A friend has sent me this photo from, er, 1988, I think. It was a strange and difficult time for me. I'd hung around in Manchester after my degree, sorta doing an M.Phil, sorta doing nothing. Rather than go back to my parents in Yorkshire, I was living that Summer in almost empty student accommodation, the unlovely Oak House in Fallowfield.
I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I had a vague urge to write, but nothing at all to say. My notebook was filled with vaguely depressing, vaguely self-obsessed thoughts about the Tragedy of Existence, etc etc. Most of my uni friends had moved away. Half of them I'd fallen out with over ... well you can probably imagine.
For days on end I'd talk to no one at all. I was definitely a bit mad. I was convinced I had a doppelgänger, and kept seeing him lurking in shadows. A hunched figure, scavenging garbage, gnawing the grease marks on pizza boxes.
But then some really nice foreign students moved into the halls, and life picked up, a little. There was an extraordinarily pretty Tunisian girl called Hyatt, with whom I had an intensely chaste affair. Just one kiss. She made me Tunisian coffee, flavoured with orange peel.
The guy to the right of Rishi Sunak had been the Jamaican junior table-tennis champion, and we used to play for hours every day. I think his name was Joseph. After a month, I could almost compete with him. I'd maybe get to 13-14, by the time he’d eased his way to 21. Then, on his last day, he said, 'OK, you getting good, now I'll play with spin', and I never got a single ball back. Good lesson.
Towards the end of this strange time, various options came up. I was accepted on a pre-med course, to begin training as a doctor. I was offered a job as a part-time philosophy lecturer at Birmingham Poly. And accepted on to teacher training to become, of all things, a Sociology teacher. And I passed the Civil Service entrance exam. Not the high-flying one, just the standard Executive grade one, guaranteeing me a career of mediocrity interspersed with drabness. I dillied and dallied, unable to make any kind of decision and managed to mess up, or miss most of the opportunities. Other lives would have followed each of those choices. I'm very glad with the way it turned out, but that has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with random chance and the kindness of strangers. Things really should have been much worse for me.
Anyway, here I am, aged 23, with Big Hair and small glasses, in 1988.