Most teenagers have anxiety and depression, but I probably had more than my fair share. The parasitic leech that was the all-boys' grammar school that I attended had feasted on my social skills, leaving in its wake a terrified husk. Although I had no real problem with playing my guitar and shouting in front of people, speaking to them was another matter entirely. In the band I felt at ease, in the real world I did not. Your 18th birthday is a time of great joy, where (in the UK at any rate) you cast aside the shackles of childhood and embrace the exciting new world of adult life. Your birthday cake might symbolize this happy transition by reflecting one of your great passions. Mine had a picture on it of a long-haired person who looked somewhat like me, slitting his wrists. That pretty much sums it up. Still, you can't lock yourself in your bedroom with your Iron Maiden albums for ever, and soon enough I tried to integrate with society. Between the ages of 16 and 18 this pretty much involved getting drunk. I quickly discovered that getting drunk made it much easier to speak to people, and getting really drunk made you unconscious and then the problem of speaking to people went away entirely. This situation was exacerbated by the sudden presence of girls in my social circle. I hadn't seen a girl since Clair Sparks; they were particularly problematic because not only did you have to talk to them, but what you said had to be really impressive because then they might become your girlfriend. Also, in 1990, girls didn't like to talk about Iron Maiden - they probably still don't. Speed dating¹ didn't exist back then, but if it had it would have been a sick and twisted manifestation of hell on earth for me. The idea of having a highly pressured social situation where you have to think of something witty and amusing to say or be thrown to the baying vultures of eternal loneliness would have had me injecting pure alcohol into my eyeballs; at least that way I could be in a coma and unable to see the disappointment on the faces of those forced to spend 3 minutes in my company. That's what this chapter is all about: speed dating, oh, and mixed ANOVA too, but if I mention that you'll move swiftly on to the next chapter when the bell rings.

¹ In case speed dating goes out of fashion and no one knows what I'm going on about, the basic idea is that lots of men and women turn up to a venue (or just men or just women if it's a gay night), one-half of the group sit individually at small tables and the remainder choose a table, get 3 minutes to impress the other person at the table with their tales of heteroscedastic data, then a bell rings and they get up and move to the next table. Having worked around all of the tables, the end of the evening is spent either stalking the person whom you fancied or avoiding the hideous mutant who was going on about heterosomethingorother.