The house in which I turned 18 was full of clocks. Dark wooden things with aged faces. Every room ticked. If you stood in certain doorways, you could hear all the misaligned second hands racing. I could not understand why anyone would want to count away life like that or decorate their living quarters with so many symbols of mortality.<\/p>\n
There was no escaping time. Shortly before each hour, a mechanical whir heralded the first chime. We lived in a retirement town with an elderly and conservative population, which amplified the ticking. Worthing, on the south coast of England, was known as \u201cGod\u2019s waiting room\u201d. Death was there in our wide, slow roads and low bungalows, the grey sea mists and blue rinses.<\/p>\n
But I was young, and I scorned the clocks. Time was no master of mine. I answered only to love. And poetry. And fashion. And boys I liked.<\/p>\n
At least, I think I\u2019ve got that right. But how well does any of us remember being 18? For 17 years, we set our sights on that beacon of independence, the coruscating wonder of adulthood and all the freedom we imagine it entails. But within a few years, the day slips from view.<\/p>\n
How did you celebrate? What did you wish for? Who did you hope to be? And if, like me, you\u2019ve lost all memory of your 18th and need an HRT patch, creatine powder and phone alarms to recall anything, can you get it back? Over the past month, I have tried to return to April 1990 \u2013 when I became an adult \u2013 to turn back the clocks and rediscover what life was like then. And what I was like.<\/p>\n
Sadly, no one has invented the machine for this yet. But no worries. I have other tools: vintage Poison eau de cologne, a clutch of letters I wrote and never posted, photographs, books, college reports, my teenage poems, Facebook, a bottle of Southern Comfort and a bag of granny smith apples.<\/p>\n
With these, I hope to send myself back in time, to visit my old best friend, and the guy I loved, and to experience life, however fleetingly, as my 18-year-old self experienced it. I hope to see again how the world looked to my peers and me as we hatched into adulthood \u2013 right there at the dawn of the 90s, a decade coveted by natives of every decade since, but from which I longed to teleport to the 60s.<\/p>\n
The cap\u2019s off the purple flask, wrists doused with Christian Dior\u2019s Poison. I\u2019m on my way. \u201cMost sensory inputs go first to an area of the brain called the thalamus,\u201d says Catherine Loveday, a podcast host and professor specialising in memory. \u201cSmell goes directly to the memory centres.\u201d I\u2019ve been catapulted into my 18-year-old body. It\u2019s a blitz. A spritz of pure joy and promise. I keep sniffing my own wrist: I can\u2019t get enough of me. I smell dramatic. Strong. Sweet. Potent. Ready. Something is going to happen.<\/p>\n
Drenched in plum and spicy tuberose, I drive the 60 miles from my home in London to Worthing. At the general election in 2024, Worthing West got its first ever Labour MP, partly due to a spillover from edgier Brighton. Although the average age of the town\u2019s population has risen by a few years since I turned 18 \u2013 44 at the last census \u2013 it feels much younger.<\/p>\n
There are other changes. The phone box at the end of our road, where I made my private calls, has gone. I have a phone in my pocket, of course, which in the spirit of 1990 I\u2019m trying to pretend doesn\u2019t exist. I\u2019m unable to access emails. For anything urgent, please write me a letter \u2026<\/p>\n
\u2018Seeing the sameness and the differences simultaneously is like wearing bifocals\u2019 \u2026Paula outside her childhood home. Photograph: Peter Flude\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Our old house is painted yellow still, and the wooden gates my dad, a builder, made remain \u2013 though they\u2019ve gone grey, and the house hasn\u2019t been ours for 22 years. Seeing the sameness and the differences simultaneously is like wearing bifocals. I\u2019m both here, and back there.<\/p>\n
As I set off to my former college, I\u2019m amazed to find that my feet know exactly where to cross each road. I walked this route daily, no phone or headphones, and took in whatever the path put before me. The slope of a church roof; ivy lacing through the chain-link fence; litter snared in weeds. Each apparently insignificant sighting thrills me with a very specific sense, unfamiliar to my 54-year-old self, that I am in the right place.<\/p>\n
Thoughts fly up out of the paving cracks: the 1960s minidress pattern I found in a charity shop; phrases from the Italian library tapes I got on permanent renewal; \u201cMoon Lady\u201d and \u201cBalloons\u201d, the titles of the poems I was working on; the dream Saturday job I\u2019d landed at Volume One bookshop in town; my next order from City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, where I solemnly sent dollar notes, then waited six weeks for excitingly slim volumes of poetry to land on the mat, into whose pages I would tuck slips of paper bearing precious observations: \u201cVowel length.\u201d<\/p>\n
I probably thought about my homework essays. \u201cWhy did race relations become an issue in British politics after 1945?\u201d, and \u201cIs the change in Mr Darcy credible, or do we believe it because we want to?\u201d I certainly wanted to believe it. I thought about \u201cthe one\u201d incessantly. In 1990, the median age for a first marriage in the UK was 24 for women. When we turned 18, we all heard the clocks ticking.<\/p>\n
And there was another, adjacent, race against time. The world divided into haves and have-nots, and I had not. If the internet had been built, it would have told me that most women in England lost their virginity at 18. It was a core belief of mine that this state of being must be addressed before my 19th birthday, and that failure to do so would mean there was something seriously wrong with me.<\/p>\n
There was no reprieve from self-consciousness about this. When my secondhand jeans tore at the ass, channelling my love of William Blake and the Beat poets, I patched them with a rose from some curtain fabric, and one day, as I was climbing the stairs at college, the boy behind me asked, \u201cIs that your flower?\u201d The shame.<\/p>\n
So many things have gone since then. The Lloyds bank tower I passed each day has been turned into apartments. Its huge digital clock was removed a decade ago, after it got stuck on 00:00. My college is a housing estate, the bakery a patisserie. The newsagent has stopped being anything at all. Only the butcher has retained its beguiling awning: National Award-Winning Sausages.<\/p>\n
I used to buy a Crunchie from that newsagent \u2013 the honeycomb was less fattening, and I sold enough copies of Rosemary Conley\u2019s Hip and Thigh Diet on Saturdays to know the dangers \u2013 and a packet of salt and vinegar Discos. Thanks to the fetishisation of 1990s snacks, you can find them in Tesco; I\u2019ve brought a pack with me.<\/p>\n
\u2018I walked this route daily\u2019 \u2026 Paula retraces her old commute to sixth form. Photograph: Peter Flude\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The salt is saltier and the vinegar more vinegary than any other crisp or chip I know. It could burn the bumps off your tongue. Good, because a postdoc research fellow at the University of North Dakota, Utkarsh Gupta, has shown that multi-sensory integration can help people who wish to undertake \u201cmental time travel\u201d. Last year he published research showing that \u201cpeople who were embodying a younger version of themselves\u201d \u2013 by seeing themselves virtually embodied with their childlike face \u2013 \u201chad better childhood memory\u201d. The Discos are doing the same for me.<\/p>\n
As I walk, I look around for friends. I keep an eye out for anyone interesting crossing the central reservation. Round the roundabout the cars come and go. Unlike them, I am heading somewhere.<\/p>\n
At high school, when I took on science subjects I wasn\u2019t very good at, my grades sprawled from As to Ds. Our family had a tradition of work over further education, and at 16 my dad suggested I look for an accountancy apprenticeship. By then, I\u2019d held 10 part-time jobs, in shops, a cafe, guest house, a supermarket and offices. Every week, the local paper had eight pages of situations vacant and I\u2019d switch jobs for 10p more an hour. I rarely heard the word \u201cuniversity\u201d \u2013 nobody had graduated in my family.<\/p>\n
But I loved books. In our house, shelves dense with clocks and ornaments, reading felt transgressive. Sometimes I\u2019d bring a book to the dinner table, and be told to put it away. (\u201cNo phones at the table!\u201d parent-me echoes.) As rebellions go, enrolling at college sounds pretty tame, but it was the first meaningful choice I made for myself, and it remains, to this day, my best. A door opened right then to a different life.<\/p>\n
Education made me feel special. In the staffroom, words like \u201cdelivery\u201d and \u201cimpact\u201d were creeping into the lexicon, but we students remained blissfully ignorant. \u201cImpact \u2013 so much more violent than effect,\u201d Mr Fraser, my old English teacher, muses now.<\/p>\n
Of course, we were all debilitatingly self-conscious \u2013 but not collectively so. We hadn\u2019t yet been named generation X. Douglas Coupland\u2019s book was still a year away. And I don\u2019t recall hearing the word \u201canxiety\u201d.<\/p>\n
We had a future.<\/p>\n
The world wasn\u2019t ending anytime soon. Michael Jackson had his oxygen chamber and was going to live for ever. Maybe we would too. There was no climate crisis. As an advert in the local paper promised, 1990 is going to be another scorching summer. At least for the lucky ones in a Mazda open top. I didn\u2019t drive; I rode a bike, oiled myself with Hawaiian Tropic and bragged to a friend that it was \u201cboiling\u201d at 24C. Sure, there was a hole in the ozone layer, but it was small and far away. The girl I sat beside in government and political studies wore a CND badge, doodled mushroom clouds and taunted meat-eaters with mad cow disease, but we thought her a pessimist.<\/p>\n
Rosemary Conley\u2019s Hip & Thigh Workout VHS tape. Photograph: Brendan Bell\/Alamy<\/p>\n
Initially, I took it easy at college. \u201cPerhaps a more consistent effort across the board would enable her to raise her standard,\u201d my report observed. But somewhere between 17 and 18, I grew serious. I spent lunch breaks in the library. The reports changed their tune. \u201cPaula always gives of her best.\u201d One morning, my form tutor told me: \u201cCarry on like this and you\u2019ll be applying to Oxbridge.\u201d<\/p>\n
I knew about Oxford and Cambridge from the boat race, which was televised annually on BBC\u2019s Grandstand. But I\u2019d never heard of Oxbridge. I asked my tutor where it was. \u201cWell, it\u2019s a word for both of them,\u201d he said irritably.<\/p>\n
Later, I studied matching towel bales, teasmades and filter coffee jugs in the Argos catalogue in preparation for my next life phase.<\/p>\n
The month I turned 18 was momentous in England. In the evenings leading to my birthday, I curled up in my corner spot on our brown Dralon sofa \u2013 it just about went with the orange carpet my dad brought home from an American Express refurb \u2013 to watch the BBC Nine O\u2019Clock News. Inmates of Strangeways prison in Manchester paced their roofs. Riots spread to other prisons. There were riots against the poll tax and the egregiousness of a system that asked people living in council housing to pay the same as millionaires. Billionaires weren\u2019t on anyone\u2019s radar; there were fewer than 100 in the UK and US.<\/p>\n
Prisoners on the roof of Strangeways during the riots of April 1990. Photograph: John Giles\/PA<\/p>\n
In six months, Margaret Thatcher would be ousted. The week of my birthday, a poll reported her to be the least popular prime minister in half a century. And alongside the ads for lost cats, funeral directors, private vasectomies, Dial-a-Tan and cars with one careful lady owner, the \u201cComing of Age\u201d section of the Worthing Herald announced, \u201cCOCOZZA \u2013 Congratulations, dear Paula. Good luck, health and happiness in the future. Much love Dad, Mum, Rob, Joe and Nan.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Labour party was a joke in my house growing up \u2013 how we laughed when Neil Kinnock fell in the sea in nearby Brighton. My political awakening comprised a moderate shift to the left. My radicalism was confined to my reading \u2013 the Beats, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud. There were drugs in those books but I went no further than an occasional smoke with friends on the forecourt of a beach hut.<\/p>\n
Members of my extended family had undergone shock treatment. Graylingwell psychiatric hospital loomed at the corner of my mind\u2019s eye. Now, I wonder if the Beats appealed because they made mental illness seem heroic; swapped the stigma for a beatific glow. Maybe my folks weren\u2019t crazy, but the best minds of their generation.<\/p>\n
I never made the connection. I was about to unwrap a rose-gold bracelet, a hardback copy of Federico Garc\u00eda Lorca\u2019s Poet in New York, and a Smith Corona electronic typewriter, on which I hoped to write better poems. (Exiling myself.\/I held the door;\/Shut\/On those sharp,\/Intransigent, wood-chipped faces,\/Quilted cuddles\/Of oven glove and potpourri wraps.)<\/p>\n
The week after my birthday, I awoke in the middle of the night and fumbled for a pencil. Without switching on the light, I wrote a verse:<\/p>\n
\u201cThis World is Full of Words\u201d<\/p>\n
Mmm hmmm<\/p>\n
and went back to sleep.<\/p>\n
Pictures of Paula aged 18. Photograph: Alicia Canter\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Then, as now, I believed that the best answer to riots, the possibility of nuclear war, political upheaval, ticking clocks and pretty much anything else was love and books.<\/p>\n
I was so busy revising for my A-levels that when C, the boy I liked, phoned to invite me to play tennis, I told him I was busy.<\/p>\n