We were twelve or thirteen, and had recently discovered irony-or at least, what I later understood to be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the swings and the roundabout and the other kids’ stuff rusting away in there if we could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment. There was nothing around that could help you get your geographical bearings if the shops were open (and they closed at five-thirty, and one o’clock on Thursdays, and all day Sunday), you could go into the newsagent’s and look for a local newspaper, but even that might not give you much of a clue. I lived in Hertfordshire, but I might just as well have lived in any suburb in England: it was that sort of suburb, and that sort of park-three minutes away from home, right across the road from a little row of shops (a VG supermarket, a newsagent, an off-license). Most nights we used to mess around in the park around the corner from my house. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.

Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money. Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them unhappiness really meant something back then.

That probably sounds crueler than it is meant to, but the fact is that we’re too old to make each other miserable, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, so don’t take your failure to make the list personally. Can you see your name in that lot, Laura? I reckon you’d sneak into the top ten, but there’s no place for you in the top five those places are reserved for the kind of humiliations and heartbreaks that you’re just not capable of delivering.

Hi fi nick hornby