It has taken quite a dose of vinegar for me to admit all this. In the musical Avenue Q, the seminal text about being in your 20s, there's even a song about it: I wish I could go back to college, in college you know who you are - you sit in the quad and think 'oh my god, I am totally gonna go faaaaar!' But you have to be pretty famous to pull that off.Īnd with each passing year it becomes harder to go back to university in a hopeless attempt to recapture those heady days of yore. Of the decade's remainder, only the '27 Club' has any romantic value the age Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse shuffled off this mortal coil. And if 'nobody loves you when you're 23', one can't imagine how they feel two years later. I'll never be a tennis pro, model or pop star - those windows of opportunity have shut. My natural impatience means I feel it more acutely the clock ticking constantly down and life's options ever thinning. No matter your stripes, being in your 20s is an agonising procession of self-doubt, existential crises and regret. Indeed, gay death cuts to the fear of ageing that festers somewhere in all of us.
