And when I squinted the world seemed rose-tinted.

Thirty years ago I was doing an illustration course in Cambridge, and lived with a family that was not my family. I was slightly terrified of the man of the house. He worked on the railways and had a gym set up in the living room. Each evening I could hear him working out as I hid in my bedroom: the sound of his weights hitting the floor, his grunts resonating through the house and the guttural swearing that helped him focus. He would occasionally appear at the door of my bedroom fresh from the effort, wet and pink and covered in tattoos, wondering if I wanted a cup of tea. He arrived home from work one day with a bike he'd "found" for me, as the house was quite a long way out of town. He was quite nice to me, in fact. But we were very different people, and I was becoming very depressed and he didn't like that. He thought I was "moody" and "stuck up". Which I was, but also deeply sad. It meant I spent a lot of time in my room with my Walkman and my three cassette albums, which I listened to over and over again: "Heaven or Las Vegas" by Cocteau Twins, "People's Instinctive Journeys" by Tribe Called Quest and "Violator!" by Depeche Mode. 

I was never a Depeche Mode fan. I thought they were rubbish for a long time. I remembered them from my youth with their cocktail bow ties and rinky-dink synthesisers.  Their lyrics were poor. Martin Gore started to wear bondage gear and all their songs seemed to be about having sex with teenage girls in Eastern Europe. I was mystified by Fletch, who was a tall, ginger man standing at the back, palpably doing nothing. Front-man Dave Gahan had an unforgivably weak chin, reminding me of Ian Lavender from Dad's Army: Pike of the Pops. So I have no idea why I had that album with me. Someone must have taped it for me. I bought the Cocteau Twins and Tribe Called Quest ones, but I would never have bought a Depeche Mode record. I rarely bought records then as I had no money. I read the music press and just imagined what records sounded like. 

But I did listen to "Violator!" (terrible title, as always. They claim it was a joke, but it fits quite neatly with the Fifty Shades of Grey motley they had been touring round Italian enormadomes for the last five years). I listened to it because sometimes the Cocteau Twins was too sexy as I lay there in my child's bed in a stranger's house, missing my girlfriend. I knew every breath on "Heaven or Las Vegas", every trill. Liz Fraser was so warm and kind and benevolent. But also the resonant murmuring on the album - she  had an impressive low end - was deeply affecting, as I tossed and turned on the creaking slats of my narrow crib. 

Tribe Called Quest was too much fun, and too noisy and jocular for my mood. It was a brilliant record, but not conducive to the sort of profound moping I was engaged with. I was becoming distinctly odd. Later I would make some friends, move into student accommodation and start drinking heavily - which didn't do my work any good. But at this point I'd started out on an adventure in further education, only find myself in a room with Thomas the Tank Engine wallpaper and listening to a man in a vest taking steroids. It was not the romantic vision I wanted for myself. I thought I'd be dazzling the University wits at a Footlights Smoker's Party, instead of living in mortal fear of getting acrylic paint on my landlady's axminster. 

So I was left with "Violator!" and "Violator!" was perfect. It was pop music but it was miserable. Dave Gahan's voice: deep and stern but with that imploring vibrato, was a much more impressive instrument than I'd previously realised. Like Liz Fraser he sounded wise and wounded and compassionate. Dave became my friend when I had none. A comforting presence in the dark, as car lights flashed past the thin fabric of my childish curtains. My own personal Jesus, in fact. It is an impressively quiet and introspective album. It's meant for the night, specifically lonely nights when you're worrying that you've ended up doing completely the wrong things with your life, through a combination of laziness, shyness and intransigence. The Mode offered no solutions, but they were fellow travelers, non-judgemental Councillors who'd been through it all before and could offer a hand on the shoulder and a rueful smile. "Waiting for the Night" could have been written for me. 

I'd developed a weird inability to work in public. I couldn't draw or paint in the college's studio. I felt like a fraud. Everyone on the course had come from art school and they were all finished - they arrived with a style and spent the time honing it, getting better at doing what they already did. I had no idea what my style was. It changed for every brief. I was constantly looking for something that was me. I was also finding out that my colour sense and design skills were ridiculously underdeveloped. I spent most of that time doing figurative scenes in shades of shit brown, dolloped on with a palette knife: Painting with Nancy by way of a dirty protest. No wonder I hid the manufacture of these feacal gems away. I painted at home, stuck in my little room, listening to the grunts of the landlord and Dave's entreaties to "Enjoy The Silence". I couldn't, Dave, there was no silence. But I liked the idea. Quiet. Distance. I started to go for long walks, a habit I have never lost. 

In a strange pop reversal, the eighties saw Joy Division, a rock band,  morphing into New Order, a pop band. Depeche Mode went the other way, turning from jolly synth-trumpet Saturday boys to guitar toting, vest wearing tattooed love gods. Except for Fletch, who maintained a look of having just wandered in from the fish counter. In the 90s they were an image of what Joy Division might have been if they'd actually got on that plane to America. No one in Depeche killed themselves, though to be fair, Dave had a good go at it. Those two bands now sit side by side on the pencil cases of fifteen year old Spanish Goth girls as if there is nothing to choose between them. Except one you can still see in concert to this day, and the other made a football record with Keith Allen. 

I doubt fifteen year old Goths have pencil cases anymore. They'll be stickers on their laptop covers then. What do you mean they don't have laptops now? 

Listening back to this odd, maximal/minimal record at this distance of time, it remains inside me, clinging like a shadow. I can't separate it from the peeled, naked idiot I was then, from the mystery of me. I pity my parents dealing with that rudderless boy, who had no ambition, no desires, no goals. Who talked about nothing sensible. Who drifted like a leaf on a stream, without energy or agency.* I wrote diaries then and I lost those diaries. I think they would make fascinating reading now, if only for me. I'd love to find out if there was anything going on under the surface. Did I think I might be able to coast through life on passable prettiness and potential cleverness, without ever testing that cleverness? That boy is a ghost who haunts me. A half glimpsed spectral outline in faded chalk. He should be staring hollow-eyed through reeds in the rain, always there on the periphery, in the corner of my eye. But when I turn to confront him, screaming "What do you want of me?" there is a shrug, a yawn, a "Dunno." He smiles a baffled smile. Good teeth. 

I wasted twenty years of my life wasting my life. I can't account for any of it. The guilt is enormous, as is the desperate need to catch up, to do the work I should have done. I've been in a hurry for a decade and as I turn fifty the panic grips me. I am too old. I should have been doing what I'm doing now a generation ago. Instead I lay under a thin duvet in a stranger's spare room, and believed Dave Gahan when he told me it was all going to be alright. He was lying. My own personal Judas. 

*Later girlfriends will recognise this "boy" as me well into my thirties.