I can’t think of a metaphor for finding old albums you used to listen to as a teenager. There must be one. Time travel, maybe. No, that’s not a metaphor. That’s what they do. Old teenage albums - dog-eared cardboard CD covers and sticky coffee-ringed plastic cases - they’re metaphors in themselves.

It’s a Fire - these dreams have passed me by.

Ten years ago, unsurprisingly, it was 1997. 1997 and 1996, which was the year before that. I was all black T-shirts and badly-bleached hair. I had a blue bedroom permanently thick with the scent of caked candlewax, belching out Portishead from every speaker. Beth Gibbons lived under my bed, didn’t you know? Playing Portishead now reminds me of paints - oil and acrylic, mostly, but white spirit is there too. The bedroom window view of a West London nowhere. Massive Attack’s Protection makes me smell glue. That’s smell, not sniff. The Boy Nextdoor™ with the pale blue eyes (Mr Ocean Colour Scene) who let me photograph him playing the guitar, and the blonde best friend at the bar with the Bacardi and Richmond’s. Camden Market by day - looking for ties - Hammersmith riverside by night - back to mine for dip and Eddie Izzard, talking and smoking till 6am when my mum would come downstairs and look at us both like the disgraces we were. You were going to be an actress. I just wanted to go to university. I just wanted to share a flat with some friends and be Anna from This Life. I used to down Vodka then like I use full stops now. That was the year that Princess Diana died, as if you didn’t know. We were both there in Kensington Gardens after all, smoking, still drunk from the night before. The year we held juvenile dinner parties with boys with real blond hair and a packet of cigarettes stolen from your mum’s drawer. We only ever pretended to be grown up. We never needed a fake ID.

This post, which probably makes no sense to anyone who hasn’t suddenly realised they’re not 17 anymore, was brought to you by incense from Camden Market, the Girl From Mars and Oh Yeah. As I type these words, Tim Wheeler has just sung “it was the best time of my life”.