Secondary school felt wild compared with what had come before. Yesterday’s rules did not always work today. There were days when chairs flew; one even went out of a window. Four long years could feel like an exercise in surviving anarchy.
I will spare you the catalogue of incidents. What matters now is what I learnt from classmates and from the teachers who managed to reach us. Violence did not resolve our problems: it made them more complicated. Drugs were a route towards self-destruction. And, in my adolescent view of the world, having a girlfriend was a remarkably good invention.
Our third-year trip was my first substantial journey outside Spain. We voted for London and arrived in the middle of the Britpop wave. We discovered a new culture and a different world. Curiously, it may have been the one place where we behaved like civilised people.
School can seem like a rehearsal for adult life: a place to try decisions without believing their consequences will last forever. Yet every choice moves us a little closer to, or further from, the future we imagine. I wanted to become a doctor. My grades fell two points short. That may sound like a small distance. It was not.