Twentysomethings: you won’t miss being poor. But you will miss not knowing what you’re doing

What I miss most about being very young is the cluelessness. It’s enormously liberating, cluelessness. The boundaries of life are simply not comprehended. The boxes into which others will put you are not apparent. Thus, you float out with life, and you see all.

I moved to London at 22, with a vague plan to sleep on my dad’s living-room floor until something better happened. He was very good about it, although I’m not sure he’d been consulted. Before long, I moved to Camberwell with an old schoolfriend. Lord knows why we chose Camberwell; very possibly because it’s mentioned in Withnail & I. And anyway, this was more like Elephant & Castle, whatever the advert in Loot had said. Our back window looked out over Burgess Park, which was terraformed and Blade Runner-esque, and about which I still have strange and listless zombie nightmares.

I was an agency temp, and would be for the next few years. On good weeks, this meant proofreading; on bad ones something far more mundane, such as the month I spent in an engineering firm comparing printed lists of inconsequential bolts on the roof of the Northern Line with handwritten notebooks of the same. Altogether, this was a process I’d describe as ‘writing a novel’. At the weekends, friends in big, crumbly shared houses would throw parties, where we would all behave like the students we’d recently stopped being. After a year I moved to Brixton, into a mouldy flat with fleas. The previous inhabitants had all been Etonians and had left a syringe under the sofa. I liked it there enormously.