Part of the journey included a three-hour stopover in Manchester, a place I’d never been to before, and a city with a reputation of being more vibrant than any of the other places I’d visited up to that point in my life. He was bitter and funny and hopeless and likable despite being a bit of an arsehole at times, which really just boils down to me saying that he was relatable because he was normal. He obsessed about music (like me!), he was a flawed person and a flawed boyfriend (hi again!), he was older than me, in his mid-thirties rather than early twenties, so he had more experience but still kept messing things up (which was both reassuring and startlingly prescient for my next ten years of trying to be a grown up). Rob Fleming, the guy listing his relationship breakdowns like he’s presenting Top of the Pops, became, for the next twelve hours (and on more future occasions than I care to admit), a very comforting presence. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.’Īnd just like that, I was in. Now it’s just a drag, like having a cold or no money. Those days are gone and good fucking riddance to them unhappiness really meant something back then. 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. ‘My desert-island, all-time, top five most memorable split-ups, in chronological order: I took my seat on the bus, sent some falsely upbeat texts to a couple of friends and then started to read: It was a story about music and relationships, and on that morning, at twenty-one, those two things seemed like the most important things in the world. My bus was due to leave soon, so there wasn’t much time for browsing – I read the synopsis on the back and must have liked the cover, although I can’t remember it now I lost this copy a long time ago. So I walked into a bookshop at the station and I picked up High Fidelity. And I had a twelve-hour bus ride ahead of me. I was embarrassed, lonely and completely fucking miserable.

I found it after my first ever ‘I love you’ which was followed by awkward silence, then an uncomfortable evening, then the argument at the train station and the decision to get on a different train, going in a different direction to her.Īfter visiting friends for a few days, I ended up at the bus station at 8 a.m., alone and hung-over, thinking about what went wrong. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?’ Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss.

‘ What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over.

High fidelity book