area because of violence.

It’s easy to put Kizzy into a stereotypical box and make all sorts of assumptions about her and her family.

But I’ve spoken to the Neals and been to their home and they are a nice, ordinary family. And one of the reasons they are so ready to speak out is to fight the prejudices and stereotypes.

Instead of judging them, sensible parents realise just how easily they and their children could be in the same situation.

So I can understand why Kevin Neal has weighed into the public arena once more.

He says he was embarrassed when his daughter put her hand in her handbag and produced what he described as ‘a replica rubber penis’.

Most dads would be. Just because Kizzy is a mum, it doesn’t mean she’s not still his little girl.

And I agree with him. The rubber willies were dreamt up by adult marketing men who need to get a serious public health message across urgently.

But it’s not a serious approach and it’s not suitable for teenagers.

Incidentally, while I was writing this my little boy saw the picture of the object in question on the Herald Express website and he thought it was supposed to be a toy dog! And my 17-year-old daughter said: “What the frickin’ heck is that? What’s it supposed to be for? That’s stupid. It just makes the whole subject into a joke.”

THE Myerson family saga which has played out in the media this week has struck a little too close to home.

Writer and mum Julie Myerson has become the country’s latest She-Devil with the publication of her book detailing the tough-love approach she took to her eldest son’s drug taking.

Four out of the family of five have now written their own very public accounts of the family in crisis.

Julie wrote about how she and her Oscar-nominated screenwriter husband Jonathan Myerson threw their 17-year-old eldest child Jake out on the streets for smoking cannabis.

And now Julie has also admitted she was the anonymous author of the weekly Living With Teenagers column in The Guardian, a warts-and-all account of her three children’s often foul-mouthed and physically abusive behaviour.

The column came to an abrupt end after her children discovered their private lives were being written about in colourful detail in a national newspaper.

It turned out her kids’ friends had guessed months before.

When the column was pulled by the editors, her youngest son wrote a piece in The Guardian about how he had been the victim of playground bullying after his mother wrote intimate details about him reaching puberty.

Ever since, he said, his nickname at school had been ‘four pubes’.

That was two years ago, but despite speculation and denials, it was only in this week’s controversy over her new book Julie Myerson finally admitted to writing the column and it was removed from The Guardian website to protect the children’s privacy, although it’s still available in book form.

In the latest row, the Myersons have come in for criticism after throwing Jake out of the family home for smoking skunk, a stronger form of cannabis.

They defend their actions saying his addictive, abusive behaviour and drug taking were affecting their other children and causing the breakdown of family life.

And that the bigger issue they wanted to raise was about awareness of the growing and dangerous use of skunk and its affect on the mental health of a whole generation of children.

Now Jake has joined in the row, claiming both his parents had volatile tempers and rows in the family home were ‘50/50′.

He says his parents over-reacted to his smoking cannabis, which he claimed was ordinary teenage behaviour.

Personally, I wouldn’t disagree the Myersons are well-placed to write about teenage drug taking and how it causes family breakdown.

As writers, they can articulate what thousands of families are going through. And their experience shows drug taking is not a class issue.

Their son was one of the brightest in his school until he started using skunk.

I’m fine with all that.

But for me, writing a newspaper column every week about family life, I think Julie Myerson has gone too far.

She was naïve, first of all, to believe her children’s anonymity wouldn’t be blown when she was writing about them in such lurid detail in The Guardian.

And if raising awareness of drugs issues was the real motive behind the book, why wait three years to write about it? And why use real names this time?

I may not be in Julie Myerson’s league, but I know from experience when I sit down to write this column every week that it’s always easiest to write about what’s happening in my life at the time.

When it gets tricky is when stuff’s happening around me that I can’t write about.

A family crisis may make juicy copy, but there is a very fine line to be trod.

It’s fine when it’s a happy event. I only missed writing two weeks’ columns when my youngest son was born.

And before that I could hardly contain myself when I found out I was pregnant.

But I had to abandon the column completely for about three years when my life fell apart because of divorce.

The difficult bit is judging where to draw the line so that I don’t hurt and offend my loved ones.

If this column is going to be in the least bit interesting it’s got to be personal and true.

And I’m more than happy to write about what a useless mother and generally batty old woman I am.

Generally I’m on fairly safe ground writing about the funny, odd little things my youngest child says and does.

Although one week I wrote something jokey about him getting blue paint all over the bathroom and somebody at school mentioned it to him.

When he got home he was confused and wanted to know why he was in the news for making a mess. I felt awful.

It’s even more of an issue when it comes to my older children.

They deserve privacy as they move from being teenagers into becoming young adults.

Luckily for me, my children don’t often read the Herald Express (and I make a point of not bringing a copy of Thursday’s paper home) so they rarely see my column.

I also never mention them by name, and I write using my maiden name, which is not my children’s surname.

But, most importantly, and this is where I believe Julie Myerson has gone wrong, I try not to write anything that will hurt them.

Yes, I know, I often make wry comments and passing asides about the difficulties of raising teenagers (especially as a single mum). But I rarely go into detail.

I joke about the fact my children have a team of lawyers poised to sue me at the slightest hint of libel.

But if I’m serious, I think they, like Jake Myerson, need privacy most of all when they mess up.

I don’t want to write a column which makes my children sound like perfect little angels and gives the impression that I’m some kind of supermum. How ridiculous would that be?

But at the same time, I can’t use their adolescent mistakes as material for my column.

In The Sunday Times this week Minette Marrin said Julie Myerson’s new novel was a ‘betrayal not just of love and intimacy, but also of motherhood itself’, claiming she was a writer first and a mother second.

And Tim Lott in The Independent called the book a moral failure, adding: ‘Julie has betrayed Jake for her own ambition’.

When I’m in the middle of a family crisis, the last thing I do is rub my hands and reach for my laptop.

ANOTHER week, another TV scandal. And I’m not talking about University Challenge — it’s Marge Simpson’s lesbian love scene that’s got me thinking.

When I heard television’s most put-upon mum — lots of hair, lots of responsibility — is going to be snogging her best friend in this Sunday’s latest episode of The Simpsons, my first thought was: ‘Who can blame her?’

I have to admit there was a time in my life — it was a pretty miserable time — when I began to identify with Marge in a rather worryingly obsessive way.

It all started with the symbolic keyring present.

I’m not quite sure what the occasion was — it may have been Mother’s Day — but my two daughters gave me a Marge Simpson keyring and I began to reflect on the fact my life was a bit too similar to Marge’s at that time and it made me cry.

Like Marge, I had two older children and a baby.

And I wouldn’t want to point any fingers, but I’d swear one of my children at the time was modelling herself on a cross between Bart’s wild behaviour and Lisa’s overly mature attitude.

But the thing that really got me down wasn’t so much the similarity, it was the fact Marge seemed to be coping far better than I was at that time.

I remember looking at the keyring and realising I was jealous of Marge Simpson.

For a start, Marge was thinner than me.

I was post-baby, in my 40s and feeling lumpy.

On the plus side, I told myself, Marge only has one dress, horrible clumpy shoes and four digits.

But at least she seemed to have found her look.

It must take massive self-confidence to pull-off Marie Antoinette hair, in bright blue.

Secondly, I was jealous of Marge’s zen-like calm while her big fat slob of a husband created daily disaster.

Nothing fazed her. She just carried on in the face of it all, always getting a meal out and her family around the table every dinner time.

Admittedly, the meal always seemed to be junk food but I even began to think Marge had got that right.

There I was, getting all stressed and anxious about organic vegetables and five-a-day, and getting ratty at meal times when the children turned up their noses at my hard work.

And The Simpsons were happily chuntering through Shake ‘n’ Bake, whatever that is?

I can only remember Marge losing it once, when she suffered a near-nervous breakdown while driving and refused to get out of the car, bringing traffic to a halt for miles around.

But she went off to a health farm for a couple of days and all was well within the half-hour episode.

But mostly, at the time, I envied Marge for her relationship with Homer. Yes, he’s fat and bald, but Homer knows home is where the heart is.

He’s in touch with his emotions, he can talk to the kids about their problems, and he can’t wait to rush home at the end of the day for a cuddle with his wife.

And you’ve got to hand it to the guy, he knows how to say ’sorry’ better than anyone else in the world — admittedly, he’s had more practice than anyone else.

As The Simpsons moves into its 20th series, I’m pleased to say I’m no longer jealous of Marge. I’ve moved on.

Like Marge, I’ve had 20 years of bringing up children, but my baby grew into a wonderful little boy, whereas poor old Marge is still stuck with dummy-sucking Maggie — I’d be worried about Maggie not talking by now if I were Homer and Marge.

And while Bart and Lisa are great fun kids, they’re stuck forever in pre-adolescence.

That may mean Marge never has to face the real teenage challenges of motherhood, but it also means there’s still no light at the end of the tunnel for her.

My older two are at the jobs, university and driving test stage now.

And let’s face it. We all know that in real life Marge would either have walked out on Homer by now or he’d have died of some alcohol-obesity related disease.

And if nothing else, the sheer boredom of her routine would have killed anybody less saintly than Marge, who once said: ‘Now if you’ll excuse me I have some dust that needs busting.’

So when I heard that poor old Marge was about to seek solace in the arms of another woman, I wasn’t at all surprised.

But then again, when I read on and discovered that the long, lingering lesbian kiss turned out to be just another of Homer’s fantasies, I wasn’t surprised either.

As for the University Challenge student scandal, I care not a jot.

Winners Corpus Christi College were stripped of their title because of an ineligible team member.

But it’s only because the BBC now takes two years to film the series, and Sam Kay had graduated half-way through.

It’s hardly a fraud worthy of nationwide publicity.

HOSPITALS have had to ban alcohol-based hand gel from receptions… because people are making cocktails out of it. The gel is up to 70 per cent alcohol and is being stolen by the glassful and drunk with orange juice.

It’s no joke. Two homeless people died in London last year after drinking the gel and now the Royal Bournemouth Hospital has removed the hand-washing dispensers except on the wards where staff can make sure nobody’s topping up a tumbler.

Neil Manser, co-founder of National Concern for Healthcare Infections,

said: “We have heard many stories of people going along and putting it into their orange juice.

“Unfortunately, we have people in society who are addicted to alcohol.”

As I said, it’s a serious issue — but it does remind me of another alternative use I’ve heard about for the gel.

Three or four years ago, my middle daughter was ill in hospital and it was a week or so before we took her little brother in to visit. I think he’d just turned five.

As he was walking through reception, his dad led him over to the dispenser, and squeezed a big blob of the clear gel into the palm of his hand.

He looked up with a big smile, said: ‘Thanks, Dad!’ and with one swift movement, stroked the gel up through his fringe to create a nice quiff.

At that time lots of boys in his class had short, spiky hair and he’d seen his big sisters’ boyfriends carefully applying hair gel in front of the mirror.

He’d been asking me to buy him hair gel for ages and I’d been dodging the issue.

So when he was handed a big dollop of gel without any explanation, he assumed it was for fashion rather than medical purposes.

Unfortunately for him, it seemed that all eyes in Torbay Hospital’s crowded reception area were looking his way at the time… and, after a second or two of surprised silence, there was an outbreak of laughter.

Luckily, he was blissfully unaware he was the cause of the joke.