Hello, my name is Oscar and I’m scared! I wasn’t always scared. In fact, I would say that I was a pretty happy child; runny free with my friends, catching taddies from the river and watching them grow and metamorphose into frogs (which I always released back to where I had found their neophyte forms), building cubbies in the bush and staging mock sorties on my friends’ cubby strongholds. I often only just made it home in time for dinner, dirty, tired and totally fulfilled. Life seemed to be full of adventure (at least outside school hours) and I don’t think I was ever bored (except, perhaps, during mathematics lessons at school).

But all that changed when my parents decided to move to the city. Where once I was surrounded by bush and farmland, now I felt hemmed in by streets packed together with houses. You would think that my circle of friends would increase by virtue of there being more kids to choose from, but things were really different in the city.

Back on the farm, I really didn’t have much time for watching television and I was usually so worn out after my adventures that I would willingly go off to bed at 7.00pm when Kanga the Roo on TV told us children it was time to go to bed and waved us on our way.

However, when we first moved to the city, I found that I was filling my time with watching TV. I hadn’t made any real friends at school, although no-one had been nasty to me, it seemed that the basis of their friendships was totally different to mine. Whereas I was used to knocking around with my friends, getting dirty and dishevelled, I observed that city friendships were based on standing around staring at your mobile phone. The only interaction they had was when they would share a quick glimpse of something on their phone with someone else. Even stranger, I discovered that they actually communicated with others standing with them via their mobile!
I knew that if I wanted to fit in, I would need to quickly learn this new form of friendship and begged my parents to buy me a mobile phone for my birthday in a week’s time, which they did.

My parents move to the city meant that they were both out of the house for most of the day. I guess they had waited until I was old enough to be somewhat self-sufficient before selling the farm. I was now what was once termed “a latchkey” child (although I’m not really a child as I’m 15 and a teenager). It’s so common now that it’s just normal and so it doesn’t need its own terminology.

Being an only child, I would come home after school to an empty house so I would put on the telly for company. Having much better Internet connection in the city, as opposed to the farm where it was very patchy, we now had all the Streaming services, and I found myself binge-watching until my parents arrived home, usually with some take-away in hand. We now ate dinner watching the news on the TV and the following current affairs programme. My parents thought it was important to keep informed about what was happening in the world and our patch on it, which is strange as they didn’t seem to be so interested when we lived on the farm.
It's funny but I found the news and current affairs programmes much scarier than the shows I streamed. Although one was real and the other fiction, I began to see that the shows of post-apocalyptic dystopia may have their basis in reality. As news of environmental catastrophe through global warming and degradation, the brutalities of war, the risk of nuclear warfare, the spying and interference being undertaken by powerful countries hungry for more power and domination and the decline of Western democracies filled my loungeroom I began to feel, more and more, a sense of impending doom.
Hungry to learn if what I was seeing each night on the news was true, I began to search the Internet on my phone hoping to find out it was all an exaggeration, and the World was a much better place than was being presented. Unfortunately, what I discovered was that the World was in a much worse state – article after article, opinion after opinion, fact after fact, story after story. The World was on the brink of a nightmare from which I knew I could not escape.

I started to lose sleep, whether that was through scrolling the Internet for any signs of hope or not sleeping because my mind could not shut out the images I had seen. When I did sleep, my nightmares were filled with scenes of destruction, starvation, animals dying as their snowy habitation melted while others, baking under a searing sun, died for lack of water. I lost my appetite and felt there was little point in making any effort to make friends, or study, or interact with my family as I thought there was no future for me anyway.
My parents put it down to the changes I was undergoing – normal hormonal changes for a boy my age and the upheaval of our way of life from the bucolic life on the farm to the bustle of living in the city. But after a while, they began to express their alarm at my withdrawal. That was when my parents decided that we all go on a camping trip. For the first time in many months, I was excited. My parents had one proviso, I was not to take my mobile phone and they promised to only take one of theirs that would be locked away in case of emergency.
I can’t tell you how it felt when we finally drove into the bush and found a place to camp. I was too old now to hunt for taddies, but I still enjoyed spotting them in the creek we camped by, especially those that had sprouted legs on their fat tadpole bodies. That night, my parents started talking about when they were kids. They talked about things that were happening around the World, civil and political wars on other continents and riots and human unrest in neighbouring countries. They talked about the stories their parents had told them, about growing up during a World War and how those terrible events had even led to positive changes. I slowly began to realise that they were trying to show me that every generation lives through threats and changes, but that people were resilient and adaptable and learnt how to adjust to changes in their world.

Despite my protestations that I was too old for children’s stories, my mother insisted on telling me the story of Henny Penny and how she, thinking the sky was falling because an acorn had fallen on her head, managed to cause mass panic by spreading her tale. I had heard this story before, but now I started to see its message in a whole new light.
Things slowly began to improve after that camping trip. My parents cut back on their working hours and there was usually one of them at home waiting for me when I got home from school. I’ve joined a cricket club and made several good friends in it. While we don’t go taddying (aside from there not being any creeks nearby I’m no longer interested in that boyhood game), but instead we go to the movies, or the shopping mall for a coffee (and maybe to meet some girls) and sometimes just to hang out at each other’s houses (especially if they have a pool).

I don’t worry so much about what might happen to the World, I’m much too busy with school, sport and just having fun with my friends. But I do occasionally look up to the sky, just to check that it isn’t falling.