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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Amelia Tait

I dived into my digital past to revisit my most cringe teenage moments – and realised how lucky I am to not be young and online today

Amelia Tait photographed in front of an open laptop with her left side to the camera, looking at the camera, with her left hand under her chin, and wearing a long-sleeved cream top, with sad face and angry face emojis sprinkled around her
‘Once upon a time, the internet was a place you visited, a place you could leave’: Amelia Tait. Composite: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian and Guardian Design

As a teenager, I went kind of viral – and the most amazing thing about that is it had absolutely zero effect on my life. It was the summer holidays in 2006, and my friends Jessie, Emma and I decided to film ourselves singing along to our favourite song. We were overheated and hyperactive, jumping up and down and headbanging, stretching our arms to the heavens as we confessed to our mamas that we’d “just killed a maaaaaan” before asking Scaramouche if he’d do the fandango.

Later, I added a couple of captions to the video implying we were drunk, even though I was 14 and the closest I’d been to buzzed was the pure placebo of clutching a glass bottle of J2O. Then – for reasons that are now lost to me – I uploaded the video to YouTube a month later, on 19 September 2006, under the title “Bohemian Crap-sody”.

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