I have the moral compass of a flea. A bratty flea, with commitment and daddy issues. Since the age of five I have terrorised any young man who caught my wayward eye, like a baby Mae West. Poor jittery boys of Year R, whom I shocked with my invitations to join me behind the playhouse, or my innuendo-laden opening lines ‘I can already do joined-up writing’ and ‘let’s read Where The Wild Things Are’. Eventually my man-eating afternoon break times were curtailed when I had my heart broken by William Harrison, who remained coy despite my witty advances and my pelting him with pine cones.

He told on me to Miss Dauncy, who sighed and once more wrote a specialist-recommending letter to my amused mother. I realised that I had been wasting time on boys my age, who were more interested in making potato clocks and feeling guilty about their strange, exciting feelings for the pink Power Ranger. What I needed was a mature man – though to that point the only examples of the type I knew of were Roald Dahl, who I fancied from my cassette of him reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Jafar in Aladdin.   

It was only when I got to secondary school that I really found what I was looking for: nerdy, greying teachers in their late forties. When I was eleven my passions were neopets.com and silver foxes. This continued through adolescence. After all, what need had I for the clammy-palmed fumblings of fifteen year olds, when I could pass the time watching Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply and reading the Times Literary Supplement, so I’d have a better chance of picking up recently divorced men at my parents’ dinner parties. Such habits, and the fact that, oddly, not that many fifteen year old boys were clamouring to inexpertly touch me, gave me time to develop the bookish know-how, eloquence, and mental health issues which got me to university. Higher education – the perfect opportunity to fulfil my daydreams of depravity. I presumed everyone would be genius dilettantes, looking at each other knowingly over candlelit formal dinners and making jokes about anal sex in Latin.

So, have I achieved the aspirations which I didn’t include in my personal statement? I’ve certainly encountered more well-read pervs than I thought could reasonably exist, sickly specimens who lull you by quoting Auden and then pounce. I’ve realised that with a flowery mini dress, the right lighting, and a touch of sass, I have a fighting chance of charming at least the short-sighted. I’ve learned that a mutual love of Wes Anderson films does not (always) an earth-shattering romance make. I’ve also learned that, probably much to the dismay of my younger, affection-starved self, not everyone who allows you under their John Lewis Value duvet is necessarily worth the trouble, even if they do own enough Bob Dylan bootlegs to charm your drunken compatibility radar.

Essentially, I’ve been pretty boring over the past two years when it comes to taking advantage of all the rich and varied opportunities for self-corruption which a town full of youth, stress and ‘Explicit Name’ cocktails could provide. But, perhaps, because this is the one area of my life I make any concerted effort in, I can say that I’m a fraction less clueless than I was, though sadly still inclined to go weak at the knees for a well timed Arrested Development reference.