Jacob has a beard and wears pastel coloured shirts, and on Friday nights screams experimental electro-pop to disinterested crowds in picayune pubs. Holly is a writer, and her sketch shows play to the Free Fringe every summer. And Thaddeus McGowan, well, he’s Thaddeus McGowan.

Who am I? Who is Yvette Bronwen-Garm? Her bigness (and I refer to myself here) is her smallness. Her sense of taste is her sense of disappointment. And her finals are rapidly approaching, and to date she’s done exactly 30 minutes of revision. My face is, as you would say, featured, my legs, shoed, my only eccentricity of dress? A hairpin. A jade hairpin. A big jade hairpin. But beneath this pale-as-moon-moon-face is a writer waiting to get out. Or a waiter. They are very similar words.

A categorical imperative for life amongst the middle-class literates: do not bed the spingy mollusc

It was surely Sex that caused my vacation to be so sorely misrevised. Or rather, the lack of Sex. Or rather, the lack of anticipated Sex. Or perhaps, the lack of anticipated pre-scheduled procrastination hours consisting of Sex. My flatmates had arranged their Easter term Sex long before the vacation was vacated, and now term is in full flow, a musique concrete of coital delight bounces down the corridor; an ephemeris charting the ascent of Venus. Or something. I feel outmatched amongst my flatmates, content with their Jacobs. Their Hollys. So I had to follow suit. I went on a date with the one person available on a Tuesday night in Easter term. I went on a date Thaddeus McGowan.

The throbbing migraines associated with the appearance of Thaddeus McGowan stem from his insistence that he knows more about the Thing you know about than anyone could ever know ever. The Thaddeus McGowans of the world see themselves as benighted, saturnine arrivals from the fiction of Ford Maddox Ford, blessed with miraculous intellects and gentle manners, even when their puking numbskullery flays the present company with a pishy gloom.

One wonders which of the many affectations it was, that napalmed the prefrontal lobes of the world’s many Thaddeus McGowans. Was it the acrid blear of liquorice rolling papers and Pueblo shag that cajoled Thaddeus McGowan’s mind into losing all pretence of self-awareness? Or was it merely a cumulative declension, a gradual accommodation to a life of tedious knits and vintage records, a life to which Thaddeus McGowan acclimatised, became addicted to, and eventually overdosed on? Classicist. Thaddeus McGowan is a classicist.

Thaddeus McGowan and I meet in the Maypole one evening: every bad joke should begin thus. I begin with the Italian defence by offering to buy him a drink, and, wittering as he picks at his nails, he speaks words to the effect that the date could begin no other way, but that he nevertheless has absolutely no obligation to show any gratitude. Thaddeus McGowan will soon have stroked his lute too much to remember he owes me a drink. The knowledge of this injustice grinds against my skull.

Like a porcupine with an addiction to codeine, it’s difficult to discern whether Thaddeus McGowan is real.

“Like a porcupine with an addiction to codeine, it’s difficult to discern whether Thaddeus McGowan is real.”

He flits from place to place, in a little play here, reading a little Virgil there, singing a little Sufjan Stevens everywhere. But he seems to be little more than a collective and masochistic hallucination. Thaddeus McGowan. Real, but nevertheless unenviable given that he resembles more than anything else the marmalade pots at self-service cutlery stations. I tried to talk to him about divestment from fossil fuels, but he didn’t listen. He spoke of a married woman who was rumoured to have invited him up for tea to her lavish apartment. He told me he told her he loved her. He told me she told him she wasn’t sure. I tried to tell him that he was a deluded puffin but it was too politely phrased to get through. Like a Shanghai wedding prank, Thaddeus McGowan is neither charming nor funny, though his personality is entirely derived from his affectation of both qualities.

“Today, I did two notable things”, he says, regaining focus temporarily.

“Really?” I respond.

He wants me to ask what they are and refuses to discuss anything else until I have, at which point he brims over with smugness and tells me.

“Today, I have done two notable things. I applied to work as a headhunter for Shell, and I bought a piano.”

“And why did you do that?”

I wonder why he has done these things, since I know he is bloody useless at throwing his hat in anything other than the infernal ring of his rotting room. But what can one do? This isn’t a man, it’s an avatar constructed from a thousand lifestyle guides, a collector of rare internet advertisements for weekend breaks in the Norfolk gloaming. Thaddeus McGowan has become too trumped up on his own arse-vapour to regurgitate the rhubarb nestled in his sprawling gut. Which of my flatmates was it who decided to name Thaddeus McGowan ‘Thaddeus McGowan’? No one, but the name stuck and we all fell about laughing, each of us spitting out globules of Thaddeus McGowan’s metaphorical slug-trail, which by that time was oozing across the carpet and out into the sunny morning. A categorical imperative for life amongst the middle-class literates: do not bed the spingy mollusc.

Thaddeus McGowan, well…Thaddeus McGowan passed the time. But the day is coming when the bed-letting will have to rock around the clock and into the past. The revision must begin. And I have no idea where to start. But it’s not with Thadddeus McGowan. “You deserve better, Yvette”, mum would say.

“What do you mean ‘deserve’?” I would respond.