1) Don’t do that.

2) Music really does sound better through earphones.

3) The grass is always greener. Be happy with your lot, not unhappy over someone else’s.

4) Wear sunscreen.

5) Don’t bank with Abbey National. Ever. EVER. Unless of course you want to waste money, have high blood pressure and go grey before your time. In which case just start smoking. It will work out healthier for you in the long run.

6) You can do anything you want…

7) … but always be polite to and mindful of other people. If even a tenth of the people who live in London did this, I’d never leave. I’d probably even use the tube without instantly calculating how to avoid Oxford Circus.

8) One day in your mid twenties, overnight, the things you do in life will suddenly seem arbitrary. You’ll think it won’t happen to you, but it will.

9) You’ll only ever truly regret not doing something rather than doing it.

10) If you must get a credit card “for emergencies”, keep it in a drawer with “FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY” written in thick red marker pen on the front. Keep a live tarantula in the drawer. One that really hates you. Never, ever, take the card out with you. Especially not to the pub.

11) Blonds are evil.

12) Politely ignore all advice and make your own mistakes.

13) But trust me on the sunscreen.

An actual transcript…

BEN:  You know you said just go for the zeitgeist - y’know, like Amy Winehouse - take something old and make it modern?

LITTLE ONE:  Yeah.

BEN:  Like, put a modern spin on it by throwing in a few swear words and talking about being wasted?

LITTLE ONE:  Uh huh.

BEN:  So how about ‘The Two Ronnies’, only more modern: ‘The Two Arseholes’?

LITTLE ONE:  No.

BEN:  No, it would be great. We could have two giant arseholes.

LITTLE ONE:  (shudders) Just… no. But we could have two blokes referred to as ‘the two arseholes’.

BEN:  Bit limited.

LITTLE ONE:  Well, we all know what they are, they’re the two arseholes. But what’s their names? Like, “oh their names are” - ring ring! - “hang on I’ll just get that,” oh no, we never heard their names!

BEN:  Hmmn.

LITTLE ONE:  And while the audience are watching it I’ll go round and flood the room with laughing gas. Ah! A laughing factory! Like when they make different things every week! Like ‘Bertha’! (sings the theme tune to ‘Bertha’).

BEN:  No.

LITTLE ONE:  (sniffs) A factory that makes models of miniature factories.

BEN:  That’s Austin Powers.

LITTLE ONE:  Clown factory.

BEN:  No.

LITTLE ONE:  A children’s entertainer.

BEN:  No, definitely not.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Yes, Mayor’. Like ‘Yes, Minister’. I like that. ‘No, Mayor’.

BEN:  I don’t think Boris Johnson would be available.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘The Conservatives’. Cos it’s all shifting, innit.

BEN:  Aye.

LITTLE ONE:  Ah! Youth centre chavs!

BEN:  Bit ‘Byker Grove’.

LITTLE ONE:  Then an adult version where they all get kicked at the end.

BEN:  Hmmn.

LITTLE ONE:  Stupid kids who are all teens, like a modern Enid Blyton, and they go on an adventure round their estate and learn a lesson every week.

BEN:  Like ‘South Park’.

LITTLE ONE:  Yeah!.

BEN:  Like ‘South Park’.

LITTLE ONE:  But with real people! They could be called R Kelly, Susan, and Dangle. Dangle’s the funny one.

LITTLE ONE:  No, really, Susan’s like 25 stone. Obese… obese! ‘Obese City!’… (coughs) Who all live in a little hole under the… (pause) mayor’s building.

BEN:  This is just typing practice for me.

LITTLE ONE:  And nothing more.

LITTLE ONE:  There’s some good stuff there.

LITTLE ONE:  A band. (Makes popping noise) Ooh! Magic bag! A band who keep trying to get a record deal and never do and you never hear them play.

BEN:  That’s been done many times.

LITTLE ONE:  A cat in a bag… let’s blank that. Oh, that’s my crazy Jesus spent.

BEN:  That’s my crazy Jesus spent?

LITTLE ONE:  Creative juices. That’s my creative juices spent.

BEN:  Ah.

LITTLE ONE:  A wood shop… where they’re all wankers. And a really lovely delicate middle class girl has to work with them, and they’re all (demonstrates their attitude by coughing up phlegm in manly way) and she has to take orders for wood and she’s all distraught.

LITTLE ONE:  This is going very well.

BEN:  I think we should stick with the mix of ideas we had before - Brian Blessed in a house that travels through time and space, and a dog who doesn’t like breakfast, with a family who drinks tea out of a different cup every week but doesn’t realise it.

LITTLE ONE:  Regulars.

BEN:  Regulars?

LITTLE ONE:  In a pub. Oh, that’s ‘Cheers’. How about ‘The Man Who Thought He Could Reason’? And always gets beaten up at the end?

BEN:  That’s just Boris Johnson again, and why does everyone have to get beaten up at the end of your things?

LITTLE ONE:  An opera singer.

BEN:  Yup?

LITTLE ONE:  Who’s a tosser. And it’s a very sophisticated agency… ah, boring shit. Do you remenber ‘May to December’? Ugh. (Suddenly gets up) Oh! This will help! (Gets notebook). The other day I watched Top 50 sitcoms and I took notes.

BEN:  How serendipitous.

LITTLE ONE:  I gotta lot here. Okay. Let’s look at, oh, Top 50 characters. ‘Rigsby - fast. Wants Miss Jones.’

BEN:  Was it Miss Jones? or James?

LITTLE ONE:  Jones.

BEN:  He was always saying Miss James or Joan wasn’t he?

LITTLE ONE:  (Ignores Ben) ‘Bill Cosby. Natural.’

BEN:  Git. Natural git.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Monty Python - an element of surprise with handbags.’ (Quotes Monty Python at length). ‘Wayne and Waynetta.’

BEN:  I’m not a Harry Enfield fan. I like Kathy Burke, but not Harry Enfield.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Hancock - miserable funny. You knew he was never going to win so you felt sorry for him, like Ricky Gervais in ‘The Office’. (Suddenly shouts) I’m the only gay in the village! Everyone’s okay with minority. ‘Green Wing’, Dancing in the surgery. Niles, Frasier. Difference in brothers, blah blah blah, cotton wool. Mrs overall. Frank Spencer. Stump’s lovely wife.’

BEN:  Huh? Who’s Stump?

LITTLE ONE:  Stunts. Lovely wife.

BEN:  Right, cos that wasn’t making sense for a moment.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘They auction Marlon Brando at Southerby’s.’

BEN:  Who do?

LITTLE ONE:  They do.

BEN:  Do what?

BEN:  Nevermind. That actually happened though.

LITTLE ONE:  Mmmmnn. ‘Abusive friendships.’

BEN:  Yes we are.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Victor Meldrew, plant in toilet.’

BEN:  This is just a monologue isn’t it?

LITTLE ONE:  Ooh, I can’t read that at all.

BEN:  I thought so.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Vicky Pollard. You actually believe she’s a girl. Demonstrated decline of articulacy. Young Ones. “Oh no the front door’s exploded… My parents are dead. You think that’s bad? Yes I do piss face.”‘

BEN:  Can we stop doing this now?

LITTLE ONE:  I’m not finished yet.

BEN:  Please.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Channelling pain into jokes. Wallace and Gromit, long suffering family friend.’

BEN:  Wallace and Gromit is not a sitcom!

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Spaced’…

BEN:  Now that’s brilliant. That’s the kind of thing I’d have liked to have written if it hadn’t already been written. Bastards.

LITTLE ONE:  ‘1990s slacker lifestyle.’

BEN:  Bastards. Bastards..

LITTLE ONE:  ‘Tony Benn doesn’t want to be out of touch.’

BEN:  Shame.

BEN:  How is it you’ve written pages and pages of impromptu notes about sitcoms and not one bit of it is either usable or funny?

LITTLE ONE:  (lights cigarette) ‘Take a character, and think about what house would he live in. What car would he have? Lynx, voodoo, Africa. Shouting out about Dixons during sex with chocolate on face.’

BEN:  This is all Alan Partidge isn’t it?

LITTLE ONE:  (nods) ‘Fawlty Towers - beautful towers, beautiful and funny. Only 12 episodes. Honest and funny.’ And that was based on when Monty Python stayed in Torquay. And they left because the man there was so rude.

BEN:  Really?

LITTLE ONE:  Yeah.

LITTLE ONE:  And what have we learned from this, Benjamin?

BEN:  That we have to stay in a really bad hotel in Torquay.

LITTLE ONE:  Theme park! Or a doctor’s surgery for really small people.

BEN:  I think we should stop now.

It happened again, somehow more as teenage viscera than the teenage innocence of before but no less warm in effect. Only there were three this time. One was a boy - a cheeky, impudent libertine. Another was an ex, tacitly competing with me for the libertine’s attention’s. And one, curiously, was a girl.

I know. So far this reads like a BBC Sitcom proposal.

I met the girl on a bus. There was some sort of major delay on the underground (a dream clearly not steeped entirely in fantasy) and we were two of several hundred people who found themselves shoved together in typical London commuter joined-up thinking, trying to board a rail replacement bus. We got chatting. She seemed to think I was straight, and I let her (for some odd reason, a lot of women seem to. Note to self: say ‘whoops, duckie!’ more in company). Next we were kissing, and I went along with it. Somehow it wasn’t all that bad. Y’know, for a girl. I even remember feeling something close to genuine affection at the time (about as much as I’m capable of offering any man these days, certainly, not that that’s a great deal), but I’m relieved it’s merely a dream. Waking up remembering kissing a girl the night before is, I’d imagine, a similar response to waking up remembering you had a cigarette after one month of virtue.

The libertine meanwhile was your typical nineteen year old - dangerously clever, impossibly energetic, impishly witty and intolerably cute, blue eyed (naturally, though surprisingly neither blond nor Canadian) with all the chutzpah of someone recently aware of people laughing louder at their jokes as an act of foreplay itself, and the reluctant attraction to them you increasingly submit to as a result. I say ‘typical nineteen year old’, but I’ve yet to meet any such boy. If my life were a Raymond Chandler novel, this sort would clearly be my homme fatale. This apparently grants me a future somewhere between Quentin Crisp as Philip Marlowe and Uncle Monty.

Immediately my ex silently declared a cold war as far as this boy was concerned, a war he seemed to immediately win by the event of my surrender. If you ever want to win against me, simply force me into a competition. I will instantly walk away. I rarely compete against anyone except myself. If you ever want to lose against me, give me an ultimatum. I will nearly always choose the alternative that didn’t. I think the ex factor (ho ho) probably represents my insecurity of separate friends I’ve made ‘coupling off’ after I’ve introduced them to each other and leaving me behind. It also makes me realise that I can be very passive aggressive / passively defeatist in relationships by immediately refusing to ‘fight’ for someone I’ve just met, surrendering to the assumption that if they were truly interested in me then they would do a little fighting of their own. You can only chase after something that leaves you a trail to follow after all.

I’m not quite sure what lesson this was meant to teach me however, as my habitual passivity ultimately won out. After an age (or a nanosecond according to current oneirological studies) of watching the ex peacock-step about my Devil-May-Caring Lolitus, the latter trumped the former’s colourful display with a quick turn to me and a politely wicked enquiry as to whether he and I should bathe together now, or just go straight to bed. In a gloriously unsportsmanlike victory, we then proceeded to eat each other’s faces off for the remainder of the evening, until my ex slunk away sullenly from the dream as a deposed alpha male. Serves him right. Even in the dream he had a boyfriend.

I woke up at the precise moment my dream self fell asleep in his Rimbaudish lover’s arms. There was no eczema on my paw this time, but my right hand was sore from where I’d slept on it, my wrists and metacarpels already sprained from yesterday when I sat down somehow stupidly in Soho Square, distracted by the self-satisfied offensive tramp who had invited himself to join us. As I slowly became aware of the dim light of the real world, Friday flavoured from behind the curtain, I recognised this playing on iTunes beside me.

I’ve been walking about the house since I got up with a feeling that I’m meant to be somewhere else - that I’ve left someone behind, and that I’ve forgotten their name. And that this clearly won’t be the last time. Somewhere in my head is lodged this stubborn conception of a phantom lover, more real and familiar than anything I could encounter from the moment I wake up to again falling asleep.

fingers tense against the gnarled oak chest, clutching at drawers, scrambling, fumbling inside. i am blind, my vision having died in darkened rooms, blindfolded by dirty sheets and smothered by anything without an edge. paper cuts my skin as i claw within the dark for clues, for something soft and warm, familiar, breaking my knuckles against the splintered wood as i search. there. something there. as fingertips tickle the tip of its outline a light fires from somewhere unseen - a spark far away that flashes an image, a distant star to find myself by. i dig deeper, clutching onto nothing and everything, anything with both hands, sweaty palms grasping only empty air and dust. is that all there is to find here? i lay them flat and take a breath of dark and unwashed air. another burst of light, and i see the image once more - older, no wiser - a face that forgot to stop. its curiosity peers at me from a place beyond. i stare back at it, forcing my hands from the empty familiar chest. slowly i move forward as it dims, my footsteps marked by brief memories of quickly fading flashes.

At last reunited with my faithful Kodak cable, I’ve been able to finally transfer the many photos that have been sitting idle on my camera for the past few months since moving.