Colin Wilson's glumness entranced me as a budding teenage existentialist

The Outsider's theme of artistic alienation was perfect for someone trying and failing to grow a beard and get a girlfriend

When I was 16, I tried to grow a beard and fancied myself as a bit of an existentialist. There was a good-looking girl at a local convent school who not only fancied herself as an existentialist but fancied existentialists, which gave me a strong motive for proclaiming the essential futility of human existence. Looking back, it's possible that I mistook adolescence for metaphysical angst.

I was also fascinated at the time by the so-called angry young men, most of whom were to end up as dyspeptic old reactionaries. I read Look Back in Anger, Lucky Jim and Room at the Top, and tried to imitate their truculent, iconoclastic style in my own unglamorous existence. This wasn't easy, given that I wore a school blazer and had only recently graduated to long trousers. I wasn't exactly sure what these writers were angry about, and later came to see that they weren't either. In fact, most of them weren't angry at all. It was mostly media hype. But they were putting what I saw as my own culture provincial, working-class, vaguely leftist, chip-on-shoulder on the map, and this was deeply exciting. In the evenings I took to wearing a cravat, a piece of clothing that I had seen the elegantly disdainful John Osborne wear on TV. It seemed to signify a certain cosmic dissidence.