Of all the 100,000 things that confounded me at Otago Boys' High School in the 1960s, nothing confounded me more than the fact that the books we read in Year 13 English had been read at Otago Girls' High School in Year 9.
How can this be, we wailed to our English teacher, boys are much smarter than girls aren't they, sir? And the teacher told us girls mature much faster than boys.
Hah! Everywhere I looked during those teenage years I saw girls turning to jelly at the sight or sound of the latest halfwit dweeb pop star to come down the pipe.
They kissed photos all day and shrieked at every mention of their hero's name.
In fact, shriek is the perfect collective noun for teenage girl pop fans.
Boys did not shriek, kiss photos or write halfwit dweeb pop stars' names on their pencil cases.
Because boys were more mature. It seems little has changed.
I gazed incredulously at the telly a couple of weeks ago when the halfwit dweeb pop star Justin Bieber passed through Auckland, having already laid waste Sydney.
I listened to what the shriek told the interviewers in answer to the genuinely interested question of what on earth they saw in Bieber.
It's his eyes, said the shriek. And his mouth. And the way he walks. And his hair.
He is so . . so . . . so . . .
A radio interviewer from The Edge asked a girl why she wasn't at school.
My mum brought me, she said, she did the same thing when she was my age. She rocks.
Personally, I find a modern cellphone more physically attractive than Justin Bieber, and his voice is as replaceable as tap water.
In the 1960s, I would have put my devotion and reverence for the musical Gods of the day up against anything a teenage girl could muster, but I did it soundlessly, and with consummate maturity.
Bill Wyman alluded to this in his memorably masturbatory autobiography A Stone Alone when he said early on, The Rolling Stones never got any pretty girls, just bespectacled boys in duffle coats who wanted to talk about the music.
The Beatles got all the pretty girls.
To be fair, after I got home from Otago Boys High School and took off my duffle coat, I would spend a lot of time thematically decorating my bedroom walls, but not with photos.
Well, there was one, Marianne Faithfull from Fabulous magazine, who stared right at me with her lovely eyes from across the room as I lay in bed meditating.
No, what I put on the walls, carefully transcribed on a huge old old Remington typewriter only the Westpac Rescue Helicopter could lift, were sheets of lyrics from the 60s' finest folk poets.
I lived by the wisdom of their words.
I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.
Extraordinarily mature.
My wife claims she was never a shrieker or a photo kisser. But she wasn't beyond teenage fandom.
In 1965, she begged her father to take her to Christchurch Airport to see The Rolling Stones, where - and this is quite a story so you should be sitting down - she clawed and scratched her way to the bus The Stones were climbing into.
Keith Richards beckoned her to follow. It was a life-changing moment.
In a nanosecond, my wife could have become the next Anita Pallenberg, and me consigned to spectacles and duffle coats forever.
But instead, she got her father to drive her back to school.
As far as I could tell, Justin Bieber wasn't travelling in a bus when he performed to a shriek of 300, one of whom stole his hat, at Strathallan School.
I didn't see any teenage boys there. Perhaps they were all inside trying to catch up on their reading.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
