It’s like having a state flower, a patron saint, or a national lizard. ‘Our song.’ I remember the first ‘our song’ I shared with a girlfriend. Christmas 1977. I was a punk. I wore vinyl trousers, a mohair sweater my mother knitted, and black and white All Stars. I was too cowardly to have anything but my ear pierced. I had bleached hair with blue streaks. I saved all the money I earned from my Saturday job making sausages in a butchers’ shop. Once a month, I visited Malcolm McLaren’s and Vivian Westwood’s Seditionaries (once Sex) in Chelsea’s World’s End. I was the proud owner of an original pair of bondage trousers and a number of T-shirts including one with two cartoon cowboys, their jeans around their ankles, pointing more than guns at each other – my mother would hang the T-shirt inside out on the washing line so as not to offend the neighbors. I still have the nappy that came with the bondage trousers – the label shows an anarchy symbol and underneath is written: ‘For soldiers, dykes, punks, and prostitutes.’

L. had asked me to spend the holidays at her parents’ house in Windsor. The castle, visible from the upstairs balcony of their six-bedroom house on swanky St Leonard’s Hill, represented everything I despised about merry olde England. On Christmas Eve, I took the train to Windsor and Eton Riverside station. I arrived at noon. L. met me at the station. She was not particularly pretty. My friends, shocked that I was seeing her, kept setting me up on dates. But L., very intelligent, with a nasty sense of humor, went along with and enjoyed anything I suggested. To meet me, she wore a fur coat, knee-length leather boots and refused to tell me if she was wearing anything underneath the warm animal plush. We found a pub in Eton village none too strict with the licensing laws and I drank three pints of Holsten lager while L. sipped a brandy and Babycham.

We took the bus to her house. The hill, edged with the mansions of television personalities, pop stars, and even a circus impresario, stratified and sparkling, was lined with houses that increased in cost the further we climbed. L.’s family lived at the very top. Earlier that year, while I was walking down the hill to catch the bus back to the train station, a comedian – infamous later in his career for allegedly biting off the head of a child’s hamster – asked me to push him on his spluttering motorbike. I did. He gave me £5.

That night, I wore my God Save the Queen T-shirt, skinny black jeans, and my All Stars, my hair short and spiky. L.’s father wore a frown and scowl, while her mother’s look of disgust and boredom was more punk than any grimace I’d practiced in the bathroom mirror. I took from my leather satchel my copy of Che Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare and Camus’s Outsider and placed them next to the glossy magazines on the glass coffee table along with my feet, crossed, and tapping along to Slade on the radio.

With the television mumbling away in the background, time ticked by in near silence. I consumed as much food as possible and became quite drunk on the sherry and Advocaat I swigged every time L.’s parents left the room, which, because of their growing resentment at having to share their Christmas with an arrogant, reticent, and pretentious 16-year-old, was quite often.

I slept in the bedroom four doors along from L.’s. After a couple of hours – I think it took her that long to negotiate her way along the dark and creaking landing – she slipped into my room wearing only a short silk dressing gown. We had hurried and nervous sex and she left as quietly as she arrived.

I woke before everybody else and crept downstairs. The tree, heavy with ornaments, blinked and winked. Underneath it, a glacier of gifts left an untidy moraine of hope over the cream shag-pile carpet. I stepped into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and drank from a jug of bloody Mary. I crammed three cocktail sausages into my mouth and washed them down with two slices of processed cheese.

I showered and dressed in a black shirt and bondage trousers. Shoeless, I took my place on the carpet before the tree. The gift giving was underway. Two presents for me. I took my time while L. and her parents oohed and aahed over sweaters, ties, socks, porcelain, and jewelery. Finally, after tearing off the haphazardly Sellotaped black wrapping paper, L. found a copy of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen and a pair of large silver hoop earrings. My gifts to her.

Aftershave from the parents. Great. I shaved once a week. At most. I sniffed it, sniffed again, and muttered a thank you. Beautifully wrapped, L.’s present to me did not give up its secrets through shape, shake, or rattle. The girl had money. The girl had class. I ripped it open. First, a book. Maurice Nadeau’s The History of Surrealism. A small box containing a puzzle ring. And something that could only be an LP. Patti Smith? Television? Talking Heads? It felt like a double album. I pulled it from its wrapping. A photograph of a grinning bearded guy leaning on someone’s back – the Boss. What the…? I opened the gatefold cover. Lyrics. I scanned down to see if I knew any of the songs. Shit. I did. Above “Thunder Road” L. had written ‘Our Song’ and I read the lyrics and noticed hearts and asterisks circling one of the lines and I looked at her and looked down and read, ‘You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re alright.’