Occasionally a photograph will haul me through time with a jolt so brutal and visceral my head rings with electrostatic shock and I’m adrift in a warm ozone of memory.

A random photo and I’m back in London 1981 and it’s early evening and the old central platform at the Angel tube station stretches out before me like some monstrous tightrope and I’m so whacked I’m worried trains howling past might drag me clean off the platform. I haven’t got a ticket and I know I’m going to have to climb up the giant spiral fire-escape to avoid the ticket inspector in the lift and I’m heading for a pub on Liverpool Road called the Agro, but the vageries of chance and light neon rain of could lead me almost anywhere and I’m not yet seventeen.

The night will be awash in cheap beer and the smell of hairspray and warm damp leather. There will be laughing and there will be fighting and each will be dismissed as lightly as the other and maybe there will be stumbling amaturish sex and more than likely not.

There will be parties in squats off Seven Sisters Road and there will be run-ins with police. There will be long walks home in the rain because there’s no money for the night bus and there will be long late nights sitting in kitchens smoking dogends and drinking tea and listening to the radio and there will be good friends long dead now these many years.

There will be bands and gigs so vital they exist still electric and vibrant in my mind and there will be venues near and far and large and small some welcoming and others more dangerous. There will be moments of a spiritual release lost in thundering song floating in the crowd like some spikey mariner adrift on an ocean of souls and there will be moments of cold terror as brutally efficient violence brushes past.

There will also be cold stodgy meals in front of the telly with Win and Ernie shouting. Both full of gin as they argue about things that happened in pubs during the war and the stories will be as familiar as the boiled vegetables on my plate. There will be early morning cigarettes walking to work head swimming with nicotine and there will be a faint odour of hopes lost.