When I was a late teenager I went to my mate’s house to pick him up, which you just don’t do as an adult, do you? I feel like for a 24-month period in my teens, all I did was go to mates’ houses to pick them up: hands in my hoodie pockets and kicking my feet on the carpet, making an agonising attempt at polite conversation with a series of uninterested parents while a friend of mine, upstairs, frantically turned his bedroom over to find a sort-of-clean pair of jeans.
One of these times, I was isolated with a friend’s dad who, on the best day of his life, probably said 10 full words out loud. The Bourne Identity boomed out of the TV and we both stared at it, me standing, him sitting, complete silence. Matt Damon shot a man in the head, then another man, then drove a car over a bridge, then shot another man. The camera moved around frenetically; the room flickered with light. And my friend’s dad, for the first time in his life, said a sentence to me unprompted. And it was: “Wouldn’t it be ace to just wake up and be that good?”
