last night we were at the pub till late, and a bunch of kids for some reason known only to them, came up to us and started chatting.

they’d just finished their a-levels, so they were about 18 or so.

it was fun, just shooting the breeze and talking crap while drunk (obviously, it was 1 in the morning and a birthday party to boot). but weird, so weird, as well.

it was difficult not to sound cynical and bitter, and i had a really hard time trying not to burst their perfect fantasy bubbles of what ‘keeping it real’ entails. although, perhaps, up in north london where they were from, keeping it real is slightly harder to do when your friends’ parents are judges and drive jaguars and drink cognacs.

i cringe now at what i must have been like when i was 18. or 20. or 21. i must have been such a pain, and rather amusing as well in my cocksureness and ignorance. and the language! words like ‘paradigm shifts’ and ‘dialectic’, they dropped out of my vocabulary long ago.

although, to be fair, even now, i’m probably amusing to someone older than i am and who’s listening to my (probably) half-baked ideas on changing the world and getting to the top of my game.

anyway, the point is, i miss the idealism of my youth. and the black/white-ness of most things, the grey being a tiny sliver in between. now, the grey is everywhere, and the black and white non-existent but for around the far edges of existence. now, nothing is so easy anymore. everything has to be weighed up against its myriad consequences, and indecision is my middle name. things were so easy back then, when i knew fuckall and couldn’t care less about it.

but, still, in all my idealism, i never wanted to live in a squat.