The past few days I have been thinking a lot about two of my as-yet unpublished novels. Though to me these stories are benign, I have begun to feel myself cowed by extremists. By fear of their extremism, to be precise.
We say to the young, “Careful what you post online, because what goes online stays online and you’ll regret it when you’re older.” Which I’m pretty sure is nonsense, because I can’t find any of my old friends online. We’ve all vanished.
It’s 1996. April, I guess. I spent the first few months after my A-levels living in a bedsit in the village of Milton north of Cambridge, working by day testing software on the science park, suffocated by my blues at night. I hadn’t applied for university; I was in a rut, consumed by despair, living …
