I’ve never been an “office job” person. By 26 I’d grown desperately unhappy, aware of time moving unbearably fast, frantically grabbing at each wasted second. I felt isolated, somehow exiled in London, desperate to escape. I remember once leaving work, inexplicably on the verge of tears, and staring at traffic on Euston Road. The city lights and sounds blurred and muffled past until I was suddenly in Leicester Square, hours later. My doctor called it a ‘fugue’; the conscious mind, unable to cope, essentially shuts down. It still happens when the moods swell dark enough, once or twice a year.
