The bizarre summer spent educating Peter

YOU are probably wondering why I'm calling," Jenny, a friend of my parents, said on the phone. "This is going to sound a bit weird. But I was wondering whether you would look after my son and teach him about being a rock star?"It did sound weird.

I knew very little about her, other than that she was a college lecturer, a single parent living in Crouch End with a 14-year-old son, and had once got annoyed when, as a four-year-old, I'd smeared an ice cream in her hair.

For the past seven years, I had been a music critic, starting at the New Musical Express and now on the broadsheets. I'd interviewed more than 300 groups and been coerced into managing a fake boy band, but had never had a request as bizarre as this.

Jenny elaborated that Peter had hit his teens and predictably been transformed from a bundle of cuddles into a storm cloud in oversized trousers who listened to heavy nu-metal rock groups shouting about death; he hadn't yet realised that girls liked him, and was still painfully shy.

It was now his mission to become a rock star and his school grades - he goes to a progressive independent co-ed in north London - had dipped as a result.

Jenny wanted me to spend a summer with Peter and pass on my music knowledge, which would allow

him to make an informed decision about his future. In return I could write a book about the experience.

At first I baulked at the idea. For starters, Jenny's nanny had just resigned and as his dad now lives in the US, and she travels a lot, I was suspicious of her motives. Then there was the photograph: he looked like the kind of kid I crossed the street to avoid - all baggy black cotton, superfluous metal trouser chains and cultivated melancholy.

Could I really offer him anything?

My parents, who had both been teachers, had warned me from an early age not to follow them into the same profession. Besides,what could I - someone whose only real musicrelated skill involved spouting off about it in print - teach Peter about being a rock star?

But, less than 12 months previously, I'd married Edie, and we had started to debate the pros and cons of having children of our own. We'd moved from Blackheath to Norfolk, were both working for ourselves (Edie as a book dealer, me as a writer) and everyone expected us to have a baby.

But so many factors about childrearing petrified me. Although I was approaching my 27th birthday, my own adolescence seemed too close for comfort - I still felt like a kid myself.

"What if you treated the Peter experiment as a test run for parenting?" said Edie. "Hanging out with a teenager means you'll miss the fun bit and go straight to the most messed-up, difficult part. Everything else will be a breeze after that."

Over the next six months, Peter and I embarked on a stuttering road trip - vaguely reminiscent of Hunter S Thompson's, if you swapped Las Vegas for Muswell Hill and the copious drugs for packets of baconflavoured Wheat Crunchies. We'd head off on day trips to visit a rock landmark such as the site of Marc Bolan's car crash or a musician who was a) available, and b) not closeminded enough to be disturbed by the concept of a fully grown man hanging out with an entirely unrelated teenage male friend.

Sometimes Peter would oversleep and miss our appointment, but mostly he would end up sitting in the corner and fiddling disconsolately with his mobile phone as I made small talk with an esoteric musician.

At first, eliciting opinions from him was hard. His Walkman would be turned up to ear-splitting volume and his responses consisted of "unnnghjjj" and "nnnhhh". And it quickly transpired that he didn't care about anything I had to say about music. But he was fairly relaxed (provided I didn't play any psychedelic folk rock).

On the other hand, I was shocked to find myself uptight and anxious. If my companion lapsed into a prolonged silence, I panicked. Did he feel that the four packets of crisps I'd fed him weren't enough? Was the ring tone on my mobile too outmoded? I broke Jenny's "no fast-food" rule, and worried what Peter thought of me.

As the weeks went on, these worries begat even more introspective ones. Did he see me as a cool bloke, or a prematurely old git?

Questions like these were perhaps

answered when I would give him some of my favourite folk rock albums as "homework" assignments, and he would come back with feedback such as, "Oh no.

More croaky weirdo music."

I got used to lecturing Peter at length about musical legends - for example, the Rolling Stones and Cheap Trick - only to have him respond with an inane comment about the packet of miniature Cadbury's chocolate he'd been eating.

When I bought him a copy of Agents of Fortune, the classic album by Seventies rockers Blue Oyster Cult, he responded by thanking me, then hiding it in my bag when I wasn't looking. Ultimately, though, I felt deep down that he liked me. As the weeks went by, I was impressed by how much I liked him.

We talked about his friends, what he wanted to do when he grew up and his schoolboy band, Goat Punishment. I still didn't understand the surreal statements he put on the bottom of his emails to me - for example, "Salute the carrot" - but I'm fairly sure I wasn't meant to.

As our adventure went on, I developed a greater empathy for the modern adolescent. Clearly, it wasn't easy being a teenager in an era where dads buy Eminem albums.

Sure, Peter was recalcitrant and moody, but he was just a kid, and nowhere near as dark as I'd imagined. At one point he even admitted, sheepishly, that he would

like to borrow my copy of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album.

We spent our last day at his annual school concert. Here, with Jenny and Edie, I watched Peter and other 14-yearolds in long black jackets playing songs I'd run yelping out of HMV to avoid. It was a fine night, full of grungey camaraderie, grunting vocals and flailing hair. I felt paternally proud, my own adolescence more distant than ever.

IAM not sure I successfully carried out my assignment, although Jenny seemed happy.

Peter seemed confident, calmer.

He also seemed less suspicious of my generation. Looking back, it seems I learned at least as much from the experience. Had I been a good "parent"?

Perhaps not, thinking back to when I'd taken Peter to the house of a psychedelic folk band, and turned to find one of them demonstrating the correct stance for firing an air gun.

Then again, can I really call what I did "parenting"? I wasn't with Peter every day; nor was I responsible for his financial and emotional support. But it is the nearest I was going to get, before the real thing, and at least that seems more of a genuine prospect now.

As for teenagers themselves, I'm not sure if I understand them any better, but I feel more comfortable in my lack of understanding of them. And, no, I still don't have a clue what those metal chains on their trousers are for.

. Educating Peter by Tom Cox (Bantam Press, 10.99)

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