More people were arriving at the Hollow now. People of many ages, at least two genders, and many miraculous clothes. Sartorially, the crowd suggested a far more diverse and perplexing definition of ‘alternative’ than the one I’d become familiar with on nights out with my friends, which mostly resulted in everyone dressing in the same jeans and band t-shirts and Doc Marten boots. Smocks abounded; tunics and dungarees and felt hats and cut-off jeans and tweed and trenchcoats and waistcoats and flares and drainpipes. I noticed one girl in a long white blouse stood a little back from everything, watching, in the woods, as if nervous to join in, but by midnight most people were dancing and hugging, flutes and banjos and lutes and guitars were appearing everywhere and the wavy treeline encircling us began to feel more like a crinkle-crankle wall separating us from the world as it had been described to us by every cautious and boring person we had ever met. I did not see the girl in the long white blouse again, which was a shame as she had immediately interested me and I liked the way her hair reminded me of a holly wreath, and I had begun to worry about why she was alone. Christine – who I’d not realised was musical – played some songs, too, and they were good, in a folky, whispery way. The clear sky above me, with all its stars, was yet another element of the evening I did not appreciate enough, although I certainly did not not appreciate it, and I fell asleep under it, a reluctant virgin, two months off my nineteenth birthday, in the arms of a woman thirteen years my senior. I suppose to some there might have seemed something poetic about it if this had been the big one, the night I ended up losing it, but in retrospect to me there is a far greater poetry to the fact that it was not. Fran, she said her name was. A baker by profession, down from the other side of the moor. ‘This is a weird request, but can I run my hands through your hair? I do so miss the feel of a young man’s hair.’ Yes, you can, Fran. In fact, please carry on. I am really ready for sleep now and this is helping me ease towards it. But oh, Fran. What would you think if you tried to do the same now, with the spotted stubble that remains there? Would you be surprised if you knew you’d triggered a lifetime of need for head rubs? Where are you now? And were you offended when your hand landed on my belt buckle and I moved it gently away? Did it make you feel like an interloper from full adulthood, a terrible raider of the young? And will you believe me if I said I did not intend to make you feel that way; I just felt it wasn’t the right place, or the right time, despite all the bigger rightness of the occasion in so many other ways, plus the mulled cider was stronger than I’d realised and did not mix well with Guinness?