The Pilot and The Fashion Designer

When I was fourteen, there was no doubt in my mind where I would be when I hit my thirties. My best friend and I were going to be living in Camden Town together in a funky pad above a bar. She was hell bent on becoming an airplane Pilot, and I was all set to attend London College of Fashion and make my mark on the fashion world. These weren't dreams to us, this was just "how it was going to be". I snubbed Daddy's ideas that I would follow him in any way into the world of Television. Why would I want to work in a soul destroying business like TV when I could work in the soul destroying world of Fashion?

Gems and I even had our cars picked out (not once worrying about permit/off street parking or indeed the cost of having said cars custom built). We were the elite. We were alway told that we were "in the top 1 % " of the country intelligence wise, that's how we met. We attended the same depraved achievement based all girl's high school...and we believed our own press there for a while.

When the reality hit, that actually we wanted to carve our own niche on the world instead of falling off the production line with a straight set of As and no life experience, we did it together...we smoked cigarettes and practiced looking cool doing it. We bought ridiculous "unwearable" outfits - quite literally turning up in identical clobber some days, looking so contrived, but genuinely having no idea that the other was also going to rock up wearing the leopard print that day. We'd drink in bars together with our newly aquired sense of cool and the latest shade of really, really expensive lipstick. I couldn't imagine breathing without that girl. We'd talk about how apathetic "adults" were and how we didn't understand how they could all be so miserable when they were adults - come on man, you can do anything when you are an adult!!

We listened to Prince together and clung to his every word; even though she was a "top of the pops" girl and I was into strange underground goth stuff and ancient rock; we could alway agree on Prince.

She was my everything, more important than my first, second and third boyfriends. But then I met a guy who was so special I couldn't spend all my time with Gems because, as it turned out, I loved him more than I loved her. She was no longer my best friend, he was. The reality of that hurt me more than it hurt her.

The next couple of years are some of the brightest of my memories. There were gigs and parties, dancing and drinking, laughing and smoking. On my first Anti Nazi League march, my head was turned by all of the exciting, crazy,intelligent people; the human rights campaigners; the marxists; the dreadlocked patchouli crew; the bands; the crowds - they were all so exciting and anything was possible.

Gems and I did almost nothing together, but we still had Prince. We paid top dollar for tickets to see him a few times and we would get together and see him and I would paint his name all over my body and she would turn up looking exquisite and swearing blind that "he" [Prince] was watching her during the whole of the encore.

Where is she now? I have no idea. A mutual friend saw her at an E-Commerce roadshow or another, so I guess she never took to flying; it's funny, I always thought she would. She looked beautiful apparently. I have no doubt about that, she was one of the most amazing creatures to look at even at sixteen. Gems gave the mutual friend a business card to pass on, but it was lost before it reached me.

But the boy? The special one? We're not teenagers anymore, we're not in love and we see each other rarely...but he is one of my best friends in the whole world, godfather to my children and he stuck with his dream. He was going to be a drummer. And he is.