It’s January 2006 as I write this, more than a decade since the passing of the summer I’d like to tell you about, but it feels further away than that. In fact, it seems so distant, and so strange, and so full of wild improbabilities, highs and lows, mild disasters and major triumphs, it doesn’t really feel like it’s a part of my life at all – it’s like a story that someone once told me, a story I found so enjoyable and exciting that I decided to adopt it as part of my own personal history.

However, if this story isn’t about me, and I have appropriated it from somebody else, then I’ve stolen that person’s diary as well. I’ve got it right here, and within its pages are stories of the summer of 1995, and they’re written in my handwriting. So I guess I’ve got as much right to tell it as anyone.

One more thing I just want to mention while we’re still in the present…

It’s January 2006 as I write this, and I’ve fallen in love again. A bit. Maybe more. Maybe it’s not love. Maybe I just fancy somebody, really fancy somebody, and I felt that I had to use the word ‘love’ to do it the justice that ‘fancying’ doesn’t. I don’t know. It’s like being young and old and happy and sad and full of expectation and disappointment all at once. It’s something I haven’t felt in this way for a while, a long while, and it’ll come to nothing or last forever or peter out somewhere in-between. It’s ridiculous and terrible, and utterly, utterly fantastic.

I don’t want to talk about it any more now – wait until my 2016 series, Ten Winters, and I’ll tell you all about it, whether it becomes everything or dies as nothing. But somehow, just having that aching for being close to somebody has made me feel very, very young again, as if these wonderfully life-affirming feelings me have given me a powerful link back to the past, when such feelings were commonplace. Ah, whatever – like I say, what’s happening now is a story for the future, so let’s not tell it now. Instead, let’s rewind the clock back ten and a half years, skip the entire Blair government, the war in Iraq, 9/11, the death of Princess Diana, the widespread use of mobile phones and the internet – all these things glide past in reverse, as we arrive at a time when Girls Aloud don’t exist yet, Westlife don’t exist yet, hell, even the Spice Girls don’t exist yet, and Take That are still together, and more to the point are still the biggest pop band in the UK. Until…

"Who is that fat twat?", ponders somebody in the midst of the crowd.

We’re at the Glastonbury Festival - that’s me, and Steve, and Alex, and Kate, and although Kim’s not with us, there are still loads of other people we know that are somewhere within the confines of Michael Eavis’s supposedly impenetrable fences. It’s Friday night, and according to posters on loads of stalls, and the festival grapevine – not the one where somebody on one side of the campsite shouts, "Bo-ll-ocks!" and somebody on the other side answers, "BO-LL-OCKS!", and then somebody on another side of it shouts, "BOOOOO-LLLLL-OOOCKS!!!", but a slightly more reliable one based on hearsay and what the people in the next tent who have called home using the almost mobile cellular technology of a company called Orange know – John Major, the maligned, and hated leader of the maligned, and hated Conservative government, has resigned, dissolved his Cabinet, and called a general election. We’re actually living as a moment of real history happens, and we can feel it, we can feel the world changing but we accept this as normal. We’re part of a golden generation that can shape its own future, anything, really, anything is possible, and to top it all off we’re watching our current favourite band, a group called Oasis, live for the first time. It’s an unbelievable experience, and it’s the best time of our life.

The aforementioned fat twat who has joined Oasis onstage, to prance around inanely, is Robbie Williams, of Take That. In a few weeks, it’ll be revealed that he’s left the group that made him famous, but so much else will have occurred in between the unexpected appearance of the peroxided podger onstage in front of us and the official confirmation of his split with the That, nobody will really notice or care. Nor will we really be that bothered when we find out later that John Major has only decided to offer a choice of putting up or shutting up to anti-European MPs, rather than actually resigning as Prime Minister. To us, John and Robbie, Major and Williams, are as irrelevant as each other – our lives are much more important than theirs will ever be.

But Glastonbury, and what happens, and what follows, is for another time - there’s a story to be told that will set the scene for the summer, a story that will introduces the principal protagonists in this tale of another time, and thus we must rewind a further month and a bit to hear it.

Steve was probably my best friend at this time – he had been in my theatre studies class at school, and by the May of 1995, almost a year after we bid farewell to Burleigh Community College for the last time, we shared a house on Burton Street, in Loughborough. Alex was another really good friend, and he was at Burleigh as well, although I hadn’t known him particularly well back in our academic days. Alex lived with his sister Kate and their family on the other side of town, along with Kim, the other principal member of the group of friends that lived the summer of 1995. This is their story as much as it is mine, and if it begins anywhere, it begins here.

Steve was originally going to Glastonbury that year with his girlfriend Liz, another ex-theatre studies student and another of my close friends, but their relationship of several years was, by May 1995, on the rocks. He had been in love with Liz for a long time before they eventually ended up together, back at school, but since they had started living together, things had started to gradually unravel, and by the 18^th of May, I think he’d already decided to end things with her, and not long afterwards, he did. Why? It’s impossible to say now without seeming trite, uninformed, or both. Teenage love gone sour is always a highly complex thing, and trying to explain or rationalise it with the benefit of experience and hindsight only complicates it even more. Maybe it’s because, for a long time, Liz was his entire life, and over the course of their year of co-habitation, he’d realised that there was a lot more in the world than he’d originally thought, both in terms of life and love, and there wasn’t room for Liz in his life anymore. Maybe a year’s worth of petty grievances had built up to overwhelming proportions. But mainly, I think it was something much simpler - he’d fallen out of love with her because he’d fallen in love with someone else. I knew who, and I knew why, because some time earlier, I had fallen for her too.

But that’s for a little while later - whatever the final and ultimate reason for the split happening, happen it did. Steve never received the vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s "The Dark Side Of The Moon" that Liz had bought him for his birthday, I never got to read her copy of Stephen King’s "Firestarter", and neither Steve nor I could listen to Oasis’ "Married With Children" in the months that followed without thinking of the day a couple of weeks later that Liz moved her stuff out of the house, out of their flat at the top of the building, moving boxes, furniture, and general detritus down that endless flight of stairs to her dad’s car. "Definitely Maybe" was on repeat play on Steve’s stereo, and somehow its closing song seemed to play a hundred times during that long day. Lyrically, it seemed to have a certain relevance to the relationship’s end that it was inadvertently the soundtrack to.

"Married With Children" is one of only two things I remember clearly about that day. The other is Liz, in the hall of the house, crouching on her knees, crying, and simply asking me, "why?"

I could only hold her and say that I didn’t know. It was a lie, of course, but the truth wouldn’t have changed things, or made things any better or easier for her to take – quite the opposite, I’d imagine. But although I’d taken Steve’s side in the matter, as it were, she was still my friend at this moment, and I didn’t want to cause her any more pain. Actually, I don’t think that even if I’d spouted a dozen possible reasons, it would have hurt her anymore anyway. Liz, at that moment of utter confusion and loss was as close to being heartbroken as I’ve ever seen. There was nothing for me to say, and in that tearful embrace, my friendship with Liz came to as much of an end as her relationship with Steve had. It was the last time we’d ever be close, except for one brief moment fifteen months, and what seems a whole lifetime, later.

During the previous twelve months, myself, and latterly, Steve, had become friends with Alex. Although he’d been a contemporary back at school, I’d never really got to know him and it was only through a mutual friend, Ben, that we’d become acquainted. As Ben gradually disappeared from the radar, Alex remained and as winter became spring we spent many great nights out at the pub, and at Echo’s, and driving the streets of Loughborough and the roads of the surrounding countryside. As his relationship with Liz started to sour, Steve started to join us more and more often, and at some unidentifiable moment, driving, and having access to a car, became a central part of our lives. Alex already had his blue Austin Metro, nicknamed the Nugget Mobile in an improbable reference to Alex’s (and mine, and Steve’s) propensity to invest pound coins ("nuggets") in fruit machines. Then Steve got a van – not a car, a van, a Fiat Citivan to be exact - from his Dad, and from then on, one or the other of them always drove when we went out. Some times, many times, both of them would, and the sights of either Alex’s headlights in the rear view mirror or Steve’s taillights through the windscreen are still vividly imprinted on my memory. I didn’t own a driving licence, I didn’t drive, so I would always travel with one or the other of them on our jaunts out into the night, and thus got the best of both worlds – I could drink every night, and still speed through the darkness with the stereo pumping, the houses and hedges whizzing past, and the night air biting at my face through an open window. I was a lucky bastard in those days.

Even before Liz and Steve split up, he and I had taken many drives at night after the pub, or on the way back from somewhere, without Liz present, and it was on one such excursion that we remembered a place we had been with our former classmate Simon, during a break from rehearsals for a school production of Dangerous Liaisons over a year earlier. I had also been up there with other people, Ian, Matt, and Kate, friends with whom I’d been at school, and also in Edinburgh at the Fringe Festival, at some later point after the summer of 1994, to do pretty much what Steve, Simon, and I had done the winter before, and what Steve and I did that night - chat, chill out, and meditate over the issues of the day, and the days to come. The place has no real name, as it is merely the area of road between two iron gates that lie opposite each other on the sides of a small, quiet country lane, surrounded by either fields, trees, or both. However, despite this place having no real name, the lane upon which it lay certainly did, and that name became the one by which we knew it over the summer of 1995, as we made regular trips up to it in the dead of night, two, three, four, five, sometimes more than ten of us, in cars, or on the road, or even in the fields, looking down on the lights of Loughborough that lay far below us. An eerie, quiet, peaceful, beautiful, place that we called Dean’s Lane.

Many amazing and strange things happened at Dean’s Lane, just as they did at many other locations that we visited on our drives, such as the church at Breedon-On-The-Hill, the end of the runways at East Midlands Airport, and the spooky shores of Rutland Water. However, I remember the quiet conversations that we had there as much as the drunken times I’d grab onto the electric fence over one of the walls, and I have as much affection for the moments sitting in Alex’s car when we wouldn’t’ really say much at all, except smoke and look out into the night, as I do for the moment when an interloping policeman arrived out of the darkness and asked Alex if he’d smoked much dope at college. There’s not enough room here, or in a thousand ‘here’s, to tell you everything about Dean’s Lane, the highs, the lows, the best times and the times after when we’d try and re-conjure the magic of the place long after it was too all too late, but there was one great occasion, that was the dividing line between the spring that was all but gone, and the summer that this long and winding tale is concerned with, was all but upon us, and that was the night of the 18^th of May.

In the evening of this day, Steve, Alex, Liz, and I, had been back at Burleigh, watching our successors in the Expressive Arts department perform pieces of theatre made for assessment as part of the practical side of their BTEC diploma in performing arts, or A-level theatre studies course respectively, the latter of which being something that all of us except Alex had experienced ourselves twelve months earlier. Partly we were there for a nostalgic revisiting of our old haunts, which even only a year later already seemed a distant memory, partly we were there because it was a fine excuse for a night out, but mostly we were there because we knew most of the people who were there, some of whom were friends, and some of whom were shortly to become more than friends. One of these people was Alex’s sister, Kate.

Kate was in the year below Steve, Alex, and I, and had just finished her sixth form studies at Burleigh. Even when we were there, she was one of the most beautiful girls in the school, and it can’t be denied that I had fancied her, on and off, for a couple of years, and had waxed lyrically about her in song, poem, and in long, probably extremely tedious, conversations with my friends. Whether she knew the extent of my feelings for her, I never knew and still don’t, even though on one evening sometime earlier that year that is particularly embarrassing to recall now, Alex and I decided to reveal our feelings to the girls we liked by putting notes through their doors confessing undying love, or something equally tragic. I can’t remember the fall out from this excruciatingly teenage escapade, and for once I’m grateful to my memory for its lack of recollection, rather than angry at it. Fortunately, whatever happened hadn’t stopped us becoming friends, albeit the kind that saw each other at her and Alex’s house, and at the pub, and at clubs and parties, and I think at some point she managed to convey to me via friends that she saw me as nothing more than that. I accepted it, and although I still carried some small secret feeling for her in some locked off, private place inside, I wasn’t as jealous as I thought I would be when it became clear that Steve had fallen for her, too.

I don’t know when I’d found out, but it was before Steve and Liz split up, obviously, otherwise their split would have been as inexplicable to me as it was to, say, Beth, who was also living with us at Burton Street at the time. I don’t know if Steve had been nervous of telling me, based on my feelings for Kate in the recent past, but I do think that I was pretty sanguine when I found out – in fact, if anything, it cemented in my mind that nothing was ever going to happen between me and her, and allowed me to move on. Also, he was my mate, I loved him, and if it was something that would make him happy – if it happened – then I could appreciate that and something buried in my subconscious that was infinitely wiser than me decided not to allow any bitterness or jealousy to grow inside me, and just accept it was happening. Plus, I have to admit, it was exciting. It was intrigue. It was pure soap opera drama writ large in real life, and some part of me has always loved that.

Kim, like Kate, was on the BTEC Performing Arts course, and her piece of theatre, or drama, or whatever it was, concluded the evening’s performance. Afterwards, Steve took her and Kate, along with various props and costumes, back to their house, while Liz and I waited behind at Burleigh for him to pick us up. Kim was living with Alex, Kate, and their family, because of problems at home with her mother and stepfather, who was, it later became clear, an evil and utterly contemptible excuse for a man. But at that moment, standing outside the drama studio at Burleigh, I didn’t know the extent of the problems that lay behind Kim’s decision to get out and live elsewhere, so in spite of its undoubted relevance and importance to later events, it’s not something that will have any bearing on the events that happened on this night, although it will surface later in this story.

Alex went back with Steve too, so he could get his car and drive down to the Griffin, where the majority of the evening’s performers, and all of us, of course, were meeting for drinks. Back then, the Griffin was a place we went as a matter of course, our local, even though it wasn’t remotely near where any of us lived. But that never mattered – it was our home from home, and remained that way throughout the summer and beyond. For some of us, one in particular, it became more than a drinking hole and more of a habit that became impossible to shake. But that’s for a very different story – yes, another one - and as it hasn’t finished yet, I’ll have to tell it in a few more years.

Many drinks were consumed by some of us that night, although not Steve or Alex, as they were driving. We were, I’m very proud to say, sticklers for not drinking and driving, and even when I joined them as a qualified driver at the end of the year, I stuck to Coke when I was behind the wheel. In those days, a drink wasn’t necessarily a requirement for having a good time, and it had the added bonus that once last orders had been sounded, the night wasn’t over – we could still go out for a drive. And that night, Steve, or me, or perhaps both of us in a moment of synchronicity, decided that we should take as many people as possible up to Dean’s Lane. I think for once, there was no underlying ulterior motive in my mind, except for taking people to a place we considered "ours", but Steve may have been thinking of Kate, even though Liz was with us and there was no way of leaving her behind when. If he was, things went wrong pretty much immediately after we’d left the back door of the pub - Matt, the boyfriend of one of the other theatre students, Helen, had originally offered to make his car available so that there would be three vehicles instead of two to ferry people from the town up to Dean’s Lane. However, once he considered the logistics of getting more people into his Citroen C5 than was probably good for it, he decided to renege on his original offer, and took Helen home instead.

This left an insurmountable difficulty – there were fourteen people who wanted to go, and only a Metro and a Citivan to try and cram them all into. Even though I, in my usual grandiose way, had insisted that it was possible, in reality there was no way of fitting everybody in, and Kate, and three of her friends, Anna, Anna, and Laura, decided to go to the free-band-followed-by-indie-disco night at the Student’s Union instead, which had been their original destination before Dean’s Lane had been suggested. The whole venture was on the verge of collapse, but Kim saved the day by insisting that the remaining ten could cram into the two cars, and that we should continue to Dean’s Lane, which eventually, we did.

It was strange, yet still tremendously exciting when we got there – both cars parked up, and people got out, and some even began to dance to the Rolling Stones that were blaring out of the speakers of Alex’s car. Others stood around talking, and smoking, in the warm May night air. However, even though Kim and the majority of the others were enjoying themselves, there was one person who was clearly not having a great time – Liz. She was sat in the passenger seat of Steve’s van, with a face of thunder, and believe me, when she was angry, or pissed off, Liz had a sharpness that could cut you even through the metal door of a Fiat van, so when I walked up to see what was going on, I kept within earshot, but at a safe distance. Steve was asking her what was wrong, and if she wanted to go home. In that peculiar way she had, Liz insisted that she was fine, and that Steve didn’t have to put himself out to take her home, even though she meant the precise opposite, and after a minor row, it became clear that Steve was going to have to take her home. I decided that I was going to tag along for the ride.

The journey home was conducted mainly in silence, and in the frostiest of atmospheres, so I was rather glad to be safe in the back of the van, behind the black plastic grill that separated the passenger seats from the back area. When we finally got back to Burton Street, Liz stormed out of the van, only to return very quickly when she heard me banging on the back door so I could get out. Having freed me, she went into the house with barely a goodbye to either of us. When I was safely ensconced in the front, Steve and I looked at each other and had another of those moments of synchronicity – I think we used to have them quite a lot in those days - the thought of going to the student union building to pick up, or at the very least, see Kate, Anna, and her friends had risen, unbidden, into both our minds at exactly the same time. It was an irresistible idea, and soon the Citivan was speeding towards the University campus.

When we arrived, we made our way onto the dance floor and soon located Kate, both Anna’s, and Laura, the latter of whom had perhaps taken perhaps too much of an advantage of the union’s cheap alcohol, and was a little relaxed. Steve asked them if they wanted to join us up at Dean’s Lane, now that there was room in the van. It’s only now, a decade later, that I realise that if they had come up, we’d have been left with the same too-many-people-for-too-few-vehicles crisis that we’d had earlier. However, the problem never arose, because, due to Laura’s inebriated state, the other girls all decided that they were going to look after their friend and probably all head for home instead. Steve was a bit disheartened, but when we got back to the van, I pointed out to him that even though Kate had declined the invitation to Dean’s Lane, it had certainly put him in something of a good position with her by his coming all this way, just to ask her. We both grinned at each other, and pulled out of the car park, to head back towards Dean’s Lane. It was definitely the start of something – you could smell it in the air, and it smelled damn fine. Summer was just around the corner, and it was going to be absolutely fantastic. I just knew it.

How did I know? I don’t really know, now. Perhaps it was merely a positive reaction to how shit things seemed to have been going in the previous few months. My band with my friend Keir had all but fallen apart; my head was only just recovering, with the assistance of that now notorious pharmaceutical remedy, Prozac, from some nasty emotional issues; and the Job Centre and the DHSS were more than likely considering withholding my dole money because I blatantly wasn’t looking for any kind of work. However, the darkest depths of unpleasantness that I’d found myself less than a month earlier now seemed like a lifetime away – I was still writing songs and playing guitar with Steve; the horrible memory of the night I’d spent in Leicester Royal Infirmary (horrible more for embarrassment than anything else) seemed a lifetime ago; and, despite everything, the Job Centre seemed content to keep authorising my dole money, which was a nice bonus on top of some other money that was coming my way. But, like so much in this story, that’s another thing that is best left until a later chapter. All that you need to know is that I was out of my slump into darkness, and was definitely ascending upon some upward trajectory, Glastonbury ticket paid for and in hand, towards some kind of wonderful summer that I just knew would be marvellous. It’s impossible to explain, but I really did feel that I’d been somewhere awful, and the only way out of it was upwards. And that was precisely where me, and everyone else, was headed.

Then Steve and Liz split up. Then Steve and Kate got together. Then we went to Glastonbury. And then, the summer really began.