Hey, hope this eve is OK! I’m sure it’ll be fine – will be thinking of you. Just see it as a field trip. It’s research: you’re like David Attenborough, observing the LAD in his natural environment. David Lad-enborough? Doesn’t quite work. Anyway, see you later maybe, love you xx

I slide the phone back in my pocket and watch my breath fug and unfug the grimy bus window. It’s so weird, thinking back to a time when Daff and I didn’t live together. When I didn’t see her every single day. Back then, the idea that I’d be meeting her after work, or getting to wake up with her, seemed like light at the end of the tunnel: a reward for getting through a tough day.

After uni finished, we both decided it was too soon – or maybe too boringly grown-up – to live together straight away. So I moved in with Harv, and Daff found a place in Balham with Jamila and some other mates. But about a year from now – at the end of 2011 – we will finally pool our meagre earnings and rent our first flat together: a poky little fifth-floor apartment in Shepherd’s Bush.

As the bus winds its way down through Barbican, it all comes rushing back to me: the giddy thrill we felt picking up the keys from the estate agent; how amazing our first night there was. We sat giggling on the floor, surrounded by cardboard boxes, like kids playing at being adults. Which, to some extent, I guess we were. We watched Dazed and Confused on my laptop, and ate takeaway curry with plastic forks because neither of us owned any actual cutlery. It strikes me now that that night was probably one of my happiest ever. Back then, it felt like we could do anything together. Like we had it all ahead of us.

I scrub the fugged-up bus window with my sleeve and peer up at the towering brutalist buildings above me.

Yes, at this point in my life – the tail end of 2010 – everything still felt just about possible. For a start, I was finally writing for a living. Well, sort of. After months of desperately emailing and cold-calling magazine editors all over the country, and hearing nothing back, I’d spotted an advert for a newly launched lads’ mag that was on the lookout for ‘young ’n’ hungry’ staff. The magazine was called Thump – and from the brief description of it in the ad, it was clear that it was to be the kind of publication built predominantly around topless women, Jason Statham films and pictures of botched tattoos. But I was pretty desperate by now – and sick to death of pub shifts and office temping – so I’d applied for a fortnight’s work experience. I got it, and when it ended – to my immense surprise – I was offered the job of editorial assistant.