Alice Loxton

“Imagine adulthood as a garden. We enter through a gate, leaving childhood behind a place we can glance at over the fence, but never actually return to. Being eighteen is to lean on the gatepost and look at the garden ahead, map in hand. There are hundreds of paths to choose from. Some lead to pristine lawns, rose gardens, bluebell woods, lily ponds or vegetable allotments. There are abandoned water butts with lurking toads, streams with banks of wild garlic, dense woodland with ancient, gnarly trees, and boiling greenhouses with tropical, poisonous plants. There are treehouses and garden sheds, green pools and rusty trampolines, upturned gnomes and dried-up fountains, crumbling walls and rickety fences. There are beauties to stop and admire: arches of rambling roses, and dragonflies dancing on water. But there are dangers, too: wasps that sting and rabbit holes that, if you're not looking, can twist an ankle.

Some of us take the main path, content to settle down in a deckchair, basking in the dappled sunlight. Some of us divert from the path to swim in streams, tumble down hills or clamber up trees, risking life and limb. Some are given the wrong directions, ending up in the sculpture park when they hoped to be in the wildflower meadow.

But that's not a problem. All of us, at any point, have the option to return to the starting gatepost, to take a new path and begin a new journey. It is at this moment we champion this daring eighteen-year-old outlook. We revisit that place of uncertainty, of risk, of potential, of excitement. And from here we venture forth down a new path.”
― Alice Loxton, Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives