The house where I turned 18 was full of clocks. Dark wooden ones with aged faces. Every room ticked. If you stood in certain doorways, you could hear all the misaligned second hands racing. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to count away life like that, or decorate their home with so many symbols of mortality.
There was no escaping time. Shortly before each hour, a mechanical whir announced the first chime. We lived in a retirement town with an elderly, conservative population, which made the ticking even louder. Worthing, on the south coast of England, was known as “God’s waiting room.” Death was there in our wide, slow roads and low bungalows, the grey sea mists and blue rinses.
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.
At least, I think that’s right. But how well does anyone remember being 18? For 17 years, we set our sights on that beacon of independence, the dazzling wonder of adulthood and all the freedom we imagine it brings. But within a few years, the day slips from view.
How did you celebrate? What did you wish for? Who did you hope to be? And if, like me, you’ve 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’ve tried to return to April 1990 – when I became an adult – to turn back the clocks and rediscover what life was like then. And what I was like.
Sadly, no one has invented that machine yet. But no worries. I have other tools: vintage Poison eau de cologne, a handful 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.
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 briefly, as my 18-year-old self did. I hope to see again how the world looked to my peers and me as we hatched into adulthood – right there at the dawn of the 90s, a decade coveted by natives of every decade since, but one from which I longed to teleport to the 60s.
The cap’s off the purple flask, wrists doused with Christian Dior’s Poison. I’m on my way. “Most sensory inputs go first to an area of the brain called the thalamus,” says Catherine Loveday, a podcast host and professor specialising in memory. “Smell goes directly to the memory centres.” I’ve been catapulted into my 18-year-old body. It’s a blitz. A spritz of pure joy and promise. I keep sniffing my own wrist: I can’t get enough of me. I smell dramatic. Strong. Sweet. Potent. Ready. Something is going to happen.
Drenched in plum and spicy tuberose, I drive the 60 miles from my home in London to Worthing. In the 2024 general election, Worthing West got its first ever Labour MP, partly due to a spillover from edgier Brighton. Although the average age of the town’s population has risen by a few years since I turned 18 – 44 at the last census – it feels much younger.
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’m trying to pretend doesn’t exist. I’m unable to access emails. For anything urgent, please write me a letter …
Our old house is still painted yellow, and the wooden gates my dad, a builder, made are still there – though they’ve gone grey, and the house hasn’t been ours for 22 years. Seeing the sameness and the differences at the same time is like wearing bifocals. I’m both here, and back there.
As I set off to my former college, I’m amazed to find that my feet know exactly where to cross each road.I walked this route every day, without a phone or headphones, taking in whatever the path offered. The slant of a church roof, ivy weaving through a chain-link fence, litter caught in weeds. Each seemingly unimportant sight filled me with a very particular feeling, unfamiliar to my 54-year-old self, that I was in the right place. Thoughts sprang up from the cracks in the pavement: the 1960s minidress pattern I found in a charity shop; phrases from the Italian library tapes I kept renewing; “Moon Lady” and “Balloons,” the titles of poems I was working on; the dream Saturday job I’d landed at Volume One bookshop in town; my next order from City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, where I solemnly mailed dollar bills and then waited six weeks for excitingly slim volumes of poetry to arrive on the doormat, into whose pages I would tuck slips of paper bearing precious observations: “Vowel length.” I probably thought about my homework essays. “Why did race relations become an issue in British politics after 1945?”, and “Is the change in Mr Darcy credible, or do we believe it because we want to?” I certainly wanted to believe it. I thought about “the one” constantly. 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. And there was another, related race against time. The world divided into haves and have-nots, and I had not. If the internet had existed, 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 dealt with before my 19th birthday, and that failing to do so would mean there was something seriously wrong with me. There was no escape from self-consciousness about this. When my secondhand jeans tore at the back, channeling 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, “Is that your flower?” The shame. 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 kept its beguiling awning: National Award-Winning Sausages. I used to buy a Crunchie from that newsagent – the honeycomb was less fattening, and I sold enough copies of Rosemary Conley’s Hip and Thigh Diet on Saturdays to know the dangers – and a packet of salt and vinegar Discos. Thanks to the fetishisation of 1990s snacks, you can find them in Tesco; I’ve brought a pack with me. View image in fullscreen ‘I walked this route daily’ … Paula retraces her old commute to sixth form. Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian 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 “mental time travel.” Last year he published research showing that “people who were embodying a younger version of themselves” – by seeing themselves virtually embodied with their childlike face – “had better childhood memory.” The Discos are doing the same for me. 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. At high school, when I took on science subjects I wasn’t 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’d held 10 part-time jobs, in shops, a cafe, guest house, a supermarket and offices. EEvery week, the local paper had eight pages of job listings, and I’d switch jobs for 10p more an hour. I rarely heard the word “university” – nobody in my family had graduated. But I loved books. In our house, with shelves packed with clocks and ornaments, reading felt like breaking the rules. Sometimes I’d bring a book to the dinner table and be told to put it away. (“No phones at the table!” I now say as a parent.) As rebellions go, going to college sounds pretty tame, but it was the first meaningful choice I made for myself, and it’s still the best one I’ve ever made. A door opened right then to a different life.
Education made me feel special. In the staffroom, words like “delivery” and “impact” were creeping into everyday language, but we students stayed blissfully unaware. “Impact – so much more violent than effect,” Mr Fraser, my old English teacher, muses now.
Of course, we were all painfully self-conscious – but not as a group. We hadn’t yet been called generation X. Douglas Coupland’s book was still a year away. And I don’t remember hearing the word “anxiety.”
We had a future. The world wasn’t ending anytime soon. Michael Jackson had his oxygen chamber and was going to live forever. Maybe we would too. There was no climate crisis. As an ad in the local paper promised, 1990 is going to be another scorching summer. At least for the lucky ones in a Mazda convertible. I didn’t drive; I rode a bike, slathered myself with Hawaiian Tropic, and bragged to a friend that it was “boiling” at 24C. Sure, there was a hole in the ozone layer, but it was small and far away. The girl I sat next to in government and political studies wore a CND badge, doodled mushroom clouds, and taunted meat-eaters with mad cow disease, but we thought she was a pessimist.
At first, I took it easy at college. “Perhaps a more consistent effort across the board would enable her to raise her standard,” my report said. But somewhere between 17 and 18, I got serious. I spent lunch breaks in the library. The reports changed their tune. “Paula always gives of her best.” One morning, my form tutor told me: “Carry on like this and you’ll be applying to Oxbridge.”
I knew about Oxford and Cambridge from the boat race, which was shown every year on BBC’s Grandstand. But I’d never heard of Oxbridge. I asked my tutor where it was. “Well, it’s a word for both of them,” he said irritably.
Later, I studied matching towel sets, teasmades, and filter coffee jugs in the Argos catalogue, getting ready for my next phase of life.
The month I turned 18 was a big one in England. In the evenings leading up to my birthday, I curled up in my corner spot on our brown Dralon sofa – it just about matched the orange carpet my dad brought home from an American Express refurb – to watch the BBC Nine O’Clock News. Inmates at Strangeways prison in Manchester paced their roofs. Riots spread to other prisons. There were riots against the poll tax and the outrageousness of a system that asked people in council housing to pay the same as millionaires. Billionaires weren’t on anyone’s radar; there were fewer than 100 in the UK and US.
In six months, Margaret Thatcher would be ousted. The week of my birthday, a poll reported her as the least popular prime minister in half a century. And alongside ads for lost cats, funeral directors, private vasectomies, Dial-a-Tan, and cars with one careful lady owner, the “Coming of Age” section of the Worthing Herald announced, “COCOZZA – Congratulations, dear Paula. Good luck, health and happiness in the future. Much love Dad, Mum, Rob, Joe and Nan.”
The Labour party was a joke in my house growing up – how we laughed.When Neil Kinnock fell into the sea at nearby Brighton, my political awakening amounted to a modest shift to the left. My radicalism was limited to what I read—the Beats, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud. Those books mentioned drugs, but I never went further than the occasional smoke with friends on the forecourt of a beach hut.
Members of my extended family had undergone shock treatment. Graylingwell psychiatric hospital loomed in the corner of my mind’s eye. Now I wonder if the Beats appealed to me because they made mental illness seem heroic, replacing stigma with a beatific glow. Maybe my relatives weren’t crazy, but the best minds of their generation.
I never made the connection. I was about to unwrap a rose-gold bracelet, a hardback copy of Federico García Lorca’s 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.)
The week after my birthday, I woke in the middle of the night and fumbled for a pencil. Without turning on the light, I wrote a verse:
“This World is Full of Words”
Mmm hmm
and went back to sleep.
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.
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.
If I stepped back to consider the vastness of the continents, the world’s 5.3 billion population, and the needle-in-a-haystack odds of finding a soulmate, I felt incredibly lucky to have walked into the extracurricular English poetry class and seen him—floppy-fringed, bespectacled—watching Don’t Look Back, DA Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary about Bob Dylan on the classroom television, which I too had recorded from TV on a VHS.
He was a year older than me and already had a place at Cambridge. He gave me feedback on my practice essays. “It’s really not as important as you think,” he scribbled in red pen on a torn bit of A4. “It’s not as important as Chaplin, as Dylan, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Beatles, football, love, life, sex and death. It’s worthless in the face of these.”
To me, he was sophisticated. His family wasn’t in the phone book. They had two sofas. His mother once told my mother, highly amused, that I’d asked her what broccoli was.
C could quote from anything, including Casanova. Sometimes he brought his guitar to my house and sang, and I felt an immense release and joy listening, too shy to sing along. We sat for hours on opposite ends of my pink duvet, in my immaculate room that my mother tidied daily, with my pink carpet and matching velveteen wastebin Mum had made from a washed-out catering tin, and we talked and talked—though neither of us remembers what about—and we both smiled when the brooch holding my crossover sweater accidentally unpinned itself, but for now, nothing happened.
“Men and women can’t be just friends because the sex part always gets in the way,” Harry told Sally; how I hoped he was right.
“Yes, but do you love him? Or is it an obsession?” my best friend, D, in her infinite wisdom, asked. She liked psychology and could parse the meaning of things said and unsaid. I thought it was love. But I didn’t see the big difference.
Obsession, as we all knew from Calvin Klein, was a very sexy, intense and stylish state of mind. It meant you couldn’t stop thinking about the other person, which sounded about right, and in some regards was more special than love. There are many loves, but only one obsession.
I would have settled for Paolo Maldini… the footballer in a match between Italy and England in 1990.
I carried out eI had endless debates with myself about my romantic future. I wanted what Lizzy Bennet and Mr Darcy had, or Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere, or Fay Roadnight and Colin Benzie, the newlywed couple in the Worthing Herald the week I turned 18.
Every Friday, when the paper came out, I’d sit at the pine kitchen table Dad had made, eating the salted peanuts my nan brought on her weekly visit, savouring the wedding announcements. Given away by her father, the bride wore a taffeta, Bo-peep-style dress and carried a bouquet of roses and gypsophila.
By now I was an A-grade student, but I had no intellectual or ethical problem with spending hours lost in the practicalities of my fantasies.
Tom Cruise was officially The Sexiest Man Alive, but he wasn’t my type. Ideally, I wanted to go out with Bob Dylan as he was in 1967. I would have settled for Victor Sifuentes from LA Law or Paolo Maldini, the young AC Milan defender. But mostly it seemed outrageous to my 18-year-old self that I was born 31 years after Dylan, an age gap that made him an impossible romantic prospect. Maldini was more attainable, being four years older and on the same continent, and weren’t we all soon going to be in the Exchange Rate Mechanism? Mind you, he had his World Cup debut at Italia 90 to focus on.
It is one of the puzzles of the age that all yearning seemed faintly plausible. Nothing was completely ruled out. I don’t know if this was naivety or arrogance or both. I bought Dylan’s Under the Red Sky when it came out in September, but the guy on the sleeve looked ancient. He was 49, an age I now know to be young.
“Do you believe in women’s rights?” C asked one day.
“I believe in human rights,” I told him. I wanted the same as the next person, but I wasn’t going to throw my love life under the bus for feminism; we still hadn’t kissed.
“What did we talk about?” I ask him now. We’ve met up for lunch, as we do every few years. It’s a bit of a blur, he says. I shouldn’t take it personally. He has whole marriages he doesn’t remember. “We would have talked about books, played records…”
He says memory has an evolutionary function. We remember what we need to survive. Of our time together at 18, there are only “pretty vague memories, because they’re essentially quite positive. They didn’t really serve,” he says.
My laptop is open at a document of notes: scraps of dialogue, an exchange of looks, our first kiss, all as sharp and infinitely replayable as mental gifs. I wonder what this says about our relative threat to each other’s survival.
Were we happy? Content? “You know, this notion of happiness,” C says. “You only know it in retrospect. The point when you’re happy, you don’t go: ‘I’m happy.'” Besides, he says, “I’ve never had a very good barometer on my actual feelings. There actually, genuinely, was the friendship level to us. Completely. We liked similar things, and not many people did. You were very observant. Somehow subtly you were always paying attention. You were always watching stuff. And you were very strong-willed underneath it all. You were introverted, a little shy, thoughtful, and you were always interesting to talk to. Even if I talked more than you. That’s my take.”
On Monday morning, my alarm clock wakes me with a Saturday night feeling. I am going to see my friend D, and it doesn’t matter what the calendar says. D means Saturday nights. We used to get ready in her bedroom; kneeling on the carpet in front of her mirror, swigging from a 1.5l bottle of Liebfraumilch.
Before I can recall any of the above, some ancient muscle memory has put me in matching underwear and knelt me on my bedroom floor, wondering why the mirror is so dusty and all my eyeshadows have crusted over. I haven’t seen D in 30 years. I no longer wear makeup.I don’t get ready. Maybe because I’m always ready, or never ready.
Who cares about makeup? You’ll just have to take it off tonight. Do you even own makeup remover? I wait for my middle-aged self to step in, but she’s busy digging through the jewellery box, happy and humming. She clips a gold bangle around her wrist — my 18th birthday gift — and rushes out the front door as if something very exciting is about to happen.
And it is.
I’m going to see the friend I had when I was 18. The friend I went on Saturday-night pub crawls with. The friend who got into bars because she looked 18 before she was, while I didn’t look 18 even when I was. For my milestone birthday, she set the table in her family lounge with a red paper cloth, lit a candle, and cooked me dinner. I loved her. But we haven’t met in 32 years.
D drank snakebite and black from pint glasses; I sipped Southern Comfort mixed with lemonade. Sometimes she was very sophisticated and asked for Perrier, a drink I wasn’t confident of pronouncing. Over an evening, we’d have five or six, but somehow only paid for one or two. I was the one who occasionally had to be pushed home along the promenade in a shopping trolley.
Now here we are, sitting across the table at a lounge bar at midday, scanning QR codes for menus and wondering what it means that we both want the same salad and fizzy rhubarb drink.
She remembers me as coy. We talked about our loves, our mothers, fathers, brothers, jobs, the Black Lace book series, Ann Summers parties. We vented, made each other laugh, barely thought about the future.
“I do believe I LOVE people and have faith in human nature,” I wrote in a letter to her that year.
And: “Sometimes it can do us good to put up with things we don’t like. It brings other elements in our personality out and makes us feel proud of our powers of endurance.”
Sometimes I mailed letters to D even when we were both at home, a mile apart. “Would you like to go out early this wk? Will phone …”
The day after D and I meet, my daughter turns 18. I ask her out for a drink. I want to taste Southern Comfort again, see if it will catapult me back, like the Poison, the sight of my teeth marks in the waxy green skin of a granny smith, or the detonating surprise of warm ketchup on a cold piece of iceberg lettuce, when I honour my 18-year-old self with a plate of Birds Eye chicken and chips.
But our local pubs don’t stock Southern Comfort.
“Is it a sipping whisky?” my daughter asks, and I laugh at her use of a phrase I have never needed, even at my age. We both get Cokes.
So, did turning 18 feel like a big deal?
“I didn’t give a fuck,” she says. “Everyone else seemed to, though.”
When I was two months older than her, my A-levels done, I got a job in a secondhand bookshop. Few customers came in; most wanted to sell us John Braine’s Room at the Top. One day, a customer asked if we had any Kerouac. Did he know he was in Worthing? I lent him mine, he lent me his Neil Young tapes. He became a regular, rolling cigarettes into a little tin by the three-bar electric fire while we chatted.
R had left school at 16, and was considering night school, something he clearly accomplished because he’s now a university professor. “There was a sense that it was a good time to be young,” he says. “Or that youth was something valuable. We were quite disillusioned — at 18 there’s always an existential stress — but it didn’t feel like a burden. If you think about our kids, and students now, the pressure … They can’t escape. They’re scrutinised all the time.”
“You helped me realise that reading could be a momentous act, rather than just a way of filling time,” R says. “And that writing meant something.”
A few months after we mYet I found residential work at a hotel bar in the Italian Alps, and R became another person I wrote letters to. In the mornings before my shift, I’d sit on the balcony and write to friends au pairing in France, Germany, Panama, or in their first year at university. I listened to Neil Young on my Walkman and the drip-drip of melting snow. From noon till 8pm, I’d manage the bar, the fog of smoke lowering as the day wore on. I paid careful attention to the customers’ grammar. Non la trovi bellissima? one guy asked his friend about me. Don’t you find her beautiful? No, the friend replied. Oh, the things that stick in our heads.
“I really believe there’s not much to leaving home,” I wrote to my brother. “When you want to get out, just DO it; cos it’s not true that you NEED things doing for you – cooking etc … There’s SO MUCH TO SEE.”
I’m not sure how to explain my approach to personal safety back then to my own children, who are 15 and 18. “To get an offer of dinner, all you have to do is walk along the pavement,” I wrote. “Cars stop all the time. If they look OK, you jump in.”
I have to order the Southern Comfort from Amazon. It’s a powerful time machine. At the first sip, I feel I’ve had too many. It tastes sweet and intense and full of things that might happen and haven’t happened. Sticky carpet. Worry I’ve laddered my stockings. The countdown of melting ice, leaving me with a watery drink that’s gone on too long and finished too soon …
Above all, I suspect that life then was lived in a state of yearning, teetering between delight and disappointment.
The year I turned 18, everything happened and nothing happened. It was the year I fell properly in love and, unrelated, lost my virginity. It was the year I first left home, travelled alone, made my own clothes, learned Italian, and admitted to myself that I wanted to be a writer, even if I forgot this till I read it in a letter 35 years later and realised I’d been living the dream all these years.
I went to Cambridge. C met someone else.
Meeting, and occasionally embodying, my 18-year-old self has felt exhilarating, debilitating, harrowing. Like being stuck between worlds. I’ve watched makeup tutorials, bought coloured eye sticks, ogled a silver leather miniskirt with my future 21-year-old self in mind, and found myself asking, “Are they the one?” of random souls who cross my path (sorry).
When I’ve tried to make sense of the disorientation by writing – something that hasn’t changed – every key on the keyboard has felt like a mess I can’t put away. So how to evaluate my life since? I am not a published poet, as 18-year-old me would have loved me to be, but I have written two novels. I’ve found love a few times, and have a loving family.
Three years ago, when I turned 50, I asked my parents for a carriage clock. It sits on the mantelpiece, and I only occasionally register its tick.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of frequently asked questions about the concept 18 Again I went back to my life in 1990
1 What does 18 Again I went back to my life in 1990 mean
Its a thought experiment or story idea where you fall asleep today and wake up as your 18yearold self in the year 1990 but with all your current memories and knowledge
2 Is this a real event or just a hypothetical scenario
Its purely hypothetical No scientific evidence suggests time travel to your own past is possible
3 Who would I find in 1990
You would find your younger self your family and friends as they were then and people who may have passed away sinceall alive and at their 1990 ages
4 What would my daily life look like in 1990
No smartphones no WiFi no streaming Youd use landline phones VCRs paper maps and listen to music on cassettes or CDs Most communication was facetoface or by letter
5 What are the benefits of going back with my current knowledge
You could avoid past mistakes invest early in companies like Apple or Microsoft warn people about future disasters and appreciate relationships you took for granted
6 What are the biggest problems I would face
Youd miss modern medicine internet and convenience You might accidentally change history struggle to fit in socially or feel isolated because no one believes your story
7 Can I bring modern items with me
In most versions of this scenario no You arrive with only your memories and your 18yearold body No phone no money from the future no proof
8 Would I remember everything from my future life
Usually yesthats the core of the idea You keep your adult memories skills and knowledge while living in your teenage body
9 What if I try to change a major event like preventing a disaster
You could try but you might fail or cause unintended consequences Small changes are safer than large ones Many stories show that changing the past is risky
10 How do I explain my strange knowledge to others
You dont Most people would think youre crazy or lying Its safer to keep your
