Two weeks was the traditional length of the Lewis summer holiday, but this year, I was returning to Loughborough a day early, as a friend of mine was appearing in a play – a real, proper play at the Haymarket Theatre in Leicester, and a group of us had tickets to go. What I knew at the time was I was looking forward to seeing my friends again, and going out in Leicester. What I didn’t know was that this one trip was to set a pattern of going out as a gang, and ultimately, to achieving that summer’s greatest single desire.

The train journey home from Anglesey was never quite as exciting as the outward leg, but it had its own special charms and musical accompaniment; Nuneaton railway station, as bleak and grey and overgrown and lonely eyesore as you can possibly imagine, is always bound in my imagination to Soul II Soul’s Back To Life - I assume this is due to listening to said song several years earlier whilst either on the platform, or on a train passing through. Even now, fifteen years after it came out, thirteen years since the subject of this meandering memoir, and countless aeons since I last listened to it, I’ve just put it on, and it really is staggering how the picture in my mind is of this peculiarly lonely place. Painted yellow lines on concrete platforms and cracked class canopies, of the high speed trains and ramshackle, the strangely evocative rubber smell of the passenger footbridge, the buffet-cum-restaurant that is always mysteriously closed, and the maintenance work that is always being carried out on the buildings and track with no discernable improvement.

But most of all, I see and the high speed trains that disturb the strange tranquillity of the station for a few seconds every couple of minutes. I hear the faint hum of the track that indicates an approaching express, heading for somewhere a long way away, and I can feel the strange charm that rail travel had for me as a child, of the mysteries and magic of railway stations. But even more, I can feel the pleasure of being nearly sixteen - old enough to sneer at such childishness, yet still young enough to revel in the roaring excitement of a loud and noisy train racing past you, blowing up dust and scaring old ladies.

But we can’t stay at Nuneaton forever, or we’ll miss the train back to Loughborough. We’ll miss the endless walk through the sunny, shitty streets from the station, we’ll miss opening the front door and wading through the mountain of two weeks worth of post and uncancelled newspapers, we’ll miss a phone call from a girl called Maxine about meeting up the next day, and we’ll miss our date at the theatre, which leads to much more.

Let’s go home.

And so to the theatre, and a play about Thomas Cook. As the man who created the package holiday and spawned the creature known as the travel agent, Cook should have been vilified as Satan’s granddaughter, but I’d imagine that what we saw was more of a tribute to a local hero. I say ‘imagine’ because my recollections of the play are precisely zero.

I don’t even really remember seeing Ben Parkinson, my school comrade, in his entirely brief and non-speaking role. Nor do I remember who else went along... Maxine Ahearne, who organised everybody into going, certainly was. My friend Luke was there, as were Jo Koolman and Leah Graham. But who else? Jim Keane? Steve Howe? Miriam Rose? These are all members, like the aforementioned Master Parkinson, of my GCSE Drama group, who may or may not have been along on this little jaunt. But it shows how uneventful and, in the grand scheme of things, unimportant it seemingly was. However, upon our return to Loughborough, Maxine said that some of us ought to get together and go to the pictures sometime. Whoever that "us" was, something was vaguely agreed, probably along the lines of getting in touch with and inviting other friends – Liz Marshall, Beth, the ubiquitous Tim Sismey, Helen Morehouse... and Louise, of course.

Since time immemorial, the Curzon Cinema in Loughborough’s "cheap" nights were Monday and Thursday, and for impoverished young people like ourselves, these were always the best nights to go. However, that summer, in its inestimable wisdom, the cinema management had decided that it would also be rather nice to have some morning screenings. The morning screenings were designed especially for young people who’d been off school for a month, still had a month left of the summer vacation, and may well have been getting bored of hanging around the house. I can’t remember if I was one such person – I’d been to see the dismal Cook nonsense, and also attended one Youth Theatre rehearsal since my return from Wales, but that’s all I can think of – but nonetheless, I found myself, along with Tim, Louise, and, I think, one other person who I’ve now forgotten, at the cinema at ten o’clock in the morning, queuing for tickets to see Arachnophobia - a film described recently in Radio Times as a "comedy horror".

Now if you’ve never seen this film, you may not know that the "comedy" element of this film is limited to the role played by John Goodman. The "horror" element is pretty much everything else you see onscreen – whatever else I got in the summer of 1991, the one thing that’s stayed with me above everything else is a profound fear of big, hairy, fast-moving, eight-legged motherfuckers. And it’s all the fault of Frank Marshall’s bloody Arachnophobia. I’ve watched it many times since, finally laughed at the cough ‘n’ drop sequence, mocked all the gaffes (in particular, the puppeteers hand which is protruding from the giant spider’s arse as it climbs up Jeff Daniels at the film’s conclusion), yet I’m still freaked out by the scary bits, namely every time a big bastard spider leaps up to the camera... towards my face, dammit! The difference between then and now is that these days I know when to look away, or peak through a gap in my fingers.

Louise was already scared of spiders, and spent a lot of the film shrieking in that strange theme park way that young people have when they're scared and enjoying themselves, and she punched me when, at one point, I said something like "more of the bloody things", when what I thought were more arachnids appeared on the screen. They actually turned out to be merely branches of a tree, or something, so I probably deserved the punch. As we left the cinema afterwards, we were laughing and joking, and getting on rather damn well, I thought. And even better, there was more cinema fun to come – another trip had been arranged for the following evening, to see a film that every black-clad-doomed-romantic-existentialist-sensitive-weirdo-"why does nobody understand me?"-indie-goth teenager should see at least once – Edward Scissorhands, starring Johnny Depp.

This was a much bigger outing in terms of numbers – certainly, Luke, Maxine, Beth, Helen, and probably Liz were all there as well as Louise and I. I think there were a couple of other young gentlemen there, possibly Henry Overton, but alas, such things have faded somewhere along the way. I do have a very vivid memory of standing upstairs in the Curzon outside what is now, I believe Screen Two, with Maxine showing us her newly purchased leather jacket, and a more vague memory of Liz telling some lies about her caravan club holiday exploits.

The film was simply wonderful; funny, tragic, and immensely moving – it’s a wonderful piece of cinema from Tim Burton, but I won’t over-rhapsodise here... rent it from Blockbuster if you’ve never experienced it, and I’m sure you’ll love it. Ironically of the three films I saw that summer, it was easily the best, and yet, for reasons shortly to become clear, the least memorable.

Anyway, back to the evening, and with the film over, we all found ourselves back out on the street, waiting for lifts home, or merely to walk off into the darkness. I think I was heading back towards Beth’s house... or possibly Luke’s, or Maxine’s. They all lay in the same direction, up Forest Road, towards the University, whilst Louise was being picked up by her mum, as she lived a way away on the other side of town, near the station.

Everyone hugged and said goodnight, and maybe plans were made for other trips – there were still a few weeks of holiday left, after all; indeed, I was shortly heading off on another trip by train to Wales, but this time to Swansea, to see my Nana - or maybe people simply said, "I’ll see you back at school". Whichever, whatever, the night still ended the same way - with a moment of impetuosity I didn’t think existed within me, and still find it hard to fathom now. When I hugged Louise, some instinct made me kiss her on the cheek, as well. God only knows what courage, madness, or whatever dragged it out of me – apart from dutiful pecks on the cheeks of elderly relatives, I’d only ever kissed two people in my life, and one of them had been a dare at the age of ten.

Louise was surprised, but didn’t look repulsed, or horrified, or dismayed. In fact, she looked rather pleased. We said goodnight, or "see you soon", or whichever parting phrase came to hand, and that was that. She walked to her mum’s car, and I walked off up Forest Road. I was strangely nonchalant about what had occurred, as I recall. Even though I’d kissed the girl I fancied, I didn’t really consider it to be anything extraordinary. Which for me at fifteen is pretty extraordinary in itself. I walked home with Beth, or Maxine, or Luke, or whoever it was, and I didn’t mention it, and neither did they. Maybe they hadn’t noticed it, or maybe it just seemed too normal for them to comment on. All these years down the line and I still don’t see how that kiss, which really was merely a kiss goodnight and nothing more, lead to what was shortly to happen. Yet lead to something it did.

The following day, Louise called and asked me out on a date.

Nuneaton railway station is still as bleak and grey and overgrown and lonely eyesore as you can possibly imagine.

I was there last year, and it still has that strange charm.

The buffet still isn’t open, though.