I was always interested in dropouts, refuseniks and people who lived outside the mainstream, who didn't play the usual “accrue resources” game, but wandered off and did their own thing, and still got housed, fed and loved.

This seemed way better than towing the line and feeling bitter and frustrated as the years turned to nothing, waiting for real life to begin.

Of course, I tended to ignore the fact that many of these people only existed in fiction, or ended up broken and broke, or were cushioned by wealth that enabled them to take refuge in the arts and launder their inheritances.

I was on the wrong kind of outside looking in. Without talent, drive, connections or money, without even much interest beyond myself and my own immediate vices.

When looked at in a cool, dispassionate manner, it’s amazing I’ve had any kind of success at all, never mind a veneer, however thin, of modest respectability, or at least not too obvious a loser and creep.

My mistake, or misfortune – if it is one – is to be satisfied with small things.

It’s happiness that leads to my regret.

From one angle a life of relative freedom and ease, from another a life of sour grapes and cope, both lived in the shadow of addiction and compromise.

I knew that I would live and die without influence, but I wasn't concerned about death until I had a child, and then it became (almost) all-consuming - the shame at what I would leave behind.

I was born in the center of a labyrinth with my eyes shut and ears closed, crawling on my hands and knees and determined to find my own way rather than follow others who'd escaped.

This was just one of my mistakes.

It's easier for me to say to myself and others I never wanted anything, than admit I wasted my time and it's too late to start again, that this is how I chose, and choose, to live.

But really what I wanted was sloth, indulgence, unearned ease and privilege. To find a place in the world without worry or stress, and to live every day as if I were free.

To live like a poor man with money.

I had the kind of empty cleverness and superficial facility with words, a willingness to go beyond and surprise, sometimes delight, with my ability for self-abasement and self-absorption, but nothing of real intelligence.

In this I was like the vast majority of innumerate men who had hidden from the world in books and drink, occasionally sobering up and realizing what a mess I'd made of my life and what little time was left to turn it round.

But still, as was always true, and for everyone, I had the rest of my life to get better.

I don't know anything, or how to do anything, and it terrifies me.

Looking at me now, you'd never believe I was among the smartest and most together of my mid-20s to mid-40s peer groups, and have only gotten smarter and more together since then.

Unless I've gotten too dumb to notice my decline, which is a real possibility, since the perception of the brain is limited by what the brain can perceive.

It's either that, or - more likely - that I've always hung out with some real dumb potatoes.

I have access to the same culture as the richest men in the world, and quite a lot of free time.

There's no reason beyond sloth and addiction for me to be so ignorant, to know almost nothing about the world I live in.