Smoking my last cigarette outside London Kings X, gazing out on the sunlit square, I suddenly felt my cares lift off my shoulders. I checked myself – wasn’t it just the absence of the rucksack that was making me buoyant? But no. Standing there in yesterday’s clothes and yesterday’s sweat, I felt unaccountably comfortable in the direct sunlight. Almost a week spent in the Swedish countryside moving beer kegs, speakers, furniture and all manner of heavy objects, erecting over half a dozen tents in the morning glare and swimming each day to that little birdshit-strewn island in the lake had left me immune to the feeble city sol. Nights lying on terra-pretty-fucking-firma wrapped up in a collection of old coats had accustomed me to all discomfort and, brushing the stubble new-grown on my tanned and perhaps slightly reddened face, I took another drag and blew the smoke through my nostrils.

Sandvikfest is an incredibly small music festival in Sweden organised by a friend of mine from university. Instead of muttering pipe-dreams and letting them go up in smoke she has created a pipe-reality, a three-day space in my calendar each year where I meet old friends, new friends, and Sandvikfriends. Others will write about the music, the setting, the personalities and yarns that have made up this festival over the past three years, but this is a selfish article where I’m only going to write about me. I dare say very few of you are surprised.

The Eurostar platform fittings look suitably like submarines.

My time in Paris was something I did because I said I would. I’ve enjoyed some of it and at other times I’ve been unhappy, and this, so far as I can make out, is just life. I seem to go in two year cycles these days, starting afresh with the best of intentions before entropy drags me back to bed. Eventually I have to up and leave for an uncertain future. And although I have used my entire overdraft and am in a somewhat dubious financial situation for making the move to London, although I haven’t written half of what I wanted to, although I’ve still not submitted my short stories to journals despite talking about it all the bloody time, despite my fears for future jobs and ingrained hatred of cities, I feel I might just shake out another reef and daddle them again. Bonus points to everyone who gets the reference.

I’ve been terrified of Sandvikfest. Terrified of flying there and back – although I am just generally terrified of flying. Terrified of meeting old friends and invariably comparing myself to them and dwelling on a shared past. Terrified of what those few days represented in my calendar: the end of my holiday and beginning of the job-hunt.

Standing in front of London Kings X, I saw someone with a massive suitcase coast by balanced on a skateboard. I saw bin men chatting to the police. I saw people in suits. I even saw fellow backpack wearers, though none looked so grubby and disreputable as me. All at once I realised that I felt strong and capable. Not the usual despairing indestructibility I flatter my overly-dramatic ego with, but a natural power and ability. I knew there was no point in comparing myself with others, and that I could just about think of the past as the comforting ache in my shoulders from all the swimming and sunburn. I knew I had agency in my own future, secret agency, rolling bunched muscles of potential with which I could effect my world. If Johanna can make a festival out of nothing, if my friends can forge brilliant and interesting lives, then I’m in good company and maybe I can do something with mine.

So I put out my last cigarette. I can’t afford to keep smoking and drinking, however much I enjoy it. I went and played the piano in St Pancras International. And now, sitting up the stairs with a coffee, I’m looking at the Eurostar submarines, the multi-coloured tetras hanging inexplicably above them, the ostentatious gold clock, the light shining through the clear zig-zagged windows on pale industrial girders, and out the far end of the hanger lie the white clouds in the blue sky, and if there is one thing I can be glad of after all I’ve done so far, one thing that those powdery insubstantial ephemeral clouds remind me, it is this: at least I’m not on a fucking plane.