My friend Georgina and I strode into the fair at Finsbury Park to the mangle of four loud and colliding bassy pop songs (UB40, Bob Marley, A-ha and Mel and Kim, as far as I could make out), and the intoxicating stink of candyfloss and kerosene. There was a buzz in the air, competing neon lights; excitement. It was warm enough that we didn’t need jackets over our black-and-white-striped T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Blondie’. It was clear to anyone we were a double act, a duo, a force to be reckoned with. We were identical, apart from the obvious; our hair short and on-trend, our dark blue jeans with red piping down the sides skin-tight, and our demeanour defensive.

I felt pretty good, or as good as it got for me. I had new boots – pointy, cone heel, kick arse, should there have been any arses that needed kicking. Two coats of Heather Shimmer lipstick, the tube a bullet in the pocket of my jeans, ready for reapplication. Glittery eyeshadow under brows shaped to death and slicked with Vaseline to make them both neat and iridescent, something I had read about in Vogue in the waiting room at the laser clinic, as I flicked through the pages of the beautiful people. And bags of slapped-on confidence, dredged from nowhere like mud from a dirty river, that I willed to be as thick and all-concealing as my foundation.

‘Let’s get some candyfloss first.’

‘OK.’

We stomped past the stall where you threw rings over ducks to win an enormous cuddly hippo with nails for eyes. It was busy everywhere, already. Flashes of fairground neon in red, yellow, royal blue, green and pink illuminated people’s faces, making them look flushed, excited, up for it. Teenagers eyed each other up. A boy in a green bomber jacket chucked me a crooked grin that I returned with a sassy smirk under my aggressively winged eyes. Fantastic.

We passed the Hall of Mirrors to ‘Don’t You Want Me’ and I caught a glimpse of myself in one of them – stretched to seven feet of bendy elastic with arms that seemed to be coming out of my feet but, apart from that, I looked all right. My hair was Studio-Lined into a truculent pixie cut Annie Lennox would be proud of. My mask was as impenetrable as I could get it, with the high-street make-up I could get my hands on. My dug-up halo of confidence may have had a fuzzy border and been likely to collapse at any moment, but it was there. From a distance, I could have passed for pretty.

‘We’ll go to the one by the Hearts and Diamonds.’

‘OK.’