Black crisps

On the stroke of noon Gemma, Manga Dave and I left our desks and rushed down to the canteen, fleeing from our to do lists like terrified citizens in a Godzilla movie. Some days lunchtime really can’t come soon enough, and today was a prime example.

The menu pinned to the notice board boasted “WE LOVE FOOD”, but I always think it’s hard to love something you can’t spell. I was prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that “Stake Kidney Pie” was a deliberate nod to Halloween, but however charitable you feel there’s simply no excuse for “chicken jalfrazi” or “tatare sauce”, whatever they are. The literature produced by our canteen is so moronic you assume it’s in Comic Sans and then have to pinch yourself when you realise it’s not.

Unable to find anything I wanted to eat I went for a red-themed lunch of champions; ready salted crisps, Kit-Kat (four-finger not Chunky, sadly, but you can’t have everything), can of Dr Pepper. We started talking about our weekends and over her chicken jalfrazi Gemma told us she was off to Portsmouth to play “pub golf”, a game in which you have to go to eighteen pubs in a row and drink a different alcoholic beverage in every one. The fact that I couldn’t see any way in which this was appealing made me feel about a hundred years old.

Then I said something almost without thinking.

“Yeuch, black crisp.”

Gemma and Dave looked at me with bemusement as I set the offending crisp down on the table. It looked ordinary enough from one side, granted, but looking at it from the other its brown edges had turned a manky black, the colour of purest wrong, a colour no crisp should be.

“What are you talking about?” said Gemma.

“Look at it. I’m not eating that. Or this one, it’s got a funny grey patch in it.”

“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” said Dave. “They all taste exactly the same.”

”They don’t. You can definitely tell. Crisps with grey bits have a different texture, like stale cardboard or something. I think they’re like tuber tumours. And crisps with eyes in are even worse. Oh, and green crisps. Let’s not even go there with the green crisps.”

The look on both their faces clearly emphasised that my little soliloquy had probably gone on a bit too long.

“Maybe you’d be better off with Pringles.” said Dave. “They’re all exactly the same shape and texture.”

“Good god no. That just means all the grey nasty bits have been mashed up and hidden. They’re even worse.”

Sitting there cradling my Dr Pepper, with a couple of substandard crisps in front of me, I had a growing realisation that I was probably coming across as more than slightly mentally unstable. It had all seemed perfectly normal in my head, but maybe everybody who’s deranged thinks that. Maybe one day, through a series of events each of which seems perfectly normal to you, you end up at home wearing a tinfoil hat convinced that the government is trying to poison you by sending you pizza delivery brochures full of anthrax.

“Do you realise you’ve inspected every single crisp you’ve eaten? You take them out of the packet one by one, look at one side, turn them over, look at the other side and then you eat them.” said Gemma.

“Well, obviously. That’s how I make sure there aren’t any bad ones.”

“It’s very serial killer. Consider yourself judged.” said Dave.

“Does that mean you wouldn’t just take a massive handful and stuff them in your mouth in one go?” said Gemma.

I shuddered, which answered that question and probably quite a few more that they now didn't need to ask. The expressions on both their faces had gone from bafflement to pity. I wasn't sure which was worse.

“Come on, we’ve all got our foibles and this is mine. Well, this and books. I can’t lend someone a book. If it comes back with a crease down the spine it’s ruined, I’d rather they kept it than gave it back to me looking like that.

“And people who fold the corners over on pages to keep their place. When I see somebody doing that I feel physically ill. And if I buy a newspaper I can’t buy the one at the front of the display stand, I have to take the one behind it. Someone might have touched the one at the front.

“Oh, and CDs. Until I got an iPod I wouldn’t buy a record, even if it was by a band I like, if it didn’t come in a jewel case. I can’t stand those digipack things. Don’t even start me on the ones where you have to pull the CD out of a paper sleeve. It’s just wrong.”

They looked like they didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or sneak off and telephone the mental health authorities. Dave summed things up with depressing brevity.

“You’re a bit of a freak, are you?”

Worst of all, when he said it I felt like he was reading my mind. Maybe I will need that tinfoil hat after all.

Self-help

1994

The envelopes started arriving at my house that summer, A4 brown rectangles packed to bursting point with paper and good intentions. I think they turned up about once every week, and their thud on the doormat was about the only noise those mornings, interrupting my lie-ins. I was back in Reading for the long break between my second and third years at university at the time, with nothing much to do except avoiding anything looking like hard work. It was a stretch at home before the home stretch.

I only had to look at the spidery scrawl on the front to know they were from Anna. We’d split up at the start of the holidays, for reasons I can no longer remember. I may not have even known them at the time; I certainly couldn’t have told you which breakup this was, because we’d done it so often. We could break up over a meal, over an evening, over something one of us had or hadn’t said, over a weekend. I’d lost count a long time before that, and so had everybody else. The first time we parted, some of my friends told me that I was better off without her. The second time, they waited a week and then took their chances. The retraction came soon after. After the third time they gave up offering their consolations and just ringed a date in their mental calendars. If they’re not back together by then, maybe I’ll say something.

This was our longest break up, and it stretched across that summer like a hit single that’s number one for months. It coloured everything; I couldn’t buy a paper, eat an ice cream or walk the dog without knowing that I was single. At first the melody was new and exciting, the novelty value of being free of recriminations was quite something. I even found myself wondering if it was time for my story to have other characters in it. On long sun-bleached evenings on the benches outside the Bull And Chequers, sinking lagers with my friends, I may even have looked around for candidates, though I didn’t try that hard. But like that hit single, several weeks down the line I was tired of the tune. It would have been nice to read a book, sit in the library, take the train to visit my friends without hearing it all the time.

The envelopes started to arrive just at the point that I’d had enough.

I opened the first one, working out from the size and heft of the contents that it was far longer than any letter she had ever written me. It had always been a bone of contention, because back then I was so insecure that I thought an eight page letter meant somebody loved you twice as much as a four page letter did. I still remember the flimsy pale blue aerogrammes she sent me from Burma, one every couple of days, and how much work that must have involved when she was supposed to be out there, on riverboats and in temples, experiencing all that differentness. But somehow it wasn’t enough for me. With hindsight I can see what I couldn’t see then; that nothing ever was.

I remember how proud I was of being the only person who could read her handwriting. I mistakenly thought that meant I understood her.

Inside was a sheaf of neat white pages, no folding, no creases. It took a second for me to register that most of the writing on them was in a typeface and it wasn’t by her. As I flicked through and saw handwritten scribbles in the margins in the jagged handwriting, more masculine than mine, I put the pieces together and realised what had happened. Spending the summer in her father’s flat in Maida Vale, she passed her days walking to Paddington Library, photocopying huge swathes of self-help books and, sitting there in the quiet surrounded by all the pensioners of West London, annotating them before sending them to me. In a summer when we should have been taking life by the scruff of the neck, she had even less to occupy her time than I did. She had run out of words to illustrate my failings, and how angry she was with me, so she’d resorted to using someone else’s.

My correspondence course lasted several weeks and I found out a lot about myself, because she didn’t stint on detail. Idly flicking through the pages, in the break between This Morning and Neighbours, in the last gasp of not having to worry about the future, I didn’t even stop to wonder why I was still paying attention. But pay attention I did, and over the course of a number of meticulously sourced and personally tailored modules I discovered all sorts of things; that I was bad at communicating, that I was nowhere near understanding enough, that I had unrealistic expectations and that I didn’t like myself very much.

I learned the first three things on that list by rote, by reading the text and reading the comments and memorising what I’d been told. I don’t know, even now, if I ever truly believed it or if I just wanted to change the record. I told her I’d read them, I told her she was right, I took the train down to Paddington to see her and we got back together. The relationship lasted less than six more months after that, and I only learned the last thing on that list the hard way, right at the end.

I should, of course, have figured it out from the fact that I touched those photocopied pages at all.

2010

The friendly-looking red card had been sitting in the mailbox when I got home from work, saying they’d tried to deliver something to me but couldn’t because they needed a signature. For a week, I’d kept meaning to phone them to reschedule it, but was hampered by the fact that I couldn’t for the life of me remember what exactly I was arranging delivery of. That’s the problem with having a good memory, in my experience. Life, an intermittent thing of wonder for the absent-minded, contains far less pleasant surprises for the likes of us. You never forget that you’ve bought something fun online or find a stray ten pound note in a winter coat pocket on the first day after the seasons turn.

At first I thought I’d missed the boat and that it would be returned to the sender. I wasn’t too upset. I figured it was probably something official and inessential; a new debit card, some documentation about the pension I try not to think about or a tedious communiqué from work about terms and conditions. Whoever it was from, they’d just have to try again once they realised nobody was home. But then I had a peek on the back of the card and found out that I wasn’t too late. They were still keeping it for me, so on a Saturday morning we hopped into the car and headed out to collect my surprise package.

Driving seems to be one of the exceptions to the rule where going against the flow slows you down, and so we zipped through the streets, avoiding the route that goes past the children’s playground with the huge bright falsely cheerful murals and the pub on the corner that nobody can seem to make a go of. Instead we headed up the long hill, past the Brazilian café and the convenience stores, past the lovely flat with the terrible bathroom and the gorgeous house with no parking that we nearly bought instead of our home. The car shimmered through dozens of slightly different lives we almost lived.

We were making a beeline for the industrial estates, a place I try to avoid because they remind me of work. They were dreary enough during the week but even worse at weekends and going there was like attending the funeral of somebody you never liked in the first place. Further out still were the football stadium, the business park, the grimmest Holiday Inn in all of creation, but before that we reached the sorting office, with the weekend world dropping by in dribs and drabs. They were the exception rather than the rule; on the way out it felt like everybody else was going in the opposite direction, hurtling into town for appointments with lunch and shopping or to treat the kids to some uncomplicated crap in the multiplex at the very start of half-term.

I stepped inside and took my place in the queue behind a streak of people waiting patiently to pick up their presents to themselves. Santa sits behind a grille all year round handing out toys, gadgets and DVDs and he doesn’t seem to care much whether you’ve been a good child or not, provided you’ve got ID. When I got to the front, the surly man handed me an electronic device and a pointer. It was impossible to use it to produce anything even approximating to parody of my signature, but he was completely indifferent to that. Back in the car, I looked at my gift, a brown envelope, heavy, with thick contents. On the outside, it said it was from Amazon but still I couldn’t remember ordering it. There was a reassuring rasp as I pulled the tab to open it up, and I reached inside to liberate its contents. It was a book, large white words on the front cover proudly inciting me to Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway: the epitome of self-help, celebrating its twentieth anniversary.

I didn’t even need to look at the slip inside to know it was from my mother.

Unsolicited advice from her wasn't new, heaven knows, but the medium of internet shopping wasn’t one that she’d tried before, as far as I was aware. I showed it to Kelly and a flash of shared comprehension passed between us. It was nice to know we were in it together.

“You’re not going to read it, are you?”

“No. Would you?”

“No, probably not. We could drop it through her door if you want?”

I half-smiled, half-sighed, all at once.

“Let’s not, let’s just go home.”

I was thinking a lot of things as we pulled away from that grotty grotto in the middle of nowhere worth speaking of and made our way back to civilisation. I was thinking that I couldn’t believe we had wasted all that time driving to the crappest part of town to pick up a book I didn’t want and wouldn’t read from somebody I wasn’t speaking to making a point I didn’t want to hear. I was remembering the thud on my doormat all those years ago. I was thinking that sometimes it’s nice just to say no, and that sometimes saying no nicely just doesn’t work. I was thinking that sometimes there’s no point in saying anything at all.

I was thinking that sixteen years ago, if someone else had sent it to another me, I might have read that book.

Then I found myself thinking about the things that didn’t change. I was thinking that when you run out of words to say your last desperate attempt is to use someone else’s. And then I was thinking about the main lesson I learned back then, as clear as if that long but not forgotten summer was in front of me again with that relentless melody playing for weeks on end. Just because somebody can read your writing, it doesn’t mean that they understand you.

Sundays in bed

Let's spend the whole of Sunday in bed. 

Let's camp out under the duvet, play cards and video games, read books, leaf through yesterday's papers. Let's make the voices on the radio the only other voices we hear until it's Monday morning. 

We don't need to leave the flat, one of us doesn't even need to leave the room. Every now and again, I'll make an expedition down the long hall to bring us things; cups of tea, chocolate and treats, toast. It's only fair, I'm the one with the special protective clothing. I'm the one with the pyjamas. 

We don't need to go out to forage for food, we can manage. There are pies in the freezer, chili from a previous weekday, all sorts of things if we're resourceful. I could be resourceful enough, if it meant that nothing got in the way of our grand plan.

Maybe we have some of those long life things in the cupboard, the ones in the foil packets. Don't look at me that way. I know the last time we had them I said "Look at those succulent chunks of meat in a rich nutritious gravy" as they slipped into the saucepan and then both of us weren't hungry because it reminded us of dog food. I know I ruined everything. We could find something, that's all I'm saying.

Our Sundays always go downhill once we get out of bed. It's a harsh world out there, full of people who aren't us, people who jostle and glower in the supermarket aisles, people who try and sell you stuff. A cold world, too; it is getting so much colder out there, you said so yourself. And yet bed is so warm, full of all the warmth we've been putting into it for hours. Looked at that way, it's an achievement. Why would you want to throw all that away?

The world on Sunday is just a dress rehearsal anyway for the world on Monday, a crueller place still where people tell you to do things and you can't say no. 

I have a theory that if we stayed in bed all day then maybe, just maybe, we could make Sundays last forever. Isn't that worth testing, just once? I could go and make us a pot of tea right now, seal the deal with bergamot. What do you say?

I rehearse this speech in my head every Sunday morning. One of these days I'm going to make it, and one of these days she's going to say yes.

Reading material

I’ve had lots of recent reminders that, whatever you might think of me as a writer, I’m an even worse reader. It culminated in me deciding that Vikram Seth was trying to kill me but I suppose, like all stories, it’s better to start at the beginning.

The thing is, when it comes to books I have always been an awful philistine. A teenage diet of science fiction and fantasy probably played a big part in that, as my father never ceased to remind me. He told me repeatedly that I should try the classics (his favourite book is apparently Pride And Prejudice, something I still can’t square with everything else I know about him). When I asked him what was so special about them he told me that they illuminated the human condition. He couldn’t tell me what that meant, or what the human condition was for that matter, but he said it in a manner which suggested it was a truth universally acknowledged and not to be questioned. He had that tone a lot in those days, although he normally used it to explain that it was his turn to play on our trusty ZX Spectrum rather than mine.

Of course, he might have just been trying to put it to me subtly that I ought to read a few books in which all the characters were humans, just as a starter for ten. If he was, given that it’s taken me over twenty years to figure that out, I think I can safely say he did it very subtly indeed.

I studied English at A Level which gave me easily enough exposure to the classics to realise that they weren’t at all my cup of tea. Highlights included The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, which is billed as a coruscating study of love and the eternal struggle between women and men across three generations but is in fact an indigestible doorstop of a book in which the passages about working life in the early twentieth century read like lectures and so do the sex scenes. Enduring the whole book was a bit like being cornered by an unbelievably tedious man, with a huge beard and halitosis, at a party you’d never planned to attend anyway.

Not that you can always tell there are sex scenes, of course; I also read Tess Of The d’Urbervilles. While the debate in academic circles rages about whether poor innocent Tess had been raped or seduced I was still scratching my head, unaware that she’d even had sex in the first place. When I subsequently discovered that she was pregnant I was completely dumbstruck, flipped back, reread the chapter in which she apparently loses her virginity and was still none the wiser.

At first I assumed that this wasn't a failing on my part but I soon worked out that, when it comes to the classics, if you don’t enjoy them it’s because you aren’t a good enough reader, rather than because they aren’t by a good enough writer. It’s an important lesson which will stand you in good stead for many years of being patronised by people who know better than you. It was also my first, but sadly not my only, experience that when people ask you what a book is “about” they don’t necessarily mean the plot. There is always a horrible danger that they are talking about a book’s Themes, its Big Ideas. Because of course, all books have them and they’re deliberately planted in there by novelists rather than dreamt up after the fact by critics. Heaven forbid.

All of this came together recently when I decided to try improving myself by reading one of the classics, to see what all the fuss was about. I picked up The Great Gatsby, because I knew everyone raved about it and perhaps more importantly because it was nice and short. Under two hundred pages, in fact, which proves that I at least learned something from reading The Rainbow. And it was okay, I suppose, in fact there were some beautiful sentences and paragraphs which at times quite stopped me from thinking hard about the fact that not a lot was really happening. I will admit though that I had to read the ending a couple of times to work out what had actually taken place, but I reckon that was down to extreme tiredness brought on by the exhilarating prose. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

It was handy that all those critics were on hand to tell me it was all about the American Dream, because I’m not sure I would have figured that out without their help. Isn’t it brilliant how classic novels always have that introduction at the start where somebody clever tells you how important and seminal the book is? How would we manage without them? Anyway, like I said, I didn’t mind The Great Gatsby and I remember putting an update on Twitter saying that I thought it was good but not great. Almost immediately somebody responded.

“Oh, you must read it again.” they said.

Only in literature would this ever happen. If you'd had a shit meal, seen a dreadful film, stayed in a grotty hotel or had a crap shag and somebody urged you to return to the scene of the crime as soon as possible you’d very quickly tell them where to go, but for some reason books seem to be different. If we judged everything else the way books are judged you would be told “You just don’t have the palate to appreciate the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, I suggest you go back tomorrow and try not to be so jejune about the onion rings.” or “Ah, maybe you just aren’t ready yet for Hudson Hawk. Maybe when you’re in your thirties, with more life experience, you'll understand.”

You might take from this that I am more at the Dan Brown end of the spectrum when it comes to reading matter. Would that that was true; if it was, my life would be so much easier. Unfortunately, just as I can’t seem to enjoy the high end of literature the multi-selling accessible stuff bores me to tears too. A little while back Kelly got a book called I Heart New York free with a copy of Glamour magazine and, in between books with no idea what to read next, I decided to dip in. What was the worst that could happen?

It turned out that the worst that could happen was reading I Heart New York.

I couldn’t really imagine anybody whose intelligence wouldn’t have been insulted by the book, including people in a permanent vegetative state or on life support. If you put a million chimps in a room with a million typewriters for a million years they would knock out the collected works of Shakespeare. If you put one of them in a room with a typewriter for a couple of days it would write something better than I Heart New York. It featured a lead character who had three main ambitions – to find love, buy lots of shoes and handbags (probably in pink, though I can’t be sure because I tuned out quite a few of the paragraphs, as you do with anything annoying) and be even thinner than the plot of I Heart New York. She ends up achieving the first two, though I suspect the third isn't physically possible. Reading it was a bit like having a lobotomy and drinking a strawberry milkshake at the same time.

Don’t for a second think I don’t appreciate the utter hypocrisy of ranting about critics and sneering about a fun frothy disposable novel at the same time. I’m painfully aware of it, I just don’t know what it means. It’s even more hypocritical given that I write myself. I know I’ve also just compared the Great Gatsby to the Aberdeen Angus Steakhouse, but let’s gloss over that; it’s the principle of the thing.

I read quite a lot of books, and what genuinely stumps me is how few of them I actually enjoy. I wouldn’t watch this many films I don’t like or buy this many records that bore me. And of course, it’s not so easy to download the first chapter of a book, or see a trailer for a book which I reckon is why people make so many bad decisions. And I don’t think it’s just me, either. Kelly reads easily as many books as I do, and in many cases her answers to my questions are always the same.

“What’s it like?” I’ll ask her.

“It’s too early to say.” she'll reply. This is her stock answer at any point from the beginning to about two-thirds of the way through the book. This is my cue to wait a while.

“What’s it like?” I’ll ask again, once I have figured out, through my unnerving powers of observation, that she’s on the home stretch.

“It’s okay, but it will all depend on the ending.” will invariably be the response at this stage.

“What was it like?” I’ll ask again when the book is finally closed for the last time. At this stage I reckon it’s no longer too early to say and, at least in some cases, the ending should have been comprehensible. The response, very often, is “Disappointing.” On the occasions when it’s not, it’s usually “I liked it,” followed by a pause, followed by “but you wouldn’t.”

Every now and again, I try again to read something that has a fighting chance of improving me. You could be forgiven, looking at this account, for thinking that doesn’t rule out an awful lot of books and you might be right. Sometimes, this is more successful than others. For instance, a while back I decided to tackle one of the giants of twentieth century literature, the series of four Rabbit novels by John Updike. Naturally, this too is about the American Dream, and about the state of America across the fifties, sixties and seventies. Because it’s by John Updike, it’s also about shagging, and maleness, and no doubt loads of other things I would have picked up if I’d been paying more attention or read the introduction.

I have to say, I quite enjoyed it, so much so that I didn’t even mind the effort involved in feeling like a better person. The second book in the sequence sagged a bit when a token black guy moved into Rabbit’s house for no discernible reason and lectured him at great length about race relations for what felt like several hundred pages. It was like D.H. Lawrence all over again; why can’t novelists resist the urge to crowbar lengthy polemics into their novels? I could understand them loving the sound of their own voice if they were, you know, writing a blog or something, but in fiction? But it wasn’t all bad, it picked up in the third novel when there was plenty of shagging and even a bit of swinging, and you didn’t even need to squint at the paragraphs with a magnifying glass to figure out who was sticking what into whom.

Emboldened by my success, I decided to move onto another Big Important Proper Clever Novel Of Substance. This time, it was time for a biggie. Well, not Moby Dick or Ulysses - because I’m many things but I’m not a masochist. Instead, I decided to go for A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, a huge sprawling family saga. The quote on the front cover said Make time for it. It will keep you company for the rest of your life. Isn’t that a lovely, comforting suggestion? Not just a book, but a friend too! Lucky old me.

Well, or so I thought. Over the space of several weeks, I manfully went to bed every night and looked nervously at the gigantic tome squatting malevolently on my bedside table. The thing is, A Suitable Boy is about a number of things. It’s about life in India post-partition. It’s about romance and the expectations of family. More importantly, it’s about sixteen hundred pages long. And I tried, I really did. A journey of a thousand miles probably does begin with a single step, but it’s still likely to take considerably less time than reading A Suitable Boy. And there were so many characters. Even with the family tree at the front (which listed about a third of them and was therefore virtually no help at all) it was slow going. Bedtime started to feel more like a punishment than a reward, especially as I’ve always thought there was something wrong with abandoning a book before the end.

It will keep you company for the rest of your life started to take on a rather sinister interpretation. By the time I was at the end of the first chapter it was beginning to feel a lot like You will never finish this book, even if you live to be a hundred. As I struggled from page to page like wading through concrete, even that started to sound overly kind. By page 200, it translated as You will die without finishing this book. At the 300 page mark, it was more like This book will follow you round from flat to flat, job to job, hairstyle to hairstyle, hastening your demise. There is no escape. This book is a life sentence in paperback form. Even that was too benign. By the time I got to about page 400 the meaning of the quote was clear: Vikram Seth is trying to kill you. And when he has, they will probably pop this copy of A Suitable Boy in your coffin to keep you company in the afterlife for all eternity, and you’ll still never finish it, not even then.

Chilling stuff at midnight, I think you’ll agree.

There was nothing for it, I dumped A Suitable Boy and picked up the latest Jilly Cooper instead. Ostensibly they do share some characteristics - both are colossal novels, both have lots of characters and both have a handy list of the characters right at the start of the book. But in Jilly Cooper’s list she tells you everything you need to know about them in a one-line summary so you know if they’re a good egg or a bad sort (as a general principle, if a character in a Jilly Cooper is kind to animals they’re probably all right, and if they so much as look funny at a dog they are all kinds of evil incarnate). And there was even an orgy scene at one point, although orgies are always bad things which leave somebody terribly upset and violated in Jilly Cooper novels (you need to read a spot of Jacqueline Susann for a decent orgy scene in my experience). And there were jokes! Bad jokes, awful puns, characters with preposterous names, a sheer comforting predictable hug of a hardback. So that’s me done with highbrow fiction for a while, and I think I might give my brain the rest of the year off because I think it’s suffered quite enough for now.

I’ll tell you this one last thing about the Jilly Cooper novel for nothing though: eight hundred pages has never passed so quickly before in my life.

Matriculation

Up in Oxford for the day, ahead of a visit to my mother-in-law later that evening, it took me a while to figure out what was amiss. It was the sort of cold, sharp afternoon that could hoodwink you into thinking that the seasons had decided to skip autumn completely and make a beeline for winter. Not quite breath-in-the-air stuff, but fairly close. And Oxford was pretty much as it always is; beautiful poky lanes, grand if slightly oppressive college buildings, chained bicycles swarming against railings, cosy looking pubs, the Covered Market full of butchers, fishmongers, cheesemongers, cafés, tourists. Almost as it always is, but not quite. Gradually, I noticed the hordes of students in gowns, white shirts and mortar boards, callow penguins, and I realised, It must be matriculation today.

Matriculation is the ceremony, right at the beginning of your academic career at Oxford, when you formally become a member of the university. I don’t remember much about mine, to be honest. It involved traipsing along to the Sheldonian Theatre, a particularly handsome edifice right in the centre of the prettiest part of the city, near to the glory of the Bodleian Library, itself a building I never went anywhere near during the rest of my time there. As far as I recall, in my case it consisted of wandering into the chamber in single file, a spot of Latin, sitting down, some more Latin, wandering past someone important looking, again in single file, while he said some more stuff in Latin and then leaving by one of the exits wondering why everybody else looked so euphoric and I didn’t. It was a bit like being in church, except that nobody expected you to sing.

By that stage I had been at Oxford for a week and I was already largely convinced that I had made an awful mistake. Being left to fend for myself was a complete anathema to me, as was being surrounded by a bunch of supremely confident people who were patently relishing the prospect of doing exactly that. On my first day, after my family had said goodbye and left me in my reassuringly huge room, I remember going to somebody else’s room and sitting there largely mute while a braying throng compared notes about their gap years. I on the other hand had been too chicken to go on the French or German exchange or take part in the school trip to the Peak District, let alone spend a year finding myself in Thailand. Where, for that matter, did they all get the money from? I can’t recall how I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening, except that I was on my own. After eleven o’clock I lay in bed, weighed down by the crisp municipal sheets, and listened to the music coming from somewhere else on my staircase. There were clearly all manner of parties going on, and I hadn’t been invited to any of them.

If you wanted a decent metaphor for the entire three years, you could do a lot worse.

On my second or third day my college “parents” came to my room to introduce themselves. This was the college’s rather sad attempt at providing moral support, and not a very successful one at that. My definition of moral support would probably not have included two people from the year above, who were also doing my subject, paying me a social visit to tell me at length that my degree was going to be unbelievably hard work and I might as well kiss goodbye to any idea I might have had about parties, or indeed having any kind of social life. That, I was told, was for people studying things like English or History, not for the likes of me. Of course, that wasn’t the sum total of our interaction. They also tried to sell me some textbooks they didn’t need any more. I don’t recall speaking to them again.

Having got used to the idea that my social calendar was likely to be even emptier than the little black book I didn’t have, the next thing to come to terms with was the dress code, and matriculation was my first opportunity to do so. The standard Oxford uniform for formal events is a plain white shirt, white bow tie and dark suit, otherwise known as sub fusc. I always felt like it ought to be an anagram for something disgusting, but disappointingly it never was. You also had to pop on your gown, a useless waft of black cotton with pointless dangly bits, called a “commoner’s gown” - as if I hadn’t felt common enough already. The icing on top was the mortar board, to be carried with you at all times. Only the very confident, or very drunk, actually tried putting it on their heads. I eventually found, on my way to my exams later that year, that it was just the right size to hold a bottle of Quink.

I say exams, because that formal attire was also compulsory for all your exams. And the exams were hellish; Oxford didn’t believe in coursework either, so they were your entire degree. If you failed any of your papers, you failed the whole degree and your three years had been for nothing. Not just that, but your exams came at the end of your final year at which point they tested you on over two years’ worth of things you’d studied, many of which were just a distant memory by then. For years afterwards I had bad dreams about being back in the middle of revising for my Finals, and I found out from some of my friends that I wasn’t the only one. One girl sitting next to me in one of my final papers had a loud, ugly, conspicuous breakdown halfway through the exam. In total silence her shuddering sobs echoed through the big hall, and she was led away to the toilet. Ten minutes later she came back pale and shaking, no fight left in her. It was awful to watch, and more than a little distracting.

There were other rules, too. You weren’t allowed to have any kind of part time job while you were studying there, something which was met with total incomprehension when I told all my school friends who had gone to proper universities. And then there were the special names for everything, a whole new language to learn. You paid your rent to the college in arrears, but it was called “battels”. Your mock exams were called “collections”, which made them sound even creepier than they were. Competitions - like sporting tournaments or drama festivals - were called “cuppers”. It all sounded ridiculous to me, but listening to my peers bandy those phrases round it was as if they’d been born to them. Really, if they’d deliberately tried to pick names which intimidated and excluded comprehensive schoolboys like me they couldn’t have done a better job.

Another thing my friends at “normal” universities were incredulous about was the food. You had to purchase meal tokens if you wanted to eat in the college halls, which everybody had to do because there were virtually no self-catering facilities whatsoever. The hall was grand and beautiful, the food absolutely atrocious. The gammon steak was a particular low point, the colour of a highlighter pen and the taste of an incinerated mattress. We heard rumours about other colleges which had restaurant quality food every night, but none of us had friends there so none of us could ever confirm or deny. The kitchen wasn’t open on Friday nights, so I got used to watching my M&S sweet and sour chicken spinning on the microwave turntable in the kitchen, or trekking to “Carfax”, Oxford’s main chippy, for something greasy and sustaining. All around me on the high street were people having what I could only imagine was fun.

What I don’t think I fully appreciated was the contrast between the odd mix of rules and regulations on the one hand and being left to quietly fold and go bonkers on the other. Every year there were suicide attempts, an inevitable consequence of the highly able, highly strung and highly stressed receiving very low levels of pastoral care. In my first term a student at another college fell from a third floor window, dying immediately on impact with the cobbles of New College Lane below. When we found out that it had not been suicide but that drugs had been involved, nearly everybody was surprised. The former seemed prevalent, but none of us had been anywhere near the latter.

My college had a proud record of mental illness, too; we even had one student known as “Mad Bob” who was sectioned more than once. I dimly remember him having a huge Russian army overcoat and a total inability to make eye contact with anyone. At one stage he was shut up in a room waiting for an ambulance to turn up, only to break out and rush across the quad at the exact point the Dean was looking out the window. He interrupted his tutorial without batting an eyelid to say “Oh my god, he’s escaped” and call the authorities.

But it wasn’t just an abstract, comedy thing, it hit closer to home than that; one of my friends spent a lot of our first year self-harming - pills and knives and tricyclic antidepressants. Outside my circle of friends, totally oblivious to that kind of suffering, the chosen ones hawed away to mummy and daddy on the payphones at the bottom of the stairwells, while high above we were all taking it in turns to sit with her, a vigil I can safely say none of us was equipped for. We were even less equipped for having to visit her in the psychiatric hospital the following term. If she’d seemed a bit strange in the context of our ivory tower, she seemed positively normal in comparison to her fellow inmates. It should have been a wake-up call, but somehow it wasn’t. The following term I caught her in the middle of taking an overdose, and sat uselessly with her sobbing on my shoulder until the ambulance arrived.

She’s married to a management consultant now, and I haven’t seen her in years. She probably wouldn’t recognize that person any more, and I still have no idea whether it was something to do with her, the result of being in that environment, or a bit of both. If I’d asked her when she was eighteen if she’d liked to have got better and married a management consultant, I fully expect she would have told me it wasn’t a price worth paying.

You must be reading this thinking how silly it all sounds and I can’t say I blame you. It was university after all, not Vietnam, and yet they have something in common because, if you weren’t there, I’m not sure I can properly explain it to you. The goldfish bowl of gossip and scrutiny, living in a confined space with a few hundred people, many of whom with egos which dwarfed even mine. The pressure cooker of expectation, of competition, of feeling like you had to justify your presence there. Just as there were children starving in Africa who would have loved your leftover gammon steak (although I always found that a bit hard to credit) there were students resenting you, who would have birched their grandmothers to get a place at Oxford. And, of course, the implication - especially from the third year onwards - was that your future in the world of work was only going to be even more cut-throat.

On the day that I matriculated I was hung over, probably from an evening spent in the college’s cellar bar doing my best to alienate anybody who bothered trying to talk to me. Apart from the dawning realisation that I had gone somewhere awful surrounded by people I couldn’t stand, I was also out of sorts because the girl I fancied had decided she fancied someone else. It wasn’t to be my first such disappointment that month, let alone that year. In fairness, it was also something most people aged eighteen had got used to long before then. They probably had their first brush with it on the French exchange.

Totally unaware of the ceremonial nature of matriculation, I also hadn’t realised that most people had used it as an excuse to get their parents to witness the event and take them out for lunch afterwards. So they all gleamed on the long benches as they took the official photo in the quad, knowing they were about to be whisked off to the Randolph or Brown’s. I by contrast was slumped, miserable and white as a sheet, contemplating throwing up into my mortar board. Less than a week, and already I wanted to leave. Not that you could ever tell anybody that, because anyone who found out you were going to Oxford waxed lyrical in no time about what a fabulous opportunity you had. It was those starving kids in Africa again.

I still have the matriculation photo, though I don’t tend to look at it very often. The women I’d eventually marry happens to be in it too, though I didn’t know her well back then, which is probably the only reason I kept it. Finding out, many years later, that she had some of the same misgivings as me about the place was one of the things that helped to heal some of my feelings about it. It was years before I could go back to Oxford and just enjoy it at face value without remembering the gloom, the awkwardness and the perpetual feeling of missing out. It was years after that before I could think of it fondly, but I think I’m there now.

None the less, seeing the matriculants on Saturday was a sharp reminder of all of this, things I’ve never really written about before. It’s frightening to think that half my life ago, that would have been me. Frightening, too, that so little changes; Oxford is a machine that processes thousands of students, and all of us want to be different but ultimately none of us are. Looking at them I could see all the archetypes, as true today as they were in 1992. The healthy, laughing Sloanes, completely convinced of their own entitlement. The state school nerds whose social skills will never catch up with their mathematical ability. The pretentious drama types. The loud Americans, here for a term and completely in awe of buildings many times older than their own country. The shiny-haired, shiny-toothed heartthrobs. The political animals. You could write a field guide, and maybe somebody should.

They’ll only start to become interesting when they leave anyway, and maybe that will be in spite of Oxford, not because of it. I feel like any success I’ve ever enjoyed has had nothing to do with my alma mater, and take great pleasure in turning them down when they cold call me asking for donations. If anything, I feel like they should be giving me compensation for all those nights spent wired on caffeine and stressed out of my mind in the college library, not to mention the psychological distress brought on by the hairy chicken chasseur.

In any case, I’m sometimes happy in my own skin now and I enjoy the looks of surprise when people find out I went there. That might be all the legacy it’s left me. I can’t say I lose sleep over it any more, and as Kelly and I walked down St Giles that day dodging the latest generation of England’s greatest minds, en route to the Covered Market for an appointment with Ben’s Cookies, I found myself thinking that they were welcome to it.

Frozen dinners

The first meal she ever cooked for me was fish fingers. I still remember it vividly, as if it only happened a couple of weeks ago.

She picked me up from Oxford train station; we had been going out for less than a month. We were both in our suits, having rushed straight from our respective offices to be there. Time was of the essence, because at the start of a relationship you don’t really appreciate just how much of it you have. We wanted it all now, to talk about everything, forever, and time spent at work, on trains and in traffic was just wasted time we couldn’t spend on what mattered. We were smart, awkward, still keen to make a good impression - even though our future together had been settled and agreed on long before then.

Her car was parked outside, a smart, sexy cobalt blue collection of elegant curves. I was still getting over the novelty factor of having a girlfriend with a proper car. Her predecessor had owned a nondescript maroon Fiat Punto I had never much liked, which as it happened suited her perfectly. This car, on the other hand, was part of the settlement when she split up with her fiancé; she got the car, he got the cats. You could almost think they had arranged their belongings in alphabetical order and were taking it in turns, but I knew how hard it had been for her to say goodbye to them.

She had done that for me, she’d left the man she had been with for fourteen years, left the house they had bought together, left the cats she loved far more than him. When she did it I’m not sure I’d realised just what a big thing it was but that evening, with my new girlfriend, in her car, driving to see the house she was renting on her own for the first time I got a picture of the enormity of the changes she had made.

Rationally I knew it was the most natural thing imaginable, but somehow it still felt like pressure. I was certain we knew what we were doing, so was she. Our friends and families, watching aghast, amused or quizzical from the sidelines, thought we were making it up as we went along. In some ways, everybody was right.

Our conversation was eager and excited as she drove us through the Oxford traffic, past the nasty pubs and DIY superstores, out into the countryside. All the noise and buildings fell away and I remember thinking how pretty it was, how pretty she was, how pretty everything could be. I felt like giving everything a chance, which was most unlike me.

“Get me five pence from the glove compartment, will you?”

“Of course. How come?”

“We’re about to go over a toll bridge. It costs 5p. When they last upped the charge, they had to have an Act of Parliament to do it.”

I must have been over that toll bridge hundreds of times since then and fished out hundreds of little silver coins, but I’ll always remember the first time she told me that story. She handed the money to the cheery looking man standing in the booth, the window smoothly went up and we sped away, over the bridge and off into the future. She was so proud of that factoid, and I was so proud of her. In time, she would even manage to make me occasionally proud of myself, something nobody had achieved before she came along.

Her house was a small two bedroom place on an estate they hadn’t finished building yet, but enough of it was complete that you could tell that one day it was going to be beautiful. Golden stone houses, caught by the early evening sun, glowed serenely as she pulled into the drive. You could imagine kids playing in the streets and windows shining with love once night fell. Or I could anyway, but I couldn’t imagine any unhappiness anywhere back then. I was relieved it was so lovely. If nothing else, selfishly, I didn’t want to be responsible for her taking up residence in a shack as penance for falling in love with me.

Her ex had laid down one condition when she left him. “Please don’t move in with him straight away” he said. He made her promise to leave it six months and, out of respect for him, she did. Their separation was civilised in every way, and she figured she owed him that much. At the time, we both cursed him for it, but over time we came to appreciate what a precious gift he had given us. The start of our relationship was like the big bang; in the six months that followed, thanks to him, we got to get to know each other gradually. Our relationship had time and space to grow and become what we knew it could be. I suppose they used to call it courting.

In the front room I realised it was a long time since I’d seen a house without furniture. She had taken what she needed but still had to buy the rest. It’s a funny kind of mathematics where fourteen years divided by two just equates to a bunch of cardboard boxes full of things you had probably forgotten you ever owned.

Later on, there would be a giant sofa shaped chocolate-brown beanbag, the comfiest place in the world. On Saturday afternoons I would nap on it in the middle of surfing the net or playing Advance Wars on my Nintendo DS while she was off horseriding, coming home happy and smelly and always pleased to see me as if we’d been apart for days. Later on there would be lamb rogan josh religiously on Sunday afternoons after a day spent exploring all the little towns in the Cotswolds that I’d never seen before, with the slowly descending gloom of knowing another weekend was coming to an end and real life, unwelcome as always, was about to punctuate our romance. But all that was for later on; on that August evening it was just an empty space waiting to be filled, and a metaphor for everything else.

Later on, too, there would be crockery and food but on my inaugural visit there didn’t seem to be much of either.

“All I’ve got is fish fingers. Will that be okay?”

I grinned. I could think of absolutely nothing nicer.

“That would be perfect.”

We ate them cross-legged on the uncluttered carpet, talking constantly. If we hadn’t been talking there would have been the sort of complete silence I wasn’t used to; no traffic outside, no neighbours next door, nothing at all. I’m not even sure if there was a television in the room at that stage, though if there was I would never have been able to take my eyes off her long enough to look at it. Perhaps that’s why I can’t remember. We had little bowls with fish fingers in them, like an orange breadcrumbed scale model of a stone circle, and to add a dash of sophistication she brought in some balsamic vinegar. And we ate together in that house for the first time, the first time I’d seen it, the first time she’d cooked for me, and I reckoned that there wasn’t a single thing in my life that wasn’t exactly as it should be.

Anyway, that was then.

The unthinkable happens a couple of weeks ago as we are sorting out our dinner. We haven’t made it to the supermarket - another weekend visit to my aunt in Bristol has got in the way - so we decide to try and make do for a few days using all the things that lurk in the depths of the freezer and the backs of the cupboards, things we can’t even remember buying. But when it comes to it and we look at what is in the saucepan, it looks pretty inadequate even for one. What follows next is the awful grinding noise of freezer drawers badly in need of defrosting as we desperately search for something we can actually eat.

“There are some fish fingers in the freezer!” she says. “Shall we have those?”

“Why not?”

So we sit there in the living room, eating something we’ve only cooked because there is almost literally nothing else, and I find myself thinking about how much and how little has changed in those past seven years. Her front room back then looked small even with nothing in it, our living room now looks big even filled with stuff. ‘Stuff’, I’m afraid, is the only word that fits and it’s everywhere you look; books all over the place along with DVDs we hope to get round to watching eventually. Piles of bank statements, letters and junk mail we haven’t yet motivated ourselves to file or throw away cover every available surface. Tops and coats are slung over the backs of chairs, cameras and magazines placed as if at random. I sometimes think it’s a good thing I don’t see my mother any more because I’d have to tidy this place for a week before I could have her over without feeling judged. Well, more judged than usual.

Where did all this come from? How did we get it all? Is this progress? If this is seven years of accumulated living, what will it look like after ten, or fifteen? Why do we put the television on these days when it’s always something neither of us particularly wants to watch? Are we as happy now as we were then when we had nothing at all, and is it the same happy or a different happy?

So many questions; they’re my speciality, after all, and I always have space for one more. This time, though, I ask it out loud rather than in my head.

“Do you remember the first time we had fish fingers?”

She smiles.

“Of course I do.”

I’m pleased that she does, because her memory is appalling. Occasionally we bet about whether something happened, and I always win. Those times make up the vast majority of the cases where I’m right and she’s wrong, something I’ve had to come to terms with about being married to her. It’s about the only thing; paradoxically it’s often very difficult to take in just how easy everything still feels. We had no idea it would be, back in that empty lounge eating our supper sitting on the brand new carpet, we had no idea about anything. We just decided to go for it, and look at us now.

Maybe seven years isn’t such a long time after all. On a night like this, none of those questions, none of that physical or intellectual clutter really seems important but this is: it’s still hard to take my eyes off her. I’m not a betting man, but I’m pretty sure it always will be.

100 Words: The unknown

There’s lots of noise from the couple upstairs lately. I hear it, failing to drift off, last thing at night.

I can’t even nudge Kelly, say “listen to that!” She fell asleep some time ago. I’m alone, just me and the hubbub overhead.

Unsuccessfully, I try to make out specifics. It’s too distant – I can’t tell whether it’s happy, sad or angry noise, horizontal or vertical in nature.

It’s louder than an aside, quieter than a tirade.

It carries on taunting me for ages, high above my bedroom; the clearest possible reminder of how little I really know about anything.

100 Words: Zombies

I’m addicted to games on my phone. In my favourite, you attack rampaging zombies with an army of plants.

“You’re not playing that again!” says Kelly in bed, giving me a withering look from behind her latest paperback.

Deep down I know it’s a mistake; I can’t sleep, tap away, then sleep becomes impossible.

The next morning, reality and the game have smudged together. I shamble exhausted to the bus, half-zombie, half-vegetable.

Anyway, she can’t talk. I spent so long in bed with her and Professor Layton last year that I thought I was having the wrong kind of threesome.

[Suggested by Baglady.]

Zeus and me

I think I went to Sunday school once or twice as a child. I might be mistaken, but I also have a feeling I played Joseph in the nativity. I even looked angelic then – blonde curls, almost white, and big blue eyes that looked like they’d never suppressed an evil thought, let alone expressed one. One year for Christmas my aunt bought me a copy of the Good News Bible. It started well, with lots of sex and violence and floods and monsters, but I got bored. By the end it was just a hippy on a hill, and my attention had wandered elsewhere.

I was always more interested in myths and legends. My dad read me The Hobbit and I listened, rapt. “More! More!” I cried when it was over, and he followed it up with Watership Down. I was always more interested in dragons, or rabbits that could talk, than loaves and fishes. To this day, I still think that parable is about Jesus inventing the tuna mayonnaise sandwich and nobody has ever been able to convince me otherwise.

I was in a chess club at five, because chess was another thing I found more interesting than religion. When they had a tournament, they let me play against the adults. I didn’t come top, but I didn’t come bottom either, and when they announced the results I got a special prize – a copy of Homer’s Odyssey. It was an American copy, dollar price on the back, pages edged in highlighter yellow, big embossed letters on the front. Those old men at the chess club knew me well.

After that I graduated to my dog-eared copies of Tales Of The Greek Heroes and Myths Of The Norsemen by Roger Lancelyn Green. Even his name sounded fantastical. My books were dog-eared back then because I was a voracious reader, but more importantly because I was carefree. I don’t know what happened to that boy to turn him into me, and sometimes I think if I could go back into the past and see the turning points I might get upset. Now, a creased spine or a dented cover make me feel queasy, a folded-over page corner induces a shudder. When did all that happen? Was it when I wasn’t looking? But back then, the object was nothing, the content were everything and I drained the objects of their contents with indecent haste.

To me it was pretty straightforward: myths and legends beat the Bible hands down in every respect. Christianity just seemed to be about an old man on a cloud who started out unpleasant, had a child and mellowed as all men apparently do, although I didn’t know that then.

Norse mythology, on the other hand, seemed to revolve around Loki (who was usually described as “naughty”, a word which meant something else back then) having lots of disgraceful adventures which largely involved him acting exactly as he pleased. The schoolmasterly tone of the book seemed to suggest you were meant to disapprove of practically everything he did, but I was six years old, scared of my own shadow, getting used to my first pair of horrible glasses and not ready to talk to girls. So I just suspended my disbelief, curled up on the beanbag and wished I was him instead.

Now I’m a grown up, and I’ll never have any kids to read Watership Down to. But just thinking about it reminds me of that time, when I really thought everything was possible in books, just the way I sometimes feel like nothing is possible in life. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if that kid had been a bit more like the adult me, or if I felt a bit more today like the child I was then. But other times I’ll sing something silly in the kitchen, or make a terrible joke, or laugh at farts, and my wife will look at me and I’ll realise neither of us has to be old all the time, if we don’t want to be.

The Greek myths though, they were my favourite. Where Christianity had the blandness of somebody taking over the family business, the Greeks had a soap opera of wars, feuds, tricks, hideous beasts and grotesque punishments. Proper theatre; plots with twists and turns. Good people did bad things, bad people did good things, weak people did stupid things. It was a lot like life, though I didn’t know that then either.

The reason I loved the Greek myths so much was Zeus. He had even more fun than Loki, despite being the king of the gods. He was married to Hera, and went around arbitrarily punishing members of his family, often for no discernible reason. Our white haired, boring god loved all his children and was an unending fountain of forgiveness. Zeus on the other hand chucked his son Hephaestus out of Olympus for sticking up for his mother. Back in 1980, my dad would probably have done likewise. He certainly would have thought nothing of chaining me to a rock and letting an eagle peck away at my liver every day. Now, in 2010, he has found crueller punishments for it, usually involving brandy.

Then there was all the sex. Zeus was forever having it away with goddesses and nymphs. Either he would turn into an animal and sleep with someone, or he would turn them into an animal and sleep with them, or he would turn into a cloud of gas, sneak into somebody’s house and ravish them. He had absolutely no qualms or boundaries. I would have said he’d shag his own sister except as it turned out he already had, because Hera was exactly that.

I suppose the equivalent in the world I lived in would have been Prince Philip behaving badly, but at the tender age of six I couldn’t imagine him doing that. He probably would have done, as it happens, but I didn’t know that then.

Zeus was a splendid role model to the immortals because naturally, all the other gods were at it too. Infighting, adultery, incest, murder, kidnapping - you name it, they did it, and more besides. Olympus was like a council estate. Zeus should have had an ASBO at the very least, and probably a clutch of restraining orders into the bargain. His private life alone could have made for the best episode of Jeremy Kyle you never saw. These days, I’m convinced that the Greek myths were topical before their time. Of course, that’s another thing I didn’t know then. There were a lot of things I didn’t know then, as you may have gathered.

But I reckon that, although God probably represents how we’d all like to be, we’re actually made in Zeus’ image. Sort of, anyway. In my mind, he looks a little bit like Sid James.

[The topic for this post was suggested by Jeannie. Sometimes a hundred words isn't enough.]

The hangover

On most of my hung over mornings, the drill is simple. My body wakes me up at around six am and it just won’t let me go back to sleep. I stumble away from bed in the half-light, go and sit on my throne in the bathroom with my phone or a magazine and a pint of orange squash. I then stay there until I feel human, which - given that my hangovers tend to happen at weekends - can take quite a long time. I know this will be an anathema to at least half of you but I have a theory about this. Forget living longer, being able to multitask, the glass ceiling or any mistaken notions of spatial awareness; the ability to remain seated on a toilet long after having exhausted its primary purpose is probably the single biggest distinguishing feature between men and women.

Last Thursday morning was, I’m afraid to say, very different.

I dimly came round just before eight o’clock with all those familiar feelings. In fact it took several minutes before I realised I was mistaken and that the building work next door had not started early but was entirely in my head, in more ways than one. Without the cushion of two hours spent squatting on the porcelain nursing a pint of orange squash, consciousness felt like a very cruel place, and it was only going to get exponentially worse when the lights came on or, worse still, I was exposed to daylight. That’s hangovers for you, they're like being a crap vampire.

I staggered down the hall to the kitchen, and got myself some squash. The glasses clattered in the cupboard like a colossal gong. Turning my head through the tiniest of angles produced the hugest of agonies, so I tried to do so as little as possible. It felt an awful lot as if a horde of sadistic pixies were ice skating across the frozen pool of my brain and repeatedly whacking the inside of my skull with pickaxes, all while listening to the Vengaboys’ Greatest Hits on the largest ghetto blaster ever constructed.

Rushing to the bathroom I barricaded myself in and cradled the squash, still in two minds about whether drinking it was a good idea. For a start, it didn’t normally fizz and foam like this. Or maybe it did, but I just never noticed. Or maybe I did notice, but it wasn’t usually fizzing and foaming in time to the queasy pulsing in my heaving stomach. Even at that early stage I had a pretty good idea of the magnitude of what I was dealing with; time to take the medicine. Kill or cure.

It didn’t stay down.

It wasn’t all that didn’t stay down; at that point, I was vividly reminded of the minced lamb kebab which had seemed like such an excellent idea only eight hours ago. Had I really asked for mint and garlic sauce? Did I really ask them to add extra grisly ribbons of doner meat as an extra treat? It appeared (as it appeared, clouding through the water in the toilet bowl like cream through coffee) that I had. It wasn’t so much adding insult to injury as adding decapitation to maiming.

The crap vampire analogy also extended to a phobia of running water. The shower sobers some people up, I’m told. Not so with me, although at least my shower is small enough that I could just against the wall for support. If anything, I probably left it more drunk than when I had entered - the booze oozing out of my pores, dissolving in the collected steam and getting me pissed all over again, as if by osmosis. I managed to clamber out just in time to assume the brace position on the bathroom mat, hands gripping the toilet seat for grim death, heeding the call to prayer again.

“Are you okay in there?” said Kelly through the door. The old trick of hitting the flush at the exact point you vomit hadn’t fooled her. Well, it only works the first time.

“No.”

Any other words would have been superfluous.

I decided against shaving, on the basis that I find it difficult enough sober. I decided against making a packed lunch, on the basis that the thought of solid food was provoking a decidedly liquid reaction. This, by any standards, was a world-beating hangover. The sort, in fact, that I used to think nothing of sporting at work back in my twenties when paid employment didn’t seem especially important. The carefree days when I earned next to nothing, lived in a shared house, didn’t own any cufflinks and had no interest in office life whatsoever. In 1999, it somehow seemed okay to be in the Purple Turtle at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday evening, bedding in for a heroic session and hoping for a heroic session later on in your bed (only the former ever materialised, funnily enough).

That seemed to sum up the passage of time far too accurately for my liking. When you’re in your twenties it's big and clever to drink on a schoolnight. And how about in 2010, in your thirties, leaning on (well, falling against) a doorframe trying to pull on your boots without pulling off a pratfall? No, it’s just a sad, sad act.

Rancid bubbles of bad memories kept rising to the surface and loudly popping at inopportune moments. Did Phil get topless in the pub last night and show us a big dragon tattoo covering most of his upper arm, had I dreamt that? Would it be worse if I’d seen it in the flesh, or worse if my subconscious had decided to invent it for laughs? That was the sort of big question I was in no condition to ponder. Work was beckoning. I allowed myself one last tactical chunder, on the basis that it might make the difference between getting to the bus in one piece and having to projectile vomit against a passing shop front, and left the flat.

On the stairs, I bumped into one of the women who lives above me in Flat 3. I am pretty sure there are two of them. One is called Lucy, and one isn’t. Even sober I haven’t got a clue which is which. One of them is going out with Hugh, and I have no idea who the other one is. Some nights - nights which generally coincide with me being at my most challenging - I am reliably informed that my flat (which is exactly the same size as Flat 3) is too small for two people, so goodness knows how Hugh, Lucy and the other two manage. It would explain why I always seem to hear a lot of arguments up there. I also have no idea what the relationship is between the couple who aren't Hugh and Lucy and the couple who are. Maybe they're some kind of polyamorous commune.

The woman who might be Lucy and I walked down the hill together, chatting amiably away until we got to the main road. I then managed to continue talking to her, completely oblivious to the fact that while I was waiting for the traffic lights she had turned left and headed down the road, presumably on the way to her office, although she might just have been escaping from me. The other people waiting at the lights looked at me, realised I wasn't wearing a Bluetooth headset and silently chalked me up as mentally ill. That’s the point, I suspect, where the penny dropped that I was probably more drunk that weekday morning than I usually was at the apex of any weekday night. God knows what I'd said to her; as I peered at her retreating back I realised I couldn’t really remember. Maybe she was offended because I'd accidentally called her Lucy.

Of course, I also couldn’t rule out the distinct possibility that she was running away from my breath, which would have been perfectly understandable. I resolved to buy some Extra Strong Mints at my earliest opportunity. While I was at it I bought a newspaper, although from the state of me the man behind the counter might have suspected it was for accommodation rather than enlightenment. Normally I would buy a worthy broadsheet, but on this occasion I broke my own self-imposed rule and picked up a tabloid. Big letters and uncomplicated sentiments were all I could manage; like a baby bird I wanted my ideas chewed up and regurgitated for me by somebody else.

Bad choice of image. It took all my strength not to slope off down an alley to be sick again, the alley which I suddenly remembered had been the site of an awe inspiring act of public urination only hours ago. Paper under my arm, crunching three mints at once, I made my way to the bus, painfully aware that it felt as if I was walking through thick, viscous jelly. I made it just in time, which was just as well as breaking into a sprint for anything could have led to a very humiliating scene, and ruined the shoes of any passers-by.

My colleagues, gratifyingly, were also hung over. Less gratifyingly, none of them was as hung over as me.

“I can’t believe we had tequila last night.” said Iain.

“I can’t remember us having tequila last night.”

Totally unable to match the bacon sandwich Iain had sensibly acquired from the canteen, I shambled to the vending machine and bought a can of Diet Coke. I opened it at my desk and the fizz sounded like gunshots. Drinking it didn’t really help; in hindsight it was effectively like giving my poor stomach a mixer. Another thing which hadn’t really helped was the packet of mints. Even despite their best efforts, if I’d burped in a lift I probably would have killed everybody in it.

I looked at my calendar. I had six hours to feel better before going on a conference call where it was highly likely that people were going to shout at me. It was going to be an extremely long day.

The only time I slightly perked up was at lunch with Iain and Gemma. I had another can of Diet Coke and a chocolate bar and almost felt human.

“I’ve got no sympathy” said Gemma, “It’s completely self-inflicted.”

“I don’t understand it.” said Iain, “I drank as much as you and you’re taller than me.”

“This is apocalyptic.” I muttered, eating my chocolate bar with trepidation. This has to be a first for me; just as the kid in The Sixth Sense sees dead people I couldn’t seem to look at food without getting a pretty good idea what it would look like floating in that toilet bowl not long after. In the case of a Twirl bar, that’s really not good.

They tried to lift the mood by talking about the Christmas party. The current joke is that because Manga Dave is single and none of the rest of us are, we’re all looking forward to living vicariously through watching him get slaughtered and paw one of the eligible ladies in the office. I’ve even gone so far as threatening to run a book on it, though Manga Dave claims it’s going to be Simone on reception or nobody. We shall see - I don’t know enough about Manga Dave to know what happens to his standards after eight pints but if he’s anything like I was at 22 practically anyone with breasts and without a moustache might be in serious danger.

I was pretty sure I’d had six pints last night. And the tequila slammer. And the kebab.

“I hope that blonde girl with the massive nose comes to the Christmas party.” I said, “She’s quite fit.”

“Do you mean the blonde girl sat right behind you who can hear everything you just said?” suggested Gemma. My face nestled in my palms and stayed there until it was time to go back up to my desk and be shouted at on a conference call. At least if it had been a face to face meeting I could have paid them back by doing some sneaky burps in their direction.

“Bit of a heavy night last night?” said Mikey at the end of the working day as I took my place on the funbus next to him and behind Manga Dave.

“Yes, he’s suffering.” said Dave. “He’s been going on about this hangover all day.”

At that point, Corporate Liam boarded the bus. That isn’t his real name, but it manages to tell you everything you need to know about him so I think it will do nicely. He used to do Manga Dave’s job, and was really pally with us all, but then he got promoted and dropped everyone like a hot brick in pursuit of his new friends. Not just that, but whenever we used to go down the pub with him you never felt like he completely joined in with all the gossip and bitching. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find that he was actually drinking alcohol-free lager and had a Dictaphone tucked in his chest pocket, whirring away.

Gemma, if I recall, thought he was rather attractive, but all the men hate Corporate Liam. Nobody, though, hates Corporate Liam quite like Mikey does. Sherlock Holmes had Moriarty, Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader, Penelope Pitstop had the Hooded Claw and Mikey has Corporate Liam, his bona fide nemesis. Some of it is because he’s such a cold fish, but some of it is because Corporate Liam is slowly taking over Mikey’s life. He lives in Mikey’s favourite part of town, drinks in Mikey’s favourite old pubs, likes Mikey’s favourite bands and pretends he discovered them years ago. Mikey’s girlfriend met Corporate Liam once in the pub. She thought he was really nice. The crucial difference though, is that Mikey is still pretending that he’s 28 whereas Corporate Liam is still several years away from that. Mikey still wants to be Paul Newman in The Hustler, he’s not quite ready to graduate to The Colour Of Money.

We all fell silent as Corporate Liam walked down the bus towards us, mainly because nobody likes him. But then I realised something was different. Corporate Liam had had a haircut. He’d always had trendy hair like a 1970s footballer, or a Lego man, but something appeared to have changed because his new look was a short back and sides. It looked tidier, it looked less edgy, it looked somehow…

“You’ve had your hair cut.” I said as Liam sat down.

“Yeah.” he said. He’s not much of a conversationalist, now he’s realised that I can do absolutely nothing for his career.

“I like it. It looks somehow… corporate. It’s a very corporate haircut.”

“Yeh, it looks very corporate.” said Mikey. “Nice one.”

Liam was completely thrown. He did a sour little smile. When Liam smiles, he always looks like he doesn’t really know how and has learned how to smile by watching videos of a smiling robot. Not just that, but the thing that really stumped him was this: it was one of the highest compliments he could have been paid, but he knew we probably didn’t intend it as one. He gurned speechlessly for a good minute before realising there was absolutely nothing he could say in response.

I got that look from Mikey that said Well done and we enjoyed the journey home in a mixture of our own comfortable silence and Corporate Liam’s very uncomfortable silence. Nothing could dent my mood after that, in fact Mikey practically had to restrain me from flicking v-signs through the tinted windows at Liam’s back after he got off the bus a couple of stops early. Even the fleet of pneumatic drills digging up half the pavement in town couldn’t spoil things; after all, it was a lot quieter than the noises in my head when the day had began.

Besides, I was happy all the way home, walking through the streets that had felt so wobbly early that morning, because I’d learned something very important. I’d realised that, even nursing the mother-in-law of all hangovers, I had the capacity to make somebody’s world a far better place.

100 Words: Insecurity

My coping strategy at university was simple. I decided people wouldn't like me, got in first with my spite and my sarcasm and guaranteed it.

If I’d only devoted a fraction of that effort to trying to make a good first impression. All the friends and sex I could’ve had!

I’ve moved on, have a subtler arsenal of tics and tricks nowadays. Jokes, showing off, flirting if you're unlucky. But the Achilles heel they're designed to conceal has barely changed in twenty years.

I'd better warn you: writing this might be just another trick. As might be telling you that.

[Suggested by Nicky T.]

Immediacy

On hearing that I've been having trouble with my digestion, my acupuncturist recommends soup. I am happy to hear this and tell her I have been taking some to work lately. But there's a catch, just like there always is.

"Do you use a microwave?"

"Yes, I do. There's one in the work kitchen."

She frowns. It's the frown I've seen before when she warned me off cider, told me beef was hard to digest, said my morning cappuccino was a very bad idea. It's the frown which communicates how many millions of miles my lifestyle is from the good life. I'm about to be told to do something impractical that would be extremely good for me. 

"Microwaves are very bad. They are an artificial heat, the wrong kind of heat. When you eat something that has been microwaved - when someone like you, whose stomach is very weak, eats something microwaved - it can almost cook your stomach. If you can, you should use a thermos flask."

I look down at the phalanx of quivering needles in my abdomen, itself more wobbly than I would personally like. From here they look like a scorpion. Later, she will tell me that if I had needles in all the acupuncture points it would look like a tortoise. 

"I don't have a microwave at home, actually. I'm quite proud of that."

"Oh! Very good." She has brightened up considerably. 

"I don't have a tumble dryer either." 

This is true. I've never trusted them, always had a sneaking suspicion that they shrink things. 

"I just think things should take as long as they take to heat up and as long as they take to dry."

She gives me that brilliant smile I always get on the occasions when our value systems almost overlap. Looking past her I notice her marl grey cardigan is by Joseph. If she had been a friend, I would have complimented her on her charcoal grey check trousers. She really is incredibly stylish; it's good to know that alternative therapies aren't all about hessian tunics and tired frizzy hair badly in need of product. I then have a fleeting thought about my analyst's knee high boots which is quite unworthy of me. 

There are tiny dots of blood as she removes all the needles. That doesn't usually happen, but then she doesn't normally use quite this many. I decide to pin it on the law of averages, everybody's favourite statistical scapegoat.

It's chilly and almost wintry as I walk back to the flat. The house I covet, covered in wisteria, is as lovely as ever and has cards in the window, some doubly lucky person's birthday no doubt.  I realise that my attitude to microwaves, tumble dryers and - if I'm honest - toasters is that of a suspicious pensioner who hasn't come to terms with modern life. 

Not just that, but they're completely unlike me. I expect to know everything now, or better still yesterday. I want you to like me right away, and I want to realise that even before you do. I want a quick fix for every single problem I've ever had, and I reserve the right to take an instant dislike to practically anybody. 

As if any proof were needed, I wrote this before I even got home.

100 Words: Ocean Colour Scene

"Do 100 words about Ocean Colour Scene." says Mikey. A running joke; I know he hates that band, always pretend he's their biggest fan.

Tuesdays he goes to what I call "band camp", his rehearsals. Running joke.

He messages me most Wednesday hometimes.

"Das Oakford?"

"Yeh."

Pretending the pub's German and the word "yeh" are - you've probably guessed - running jokes. They're only funny to us.

Yet I'm never bored by him - I, who bore so easily. Aren't friendships curious?

"I'm looking forward to reading it. I bet it won't be about Ocean Colour Scene though."

No Mikey, I suppose not.

[Suggested by Mikey.]