I can’t be certain, but I suspect most letters written to a younger self might well be preoccupied with warnings, things to look out for, and — most especially perhaps — things not to do. But, let’s face it, what’s the point? You’ve done them now. So I thought I’d take a slightly different tack and let you know what you did do — or, imagining you reading this many years before it’s written, what you’re about to do…

Just look at you! It’s around 1981; you’re in that wonderful house on Archers Road, a Shangri-La. Two years of bliss you’ll only came to recognise when it’s far too late, only when you have an inkling of what bliss might actually comprise. You have all the accoutrements of a university English major: record deck and headphones, lots of books, files and folders (you work hard but probably not hard enough), long hair, Zapata moustache, stupid ring on one finger. I wonder, did you think you were cool? But then again, did you have any idea what you were really doing?

How could you possibly?

And what did you know then anyway?

Well, quite a lot as it turned out, shaped as you were by a difficult, impoverished, nomadic childhood which effectively made you middle-aged before you were ten. Yet for all that wisdom (which will offer you so much material later on!) at 22 you’re still naïve. That pose is fooling no-one!

If it is 1981 then you’ve already learned some other valuable lessons: the first is that you love writing (that you’ve always loved writing); and the second is that you fall in love too easily, happy to let your heart break on a whim, never having the gumption to work out what’s really going on as far as the fairer sex is concerned. (A theme that will carry on for a few more years yet I’m afraid to say...)

And what you don’t realise is that you’re about to make two big mistakes. The first (just after you graduate) is to kid yourself that you’re mature enough to try teaching in Sierra Leone; and the second is, that subsequent to that, you’ll give up literature (both academically and in terms of creative writing) in favour of a ‘career’ — or more prosaically, because you’re fed-up being poor and someone has offered to give you money for your time. You will bail from the first of these episodes after three months, and from the second after nearly forty years.

Along the way you’ll give up your friends too easily, often withdraw into yourself too much, occasionally wonder what the point of it all is…

As with all those unrequited or failed loves, you will come to look back on Africa and your career with regret, try and imagine ‘what might have been’ had you made different decisions; then — and for a long while — you’ll choose to ignore the positives that will arise from those choices. Isn’t that something we always do, try and solve the regret=experience equation even though there can be no solution — which makes trying to do so meaningless? In your case you’ll always tend to be drawn to the regret side of the equals sign.

But know this. Out of the maelstrom — the childhood, Africa, the wasted years working for commercial businesses, the broken hearts — you will curate a bounty of experience, perhaps more than the average man might expect to harvest.

How many 23-years-olds get to know what it’s like to be isolated, the only white man in a small African village, miles and hours from anywhere, with no-one to rely on other than themselves? ‘Character-building’ I believe the phrase is. And what of a career which will be more or less constantly stimulating? It will give you the opportunity to see so much of the world: most of Europe, America (both coasts and some in-between), India, China, Japan, Australia… You’ll get to live in Basel and Singapore.

And across all those years you will, unwittingly, gather components for stories (indeed, to some extent you will perhaps come to regard your life as a story) such that, when you rediscover your passion for writing so many years after you abandoned it, you will excavate an almost limitless supply of material to be examined, interrogated, replayed. Oh, in the early days of your rebirth much of what you write will not be very good, but soon enough you will see progress; there will be lines in your poems you are mesmerised by, narratives you are proud of. People will confess to liking your work — though often you’ll not necessarily believe them! And you will become addicted to the craft, to dissecting your life, the lives of other people, to examine and replay events — real and fictitious — in the hope of what, finding truth? Touching someone? You’ll come to know you’ve done that; how else would your words make a reader cry on the Boston subway?

Yes, the world will be going to hell in a hand-cart thanks to politicians who think they’re emperors, businesses only interested in the bottom line; where honesty and integrity are rare commodities; where the fate of the planet and the politicians’ duty of care towards its citizens count as nothing; a world where common sense and decency, where kindness and consideration — prevalent in the silent majority — becomes nothing more than a whisper in a tornado…

Your superpower — if you grow to have one at all — is to keep writing, to keep trying to help others in what little ways you can. For a while (and I won’t tell you when) you will dream of literary fortune and glory, but as the years pass you will come to understand yourself and your work better — and hopefully that will prove enough to balance that equation, to prove that the journey from where you are now to the person writing this letter has been worthwhile…

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