One Sunday when I was seventeen, I went with some friends to a local psychic fair. I’m not entirely sure why we went. We were mildly curious, but it was more to do with having nowhere else to go, or anything else to do that night. Oh, and we had a gram of speed between us, and didn’t want to spend the evening whizzing our tits off to Songs of Praise.

The fair (or, possibly, ‘fayre’) was at a hotel about 30 minutes’ walk across some fields. We ambled along, rubbing powder on our gums and regurgitating the usual paranormal snippets teenagers pick up about Aldous Huxley, Aleister Crowley, fractals, urban legends, alternative universes, a bit of quantum mechanics, and Our Friend Helen Who Says She’s a Witch and Has a Pack of Tarot Cards. By the time we arrived, we were rushy, twitchy-eyed, and ready to believe anything.

I don’t know what it is about speed that makes you so gullible. Enough cocaine turns you into the world’s funniest and most interesting person (at least, to yourself). Speed, whereas, convinces you that something amazing is about to happen. The person you’re talking to is about to say something that will blow your mind. Or the next bar you’ll visit on a pub crawl is going to be excellent. Speed promises and never delivers, but you never learn. Unless you’re me, and you get to 19, and you think “Fuck it, I’ll just drink coffee.”

Anyway, so we wandered in, chemically naïve, and the sequinned vultures descended. One friend disappeared immediately behind a sparkly veil with a frumpy, tasselled woman called Doris. The other was spirited away to have his aura photographed.

I made a couple of rounds of the stalls, willing the uncanny to reveal itself to me. My family’s religious views are conflicted – equal parts Catholic guilt, dodgy eastern mysticism; and the dichotomy of an attraction to the romance of demons and ghosties versus a very real need for genuine scientific evidence. I leafed through books and weighed up crystals in my palm, wanting to feel something. But I felt nothing.

Nothing except a mild pang of misplaced lust (you know, the kind you get towards someone on Neighbours when you’ve been incarcerated with a cold for several days) towards a kind-faced young Richard Madeley lookalike, who offered to tell my fortune. Possibly distracted by his hair, which was all flicked over, and his shirt, which was unbuttoned to the nipples, I accepted.

“I sense a… conflict, and a clash of philosophies between you and your family…”

What was it that tipped him off? The nose ring? The pillarbox-red dreadlocks, perhaps?

“You have a questioning mind, particularly around politics…” 
The anarchy badge on my lapel? (I never said I was particularly subtle or inventive teen)

“You come across as someone with a good education…” My multiple syllables, possibly. “…And an aptitude for music…” The GUITAR I had to carry around all day?

Richard Madeley’s diatribe got boring after that; something about seeking harmony with my family, and learning from, not disregarding, its wisdom. Blah, blah, blah. I was starting to come down; this was rubbish speed. I threw some coinage his way and went to loiter by the crystal and incense stall. Friend Number One found me soon enough.

“I’ve just had my tarot done!” He blibbered, launching spittle everywhere. “It was amazing, you should do it!” And also: “Do you have any chewing gum on you?”

And suddenly I was in a sort of tie-dye shower enclosure, picking eight tarot cards for Doris, the hack-faced West Country woman with man hands and a gravely, professional smoker’s voice. I eyed her suspiciously as she turned the cards face-up; I forget what they were. The something of cups. The fool. The something of knives. The lovers. Death (which is, apparently, not death, but life. Or something. Anyway, the tower is supposed to be worse than death. I didn’t get the tower).

“Now, this is very interesting,” she rumbled, like a station wagon pulling into a suburban driveway, and made vague noises about seeing me in a big room with other people, writing, and there being a clock on the wall, and a choice to be made – because it’s unusual for seventeen year olds to make choices, or sit en masse in big rooms, feverishly writing while a clock ticks significantly away. Plus there was the inevitable clash with my family, and an urging to carry on with my studies despite perhaps not wanting to.

I rubbed my temples, unimpressed. The crappy speed was fast wearing off, and with it my sense of fun and exploration. All I had now was a foul mood and the urge to grind, grind, grind my teeth until they wore to a fine powder that I could sell back to the swindler who dealt us the speed.

Still, I thought, she may be an old fraud, but she has principles. She could have told me the gods wanted me to go into prostitution, or catering.

“Now, darling, I’m getting a lady with you,” she suddenly pronounced, as though that kind of sentence made all the sense in the world. “It’s your… grandmother?” I shook my head; both sets of grandparents were alive at this point. “Maybe it’s Great-grandma then, and ooh, she looks lovely, with a lovely shawl on her head and some beautiful… coin things hanging down.”

Wuh? I stared at her blankly.

“And here’s a man, yes, he’s your Great-grandpa, maybe, with a sort of… it looks like a hat, or maybe, you know when you wash your hair and you put it in a towel…?”

I should point out here that I am a person of initially ambiguous ethnicity. I could be Mediterranean. I could be Asian. I could be Middle Eastern. Doris was hedging her bets. To save us both from further clumsy ethnic stereotypes, I told her where my family was from originally. I left out the bit about exactly none of my ancestors wearing coins or towels.

“Right,” She continued, unabashed. “And they say that they love you, and are very proud of you, and that you should continue with your studies and they know that you’ve considered another path, and I’m here to tell you no, that path isn’t for you.”

Well, bugger this, I thought. What seventeen year old student hasn’t considered a different path?

I stood up. “Thank you very much, that was interesting. I’ll just cross your palm with, er, fifteen quid then, and –“

“Your father’s here, dear.”

I sat back down. I think it was the quietness of her voice that swayed me. That and the fact that my father had died when I was 10. How could she know that?

“Oh really?” I asked, trying to inject a casual curiosity into my voice.
“Yes dear,” She reached out and held my hand. I didn’t pull it away. “He’s smiling at you, just over your right shoulder there. He wants to tell you he’s happy, and it didn’t hurt, and it was quick. He saw you all crying. He says he wished he had been able to hold you at the funeral and tell you he was all right.”

By now the tears were flowing freely down my face and I was powerless to stop them. I was so busy trying to staunch the flow with my left sleeve that I didn’t realise Doris had attached my right hand to a bonsai tree on the table.

“Er?” I enquired.
“You’re getting very weak and the signal is sort of fading,” explained Doris. “Just draw the strength from this little tree. Go on, draw up the goodness into your fingers and up through your arm into your heart.”

I was suddenly struck with the thought that, had my father really been here, he’d be sniggering into his hand by now. And while he would have thought the bonsai thing pretty funny, he wouldn’t actually want to see me reduced to tears by this ridiculous woman.

“Could you just tell me,” I asked, pulling my hand away from the tree, “What my father looks like?”
“Ooh, it’s hard, the ether is blurry,” she told me, then went on to describe a short, swarthy man of possibly Asian origin. Thankfully she didn’t add any bizarre headgear.

Sadly for her, my father was a tall blond man (and no, we didn’t have a short, swarthy milkman – I resemble my father in other non-tall, non-blond ways). I wiped away the tears, paid up and hauled my friends away from their various potentially bad purchases (friendship bracelets, mood rings and one breathtakingly hideous unicorn poster). We meandered home via the kebab shop.

“Well, that was shit,” concluded Friend Number Two. I told him about my tarot reading, and wondered aloud how Doris could have known about my father.
“This is a small town,” he reminded me, “and your family has an unusual ethnicity. Perhaps she’s met your mother?”
“Of course!” I realised. “What a gullible dickhead I am.”

Friend Number One was still in the grip of the largest share of the speed, and extremely happy with the incense sticks he’d bought.

“I’m a Libra!” he exclaimed.

“I’m an atheist,” I decided, and we all lived rationally ever after.

It is acceptable, when you get to a certain age, to say “I don’t like clubbing” without people recoiling in horror and calling you a killjoy.

“Well, of course you don’t,” they may reply. “You have a cat and a garden and something resembling a career. Why would you?” Then they may add, “Besides, they probably wouldn’t let you in now.”

Which is great news for me.

Because the truth is I’ve never liked clubbing.

I’ve never seen the point of packing yourself into a building with hordes of other people and waving your arms around until dawn. By the same measure, I don’t like going to the gym. Or travelling by Tube.

At nineteen I already felt this way but, as a self-confessed wild child, I was firmly committed toexperimentation.

Which is how I found myself in an overcrowded cellar somewhere in London long after the last train home had left Waterloo, swallowing a little white tablet.

The club was called BANG or UNDER or something, and it was in New Cross or Mornington Crescent or somewhere – very grimy and dingy and not at all what I’d expected.

I thought there’d be blonde girls with spiky hair and interesting clothes, and young men in neon-green hooded tops blowing whistles. But here, everyone seemed to be male and over 30 and without the full complement of teeth.

I felt somewhat menaced.

“When will I feel it?” I asked my (then-)boyfriend.

“Soon,” he replied. “Apparently you feel a bit sick, then really happy.”

Hmm. We were sitting huddled together in a corner. Men dancing nearby leered at me. Dark techno rearranged our internal organs through the floor.

Suddenly a wave of nausea took me. Swaying, I rose to my feet. But I didn’t feel happy. I felt like I needed to vomit, or go to bed, or to the hospital.

“Mergh,” I complained.

“Come on,” said the boyfriend, and led me to the dance floor.

I jiggled about experimentally. It felt good. Well, not good, just better than sitting down. I stopped dancing for a second and the nausea zoomed over me again. I felt the bass jabbing through the balls of my feet and I lifted and dropped my legs: one, two.

I have to dance, I thought. I have to dance OR I’LL DIE.

And so I danced. Not proper dancing, like the happy, dopey, hands-in-the-air bouncing of the Whirligig tent at Reading Festival, waiting for the DJ to ‘bring the beat back’. This was dancing at gunpoint – all knees and elbows. Heads bobbed mechanically all around me; not one hand was raised.

Is this it? I thought. Is this clubbing?

I reached out for the boyfriend and my fingers closed around a large, fleshy palm. I looked up. A strange man was holding my hand and smiling at me with cracked lips. His shaved head flashed orange and purple in the darkness.

“All right love?” He said. “Can I have a kiss?”

I twisted away from him and scrambled through the crowd. I found the boyfriend by the PA stack, limbs jerking like a half-controlled marionette, mouth open, eyes fixed on the spotlight. Vaguely he reached out to me and we clasped hands, wibbling and wobbling to the music, gulping water occasionally but always dancing, dancing, dancing.

Adrenaline coursed through my body, but my head felt swimmy and separate. Several times I wondered if I was sleeping. My vision snapped in and out of focus.

Blink. Everything was clear and crisp: bodies in front of me, coloured lights overhead, black walls all around us.

Blink. Blobs of colour, like the inside of a lava lamp. A swoony feeling, as though I was falling into a deep sleep.

Blink. Everything back in focus again, apart from the man in front of me. Bathed in orange light, his head slowly turned into a large, clunky, old-fashioned video camera.

The music had disappeared; I was only aware of rhythm, the pattern of my thoughts and, somewhere buried deep, the threat of nausea if I stood still for even a moment.

Dancing ceaselessly, I felt as though I were a small pool of energy powering a massive, malign machine.

I had visions of people living in identical tower blocks, working in faceless skyscrapers, exercising in purpose-built megastructures – all so that they could line up outside clubs in large warehouses, take pills, and dance, dance, dance – never thinking, just being, just moving, just feeding the machine.

I was starting to feel breathless and panicky when two hands planted themselves on my shoulders and shook me.

It was the boyfriend.

“It’s morning, the club’s closing, let’s go.”

I looked around, blinking. The crowd had thinned out considerably, and a cool breeze was flowing in from somewhere. I stopped dancing; stopped feeling as though I had to dance. The normal bodily sensations returned – hunger, thirst, an insistent pressure on my bladder.

It felt amazing.

“It’s over?” I muttered.

“It’s over,” the boyfriend replied, and we clasped hands and jumped up and down with happiness.

The pale, post-dawn sun hanging like a slice of lemon in the sky was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The streets looked washed clean, the air was filled with the sleepy cooing of pigeons, the rumble of the first buses of the day.

We chased each other across Whitehall, laughing, feeling like released prisoners. We reached our arms out and spun around and around in Trafalgar Square*.

Crossing the bridge to Waterloo we planned a kingly breakfast of croissants and baguettes and coffee from Délice de France. We didn’t have enough money for the train fare home.

I didn’t care.

This was ecstasy, this feeling of release and escape and beauty, not whatever was in that pill**.

Handing my bag to the boyfriend, I cartwheeled across the concourse at Waterloo.

“Let’s not do that again,” said the boyfriend as I bounced to my feet, breathless and giggling.

“Last one at the baguette kiosk’s a twat!” I shouted.

We started running.

*I think we got lost…
**Which, in hindsight, was probably not MDMA. But hey, drugs are bad.

As you may know, I am easily offended.

Not easily offended in the sense that if you don’t say I’m pretty and give me a fresh puppy every five minutes I’ll have some sort of episode.

More in the sense that, if you look at me askance on the train, or sigh more than once, or are male and have highlights, or are female and have acrylic nails, or I disagree with your choice of shoes, or you answer your mobile and say “hello, I’m on a train”, I’ll privately label you a paedophile and curse you and all firstborn males in your family with early onset male pattern baldness and a lisp.

‘Indiscriminately intolerant’ – maybe that’s the term I’m after. Or possibly ‘quietly rabid’. Whatever.

And, like most mean-hearted misanthropes, I like to think of myself as a basically considerate person. But, just recently, I’ve been doing some thinking (I’d call it ‘soul-searching’ but I think we all know I’m far too shallow), and wondering what offensive transgressions I myself may have made.

They doubtless number well into the thousands, but I have so far come up with 5. These are they. In no particular order.

1. Racism
In which I visit an Edinburgh Pizza Hut and ask the nonplussed waiter to “recommend some local dishes” and, when he brings me the bill, I ask “how much is this in, you know, English money?”

2. Stigmatising the less abled
In which I get a new job and offend a colleague whom I will call C, although her name is Marie Clarkson.

A few weeks prior to getting this job, I had suffered a rather nasty case of nits and, although I had shampooed in enough pesticide to be able to psychically render people infertile, my scalp was still itchy, I wasn’t entirely sure the nits were gone, and I lived in fear of infecting others.

After a couple of weeks in the new job, working (physically) closely with C, I noticed that she had some little white specks in her hair, close to her parting, and began to worry. After much introspection I decided to be an adult and broach the subject.

What shall I say? I wondered. Perhaps something like ‘Just FYI I had nits recently, I think they’re gone, but we’ve been spending a lot of time poring over paperwork together so maybe you should use some nit stuff just in case.‘

Yes, that seemed relatively inoffensive. So I eventually turned to her and said:

“So, do you have dandruff, or what?”

There was a pause. Then she said:

“Actually, I have psoriasis of the scalp. Most people are nice enough not to mention it, but thanks for bringing it up.”

C and I no longer speak.

3. Religious intolerance
A new colleague joined my work and it was my job to show him the ropes. He seemed like a nice fellow – calm, wry and friendly. Very easy to talk to. On his second day we were walking and chatting, when he asked me what I thought of religion.

So I blathered on and on about how I was brought up a Roman Catholic and how that’s a great way to ensure that, in adulthood, you become an atheist, and how it’s all bollocks and blah blah blah. On and on and on and on. Not sure why.

Then, as is so often the case, there was a pause.

And he said:

“That’s interesting, because I’m a Mormon.”

And I said:

“Huh. Is that the one where you can have lots of wives?”

Yes, ‘Is that the one where you can have lots of wives?’

And he said:

“Robyn, are you proposing?”

Luckily he and I do speak on occasion. Although I have not been added to his Mormon harem. If you’re reading, hello, J.

4. Creative oppression
In which a friend is telling me, tentatively, shyly, about her long-cherished film idea, because she thinks I am a nice person who cares about her and wouldn’t stomp all over her feelings, and when she is halfway through, I bellow “THE CENTRAL CONCEIT OF YOUR IDEA IS ACTUALLY WRONG. GOD I’M SO SICK OF THIS SORT OF THING. YOU SHOULD DO MORE RESEARCH”, then wonder why she’s silently weeping into her Americano.

5. Child abuse
In which I, aged one day, somehow manage to – medical marvel that I am – roll into the cot next to mein the baby ward and pinch the baby lying there. The baby I pinched grew up to be one of my closest childhood friends and now, despite being fifteen million feet tall, excessively handsome and in possession of a Doctorate in Something Clever from Oxford, has a crushing inferiority complex. I blame myself. So would he, but he feels too inferior.

So. It turns out I’m a bit of a twat. Maybe I should remember that the next time I fly into a rage because someone has the temerity to ask me where I’m from.

When I was a little girl, I lived in Sussex. Sun-dappled, rural Sussex, all Enid Blyton woodland carpeted in bluebells, forest tracks, Pooh-sticks, Miss Marple cottages, streams at the bottom of your garden, Blackberrying on Sundays, sledging down the Downs in winter.

Sussex, then.

My parents’ jobs took them abroad for great swathes of time, so when they were in the country we all lived merrily in a modest cottage (at least, then it was a modest cottage - now, living in London I realise it was A Large House) with my grandparents and two large dogs - a Boxer named Brutus and a dopy, floppy-eared Alsation called Jetson.

I was a country child. I believed wolves and witches lived in the woods, that fairies lived in the Secret Village Under the Bridge (there was a bridge beside our house; I was never allowed to venture under it to the Secret Village - just another village, really - on the other side. Obviously I transgressed this rule. Frequently. But the fairy village idea never left me).

Imagine the culture shock I received when we moved to Bracknell.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At this point I was about six, and we still lived in Sussex. I had a pony (a grey mare named Pepsi), the loyal company of my dogs who were really fully fledged members of the family, and commanded a tight group of adventurous friends. But what I wanted, what I really wanted was a kitten.

And one day I got one.

She was a grey, silvery thing, all big eyes and paws, as long as my palm from tail to nose. I called her Tosca. I’m not sure why. She was fluffy and timid and shivery, with a cold, curious nose and ears so fine you could see the network of veins running through them, pumping red, a filigree of blood.

Tosca lived at the bottom of a tall wicker basket, carpeted in hay, to save her from the friendly but potentially fatal boisterous attentions of the dogs. She slept there at night and spent most of the day on my lap, prowling around there and pouncing on imaginary prey in my skirt.

I could play with her forever and be happy, I thought one day as my grandmother was preparing breakfast.

My parents were away, my grandfather was at work and it was my grandmother’s turn to take me to school.

“Not until you’ve had your breakfast,” she had said, and retired to the kitchen to bang some pots around.

So I sat and poked fingers at Tosca under the tablecloth, and she pounced on my fingers and gnawed at them with her tiny sharp teeth, and I stared out into the garden, where the chestnut trees were hissing and shifting in the wind, and waited for my breakfast.

Porridge.

It was porridge.

I hated porridge and the only way my mother could get it down me was to ladle it with cream and sugar.

But this was different. This was gran porridge. Made with water, not cream, and possibly salt.

“I’m not eating that,” I told my grandmother.

“You’ll eat it,” she replied. “And be glad.”

She then went on to mutter complaints about impudent, disobedient children who talked back, and so on.

And we waited. Outside it started to rain, in sheets, and the wind increased.

“You’ll eat it,” repeated my grandmother, and went to fetch her copy of Woman’s Weekly, which meant she was in it for the long haul.

But so was I. I played with Tosca, my grandmother read her magazine, the rain fell, and Tosca did a small wee on a napkin.

Hours, possibly, passed. The time for school registration came and went, the sun came out, I yawned widely and Tosca retreated down one of my legs in terror.

The porridge, gelatinous gloop, did not become any more appetising. What it did become was cement.

My grandmother finished reading the Robin’s Nest serial (in a box on a shiny page of the magazine, always illustrated with a complex sketch of a robin in some holly) and sighed. She fetched her massive gran handbag from the hall and told me to come on, then. I popped Tosca in her basket, kissed her nose, and went to school.

I’m not sure whether it was that night - my six year old memory, while vibrantly real in some places is sketchy in others, particularly chronology. It might have been later that week.

Let’s pretend it’s that night. I’m back from school, from playing at my friend Rupert’s house after school, and my mother and father and grandfather and dogs and everything are there, but Tosca is not.

The kitten is gone. The basket empty, cleaned out, free of hay.

“We had to give her back, darling,” they said. “It just wasn’t safe with the dogs.”

They had to give her back.

And they did actually give her back, this was no she went to a special farm pet death analogy - she went back to the breeders. Because the dogs wouldn’t have let her alone, and she couldn’t have spent her life in a basket.

Six year olds are pretty hardy. The next day I was probably charging round the garden with my friends playing Stonehenge (we didn’t know what Stonehenge was at the time, but we figured it must involve sticks and shouting). But there was a little, kitten-shaped nugget of sadness inside of me. There is still.

Three years ago, on her birthday, my mother was staying here for a couple of days. I think we went to the theatre, did some ‘up West’ London stuff. Then we came back to the house and she went out to buy some milk, and came back with a cat at her heels.

You may know this cat as Catford.

If you don’t know her, well, there was some drama involving her ‘real’ owners, etc., but in the end she chose us. She’s not silvery grey, she’s a tiger-striped mix of tabby, white and ginger. And she’s a young cat, not a kitten. But my mother brought her to me and I think, perhaps, it is enough.