Back Story

  When we got past them for the second time, the traffic moved again. It’s not a long walk from the end of my road to Kilburn Tube station – it takes perhaps four minutes. But I can tell you, if you’re ever in a situation of only having minutes to live, get a gang of cockney builders to enthusiastically rip the piss out of you and it’ll feel like aeons. When we finally reached the Tube station, old men by then, we took off our hats and kept them off until we were in the National Gallery waiting to pass on some fake microfilm. We didn’t stand out there; there are loads of twats in the National Gallery.

  But this wasn’t my worst experience with that black trilby. Aged seventeen, on the brink of leaving Abingdon School, I gazed into that hat in a moment of utter defeat. Just stared into its silky lining, reading the words ‘Dunn and Co’ again and again – feeling the contrast of a pleasing sight made ridiculous by failure. It was the Christmas holidays and I’d just come home from a shopping trip to be greeted by a letter from Merton College, Oxford saying they were not going to offer me a place to read Modern History.

  I’d bought the hat a few months earlier. I thought it was quite stylish. I knew I could never be properly trendy but I’d begun to affect a slightly more flamboyant, if young-fogeyish, taste. I’d started to wear brown brogues instead of trainers and was one of the boys at school who’d taken to waistcoats. Awful, I know – but no worse than most teenagers’ fashion crimes, just slightly more Wodehousean.

  How absurd it suddenly was, this hat, in the light of my Merton failure. This affectation of adulthood by a boy. It had cost me quite a lot of pocket money – not that that mattered, I had precious little else to spend it on – but what had been the point? To look quirky, mature, artistic, intelligent? Well, I wasn’t intelligent – I just used to be. All those years of being a swot, all those exam triumphs at prep school, had just been a waste of time because, on the first occasion that such aptitudes might have achieved something concrete, something which would have materially affected my life, they’d let me down. It had all slipped away at the eleventh hour. I’d been reduced to a fogeyish, hat-buying teenager who was okay at debating and liked amateur dramatics. So what.

  I hope you’ll excuse the lapse in my sense of proportion that occurred at that moment. Going to Oxford University isn’t the be-all and end-all of life but it felt like it at the time. The pill of failure was further embittered by the fact that Leo, Ed and Daniel had all got into Oxford. Harry hadn’t applied. I felt like the failure of our group. It had always felt to me – and I’m sure growing up in Oxford has something, but not everything, to do with this – that Oxbridge was where you went if you wanted a chance at real success in almost any field except skiing. And glutton for glory though I’ve always been, I’ve never yearned for mastery of the slopes.

  As I remember it now, that was an epiphanic moment. It wasn’t, of course. In fact, my parents said, ‘We’re so sorry but, don’t worry, let’s just try and have a nice Christmas,’ and I did my best to suppress the sense of failure by shoving mince pies into my mouth. (This did not, in case you’re worried, result in weight gain. As a teenager I had, in common with most of my friends, a ferociously inefficient metabolism. I was stick-thin and perpetually starving. An hour of solid ingestion would stop me feeling hungry for perhaps twenty minutes. Then the peckishness would start to set in and gradually intensify as I prepared for another massive feed. It was like I had a tapeworm. It was brilliant.)

  But the more gradual epiphany which I associate with that moment was realising that I’d had it with academe. From now on, I decided, school work was a means to an end and that end wasn’t ‘coming top in exams’. I would get to Oxbridge somehow – I would exchange all the prep school exam results and thousands of hours of pre-pubescent swotting for that at least – but then I was done with it. I genuinely remember thinking about it like that – as if, after the Oxford failure, I was coming out of academic retirement for one last job: to get three A’s at A-level so that I could reapply with a realistic hope of success. (Not to be rude about ‘all our hard-working youngsters’, as politicians put it, but three A’s at A-level was still quite difficult to get in 1992.)

  By all means now imagine a training montage of my buckling down to work. I made my revision plan as if I was studying flaws in the ventilation system of a Swiss bank. The blueprints: A-level past papers. The weapons: a fountain pen, a glasses-cleaning cloth, a ream of A4 and a copy of Aristocracy and People: Britain, 1815–65 by Norman Gash. The mission: to break into Oxbridge.

  - 17 -

  I Am Not a Cider Drinker

  Two thirds of the way through the park, I pass the public lavatories. Do I need a piss? Yes. Do I need a piss enough to go to the park loos? No. They’re weird and cold. The surfaces are all damp and, while it’s probably condensation, it could be urine. Sometimes it’s definitely going to be urine. And also, aren’t park loos basically for closet gay men to have sex? Or the sort of gay man who isn’t in the closet but is still turned on by the trappings of an illicit act? It would be rather rude of me to be getting in the way of assignations, using my penis for the less glamorous of its two purposes.

  And what if I were propositioned? Unlikely, I know, but that would be a moment of such acute embarrassment that it’s worth considerable bladder discomfort to avoid. How do you deal with that, socially? If someone says hello in the loos, you can’t assume they want to have sex – that would be incredibly presumptuous even if it’s what you’d immediately suspect. In order not to be either the kind of person who thinks they’re so desirable that any unsolicited greeting must be a seduction attempt, or the kind who reckons anyone showing civility in a public toilet is on a cottaging expedition, you’d have to behave like you thought it was all innocent friendliness – until the last minute, the awful moment of having to say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, I think you’ve got the wrong idea,’ while removing their tongue from your face or trousers.

  A female friend once told me that this often happened to her with meals out that weren’t definitely dates but probably were. Some male friend or other would suggest dinner in a way that was probably romantically intended but (because it wasn’t specifically expressed as such) there was no opportunity to say, ‘Thank you but I don’t think of you that way,’ without sounding rude. She had to say yes. Then, throughout the meal, the suspected ulterior motive would gradually and agonisingly manifest itself in coy smiles and lingering eye contact and she’d realise that there was no polite way out of this before the inevitable awkward lunge. (As she was explaining this, I nodded and asked for the bill.) I wouldn’t want to go through a quicker version of her experience in a cold room with my cock out.

  In my year off after leaving school, I had a job as a cottager. Or so the others in the office must have thought, because I was always in the loos. Officially, I was a general office assistant at Oxford University Press. Unfortunately I worked in the department that published dictionaries for learners of English (i.e. dictionaries without the interesting words) and one of my duties was proofreading. I took every plausible opportunity to get away from this job for a few minutes: lots of trips to the loo, or the water cooler, which itself necessitated lots of trips to the loo.

  The loo was quiet and clean and calm and I didn’t have to stare at words on a screen. I would sit there wondering how much longer I could plausibly be in there before I had to return to my desk. I don’t think I was so bored that, had an urgent member appeared through a glory hole beside me, I’d have given it a rub – but who knows? It would have used up valuable seconds before going back to double-checking the pronunciation guides in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Maybe it’s that sort of boredom that has always led to sexual experimentation? God knows what must go on at the Inland Revenue.

  It had always been my plan to take a ‘gap’ year between school and university – and by ‘my plan’ I of course mean ‘my mother’s plan’. She felt very strongly that I needed that time to become a more rounded person. Basically I think she
was worried that I was boring – not really, properly, actually boring, just that people would think that I was boring. That I would seem boring to everyone else. That they would become bored when I was there. Which I suppose is the definition of boring.

  At my mother’s urging, I spent some of my OUP money on an interrailing trip round Europe. It wasn’t a success. I’d secretly known it wouldn’t be. I’d suspected it was going to be Barcelona all over again.

  Eighteen months before, in the Upper Sixth at Abingdon, I’d been appointed ‘British Ambassador to the European Youth Parliament’, which simply meant going to Barcelona for a lot of dry political discussion with other nerds and a two-day ‘team-building’ event in the Pyrenees.

  I was even more nervous than most of the other swots. But in fact the European Youth Parliament wasn’t nearly as dominated by nerds as I’d expected or considered appropriate. It turned out there were plenty of cooler kids there who weren’t really into debating but had got wind of a foreign trip and all the opportunities for drinking and dry humping that that afforded and so scrambled onto the band-wagon, undoubtedly pushing aside some of the less articulate of my fellow dorks as they did so.

  We had to do a bit of rock climbing and abseiling. As you can imagine, I was delighted. There was a certain amount of trying to rig up a net between trees for some reason, as well as some capering about in a mountain stream with some logs. We were given pointless tasks to complete with kids from other countries. Just picture me, miserable, damp and cold – consumed by concern about whether I’d ever be relaxed enough in the weird youth hostel where we were staying to be able to do a shit, surrounded by some likeminded compatriots and dozens of other teenagers from all over the continent who were perfectly happy to scramble over treacherous rocks as a means of flirting with members of the opposite sex rendered even sexier by virtue of being foreign – and ask yourself why you ever thought the Euro might work.

  Later in the week, a few of the cooler kids organised an evening in a nightclub which I bewilderedly went along to, before discovering that all it involved was drinking, which I was too law-abiding to do illicitly (even if I had an ignorant suspicion that it might be legal, or somehow closer to legal, in Spain), and dancing, which was an unthinkably embarrassing act in my view then. And now. (But not always in between. I was able to disco dance drunk on a regular basis from about 1994 to 2000. That particular ray of unselfconsciousness has now once again been obscured by cloud.)

  I did have a bit of alcohol in Barcelona, though. There was a reception to welcome all the teenage delegates, with glasses of fizzy wine going round. (At the time, I assumed it was champagne. I now assume it was Cava, both because we were in Spain and because it was a party for teenagers.) I liked the warm fuzzy feeling and it was beginning to give the taste positive associations for me. Drinking alcohol was ceasing to be a chore. For a few years, my dad had been giving me a bit of wine and beer now and again, if we were eating in a restaurant – just for me to try, before wincing and ordering a Coke. His well-meant booze-pushing was beginning to take hold.

  I remember thinking, around the time of this trip, that there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t get drunk. I tried at the cast parties I was invited to, and occasionally at the houses of friends, to little or no effect. I now know the reason for this: I’d somehow got it into my head – as many teenagers do – that I liked cider. I did not, but I assumed, cider seeming to be an entry-level drink, that the alternatives tasted even worse. It was sweeter and fizzier than other boozes and therefore surely less unpleasant. At first sip, it seemed nicer than beer or wine.

  But, when you don’t really like it, cider is quite difficult to get down in any quantity. Its acrid, acidic sugariness precludes quaffing for all but the most alcohol-calloused tramp’s throat. It’s very easy to accidentally nurse it. So, on several occasions, I’d been ‘on the cider’ for some hours while hardly consuming any of it. At the time, I worried that my apparent inability to get drunk was due to some terrible lurking physical failing. I worried that the normal human metabolic reaction to alcohol was beyond me. That might give you some sense of the scale of my teenage doubts: I was one step away from fretting that gravity might cease to have an effect on me and I’d start to float helplessly out into space. Because I was such a loser.

  Of course that kind of doubt is common to most teenagers. It is, in fact, the norm. The real freaks are the tiny and influential minority of teenagers who actually enjoy life at that age; who embrace the dating, partying, music, dancing, drinking, socialising, sport-playing of the pubescent years with gusto. In general, they are to be pitied. Few of us leave this vale of tears on a high: medical science and decades of relative peace mean that most Britons expire decrepit, with our happiest, most exciting years behind us. That’s always sad. But it’s sadder still when those high points came so early on in life – when the nostalgia kicks in at twenty. That’s a high price to pay for avoiding acne and mood swings.

  My Barcelonan inkling that drunkenness might not, after all, be beyond me, was proved right the following summer at Leo’s house. It was a strange occasion on which to get drunk for the first time. Not a proper party, an afternoon gathering in a field, a pub where they’ll serve you underage, or a covert late-night raid of a parental drinks cabinet. It was a very self-consciously ‘civilised’ evening. Leo, Ed, Daniel, Harry and I were behaving like adults, taking a break from our A-level revision to unwind, relax, chat, recharge – there was a thick veneer of bullshit maturity laid over the whole occasion. Leo’s parents were out. Their house was tastefully decorated and full of musical instruments. There was no television in the sitting room – how posh is that? We chatted, we watched a film, we ate pizza, we drank wine.

  I drank a lot of wine. For the first time in my life, it was really going down a treat. That horrid sour drink had become delicious. I wanted to guzzle it – now a sensation I’m all too familiar with. I suppose we must all have got a bit tipsy but I’m pretty sure I was further gone than the others. I only became aware of the situation on the way to the loo: I noticed that the corridor had become slightly difficult to negotiate. I was swaying, like someone drunk in a film. It was weird, unsettling, basically unpleasant – but, at the same time, I was thrilled that it had finally happened to me. I was experiencing in real life something I’d previously only known from fiction – it was like seeing a white Christmas or someone ripping off the end of a cigar with their teeth.

  I also felt embarrassed. I hadn’t behaved as responsibly or maturely as people might have expected. In a tiny way, I’d been stereotypically teenage and, in a stereotypically teenage way, I was ashamed of myself. So after an awkward swaying piss and a careful journey back to the living room, I tried to act as sober as possible. Yet somehow, while doing a gesture to illustrate some remark, I managed to break a plate. I was unmasked. I sat with a guilty expression, quietly burping. My friends observed the state to which I’d reduced myself with sage, judgemental looks that ill concealed their glee.

  The next day, I had my first sensation of wondering how much of a fool I’d made of myself. That’s so often the strongest feeling after you’ve got pissed – worse than the hangover. You’re seldom convinced that you were a tit, you’re just not convinced you weren’t. You feel the urge to make phone calls to test the water. You hope that you can determine whether you should be embarrassed and apologetic by the tone of voice with which your call is answered. You think they’re unlikely to sound offended – but it’s a warning sign if they sound amused.

  Of course I also had my first hangover, which I didn’t realise was a hangover as my expectations of what one would be like were solely informed by Alka Seltzer adverts. What I know now but didn’t then is that you often don’t get the bad headache they illustrated, just an overall feeling of unease, clumsiness and delicacy.

  The stomach is usually more upset than the head, which Alka Seltzer failed to mention – largely because, if your stomach’s feeling peaky, the last thin
g you want is Alka Seltzer, a horrible salty fizzy drink. Its pain-killing powers are dwarfed by the massive downside of taking on a gallon of stomach-troubling slosh. So, at the time, I was relieved to escape the dreaded hangover but puzzled to coincidentally have no appetite and crave water. It’s not much to be proud of, managing to get drunk for the first time. But, like mumps, I was glad to get it out of the way.

  I’m just leaving Regent’s Park now. On a bench near the gate, there’s a tramp swigging from a can of Special Brew. Now there’s someone whose first experience of alcohol probably wasn’t swiftly followed by the offer of work at Oxford University Press. I wonder if he got into booze under pressure from his parents to stop watching Blackadder and develop a social life? I wonder if they were half glad, the first couple of times he threw up in public, that he was beginning to live a little?

  I wonder if they nagged him into taking an interrailing trip round Europe so that his gap year wouldn’t be entirely frittered away doing clerical work for £4.50 an hour? I wonder if he sat nervously in beautiful squares in Florence, eating supermarket sandwiches and worrying about wasps, utterly oblivious to all the opportunities of high- and low-brow fun that lay around him? I wonder if he dutifully got up from youth hostel beds at eight in the morning to trudge round museums and galleries, bored out of his mind but feeling ashamed of that boredom? I wonder if his terror of running out of money while away from home prevented him from buying more than tiny amounts of horrible cheap food, while salivating as he passed restaurants? I wonder if he worried about how much more life frightened him than excited him, about how he longed to take refuge in things he knew? Did he feel inadequate at the thought of contemporaries who’d travelled to the Third World to build schools and get off with one another, thus rubbing his nose in his own encumbrance with shyness and fear? Did he return home from this holiday in Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Vienna and Prague just hugely relieved that it was over and looking forward to eating beans on toast and watching Telly Addicts?