Our teenage years are a strange stage in our development as people- we have both the vulnerability and adaptability of children, and yet it’s when we start to deal with adult issues such as our identity and place in the world. It’s a lot to have to deal with, and for most people it’s a form of purgatory at the very least. As Joss Whedon has said, the message of the first three seasons of Buffy is that to come through high school and not become a monster is a victory in itself. At the moment, I find myself working through a lot of issues and I’ve become aware of three moments in my teenage years which I think have helped to make me the unhappy and frustrated individual I am at the moment. I’ll take them in chronological order.

To understand the first, you have to understand that I went to a rugby-playing private school controlled by a puritanical Welsh headmaster who’d captained Wales and, beneath a jovial, grandfatherly exterior concealed the heart of a dictator. I’d played rugby for two years without having a clue as to how to play the game- the way it was taught at my school was just to let everybody run up and down and penalise any infringements. I loathed it and wanted a change, however the only alternative was cross-country running, which would have meant me getting home at about eight in the evening. And then there was a ray of light- at the beginning of the third year were the trials for the hockey squad. The rules were simple- everybody who tried out would be given three games, two with the teacher who ran the school squad and one with another teacher. I loved it- I seemed to have an instinctive understanding of the angles of incidence and deflection, and I was a fearless defender, taking on forwards who’d already played for the school regardless of their reputation. I had two good games with Mr Prescott (no, not that Mr Prescott- come on, this was physical exertion!) who trained the squad, and then an unremarkable one with Mr Jones, which was the make-or-break one. Being a rugby-playing school, there was no room for passengers, so the squad consisted of about fifteen to eighteen boys- enough to make a team for each year group with a few reserves. And come Tuesday, when the squad was announced, my name wasn’t on the list. To give Mr Prescott his due, he did say that he was sorry that I hadn’t made it, which is a pretty big thing for a teacher to say to a thirteen-year-old pupil. I was condemned to play rugby for the rest of my school career. I have no recollection of how I told my parents, only that it ended in a row, and I think I threatened to get my dad’s tools out of his shed and break my leg so I didn’t have to play rugby. There were two lessons I took away from this experience- first, that I couldn’t rely on anybody, even my parents, to support me, and that any attempt to try something different was bound to end in failure. To this day, I don’t assume than anybody is going to be on my side in whatever I want to do, and shrink from anything remotely competitive apart from quizzes, where I rock.

Moving on to the lower sixth, I was encouraged by my teachers to apply for Oxford; they must have thought I could do it, and a party from school was bussed down there to have a look around the colleges and meet certain tutors who were known to our teachers to discuss entrace, the syllabus and so on. The Oxford admissions procedure is a long process and, for English, involves picking your authors for the entrance exam and reading up on them over the summer between lower and upper sixth; once back at school, the additional coaching took up most of my free periods in the course of the week- the intensiveness of it frightens me even now. As I recall, we took the first paper, the one on our chosen authors, on the Monday afternoon and the practical criticism on the Tuesday morning, following which there was an interval of about ten days before the interview week. I don’t know if Oxford still do it the same way, but when I applied you were told to assume that you were going, and you would be called at home by 5 pm the previous Friday if you weren’t wanted. Of course I was a total nervous wreck for those ten days or so, until it finally came to the Friday which would be the last day for them to ring. I was so nervous about having to take the call that I deliberately let my normal bus go, knowing that if I let it go, I wouldn’t have to take the call myself. Needless to say, I arrived home late, muttered an excuse about the bus, put my stuff down and was almost about to start believing that I might be going, when my grandmother, ever keen to impart bad news, told me that Oxford had called and I wasn’t required for interview. I think I took it well, possibly even with a smile, but the fact that I almost certainly made a complete hash of the Shakespeare question has been eating me from the inside for the last fifteen years and I doubt whether it’s ever going to stop. The following day being a Saturday, my dad took me out for the day, but I think it’s indicative of something in my personality that when I finally went to Bristol, rather than thinking of myself as having been accepted by one of the top half-dozen or so universities in the country, I still thought of myself (as many Bristol students do) as an Oxbridge reject. From this I took away the lesson that aiming high just means you have further to fall- if I could find a way to stop beating myself up over this I would, but I don’t know how to do that. When it comes to applying for jobs, I don’t apply for the attractive ones with big, well-known companies because, as with Oxford, I just don’t see myself as belonging there and I know that nobody else will either.

And so to the third and final one. For this you have to imagine me in my first term at Bristol, or possibly my second- it was a clear day, but I can’t remember whether it was warm or cool. You also have to bear in mind that university was my first real exposure to girls since the age of about 11- and my, hadn’t they changed...except that I had absolutely no idea how to talk to them. And so it was that I found myself hanging out with Katie, a girl on my course; a bit of a hippy, but there’s nothing wrong with that, nice looking and with a deep, slightly posh voice. Not having the necessary social skills to converse with the female sex, I tended to become semi-obsessive and lay excessive importance on every single word and gesture in a conversation. Katie had been to my room for tea and a chat, and I think by this stage I’d spent an afternoon in hers, so I thought it was time to take things to the next level, and as we were ambling down from the English Department to the shops at Clifton Down, I asked her out for a drink. She turned me down with a one-word "No" from which I don’t think I’ve ever recovered. The only other phrase I can remember her using is "it’s just that I’ve got my own life". Of course Katie was just one woman, but she wasn’t to know how long it had taken me to steel myself for this, and just how crushed I became. I think this was the occasion when I drank a bottle of wine and a glass or two of brandy in the afternoon and slept the rest of the day- well, you can shake that kind of thing off when you’re 18-19. But that was the first and last instance of Ian using the direct approach- what its advocates usually fail to point out is that a direct approach tends to bring a similarly direct response.