My friend Abby is the nicest person in the history of human existence. I have not conducted a proper study to come to that conclusion but my survey sample is confined to me and everyone who has ever met her. I feel that is quite sufficient. In our first year at university, Ab and I would stay up until the early hours talking incessantly. I bear serious responsibility for her getting virtually no work done while she helped me get a piece of my writing published properly for the first time. It’s clear who came out best in that deal. 

The May Anthologies is a compendium of writing by students from Oxford, Cambridge and UEA’s Creative Writing course. In 2003, the guest editor was Ali Smith. The Cambridge introduction to the project that year was in a drafty hall in the centre of town. Ab persuaded me to go to on the promise of free booze and canapés. I have a natural homing instinct for canapés and, could, if required be used as a human divining rod for locating mini-burgers and fish & chips in little paper cones. 

Back then I was writing poetry and little bits of prose compulsively. I’d been doing it throughout high school, encouraged by a brilliant English teacher who let me sit at the back and write my own creations when I finished her assignments early. By university, I was filling my bulky PC up with scraps and pushing my plays on any drama students who’d look at them. However, besides a few music reviews for the student papers and a vague thought about auditioning for the Footlights, I kept most of it to myself. 

As we wandered about at the launch of The Mays though, Ab persuaded me to submit some of my writing. I wouldn’t have got round to it without her but I duly bundled some bits together and emailed them off to the editors. I forgot about it almost instantly and returned to my routine of sleeping all day on Tuesdays, compulsively playing the quiz machine and feeding too much change to the jukebox. 

A few months later I received an email. I was in and the only first year to make the cut. My short prose poem The Loneliness Of The Bookshop Dweller was going to be the first piece in the book and Ali Smith had name checked it in her introduction (I’d “set the challenge and the tone” for the book. Me! Actual me!).

Completing the trio of brilliant things the email had to tell me was an invite to the launch in “that London” where a living breathing literary agent would be in attendance. Fame and fortune was obviously imminent. Obviously. 

David Godwin of David Godwin Associates, which represents Arunduti Roy and, of late, Pippa Middleton, was going to be at the party. If I couldn’t charm him into immediately signing me up, I was sure I’d at least be able to get some tips on how to become the superstar I was certain I was due to become. That I had never actually finished a story and my contribution to The Mays was no more than 100 words was just a minor detail. 

Come the day of the event, I was a quivering wreck, convinced of my unworthiness, and looking paler than usual as I sat beside Ab on the train to London. After finding the swanky premises where the launch was taking place, we slipped into the crowd of chattering proto-literati and proper London types and talked to precisely no one.

I did make a Hitchenseque attack on the free wine though and by the time I was in chit chatting distance of David Godwin, a moon being orbited by more confident young meteors, I was plastered. I stood and stared and said nothing. The party started to wrap up and Godwin slipped away. I had achieved nothing more than feeling awkward in a room full of strangers. It was an experience I could have got in Cambridge, where loud entitled people are plentiful. 

One of the other names on the contents page of The Mays 2003 was Joe Dunthorne. His story Fred was great and hinted at the quality that he’d deliver on in his first novel Submarine. Last year it was turned into a film, directed by Richard Ayoade and soundtracked by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys. The editors wrote in their introduction: “We sincerely hope not only that we got it right but also that we are introducing some writers we’ll hear a lot more from.” Joe proved them right. 

It’s nearly 10 years on from The Mays 2003 and I’m still shuffling my feet and watching the party pass me by. I remember daydreaming in 2003 as I flicked through the Granta Young British Writers issue that by the time the next one rolled around, I might be in there. Granta has published that issue every ten years since 1983 so the next one’s due in 2013. I really need to get a move on.