INNOVATION:My teenage years were blighted by the nagging thought that everyone else was having more sex than me.
This wasn't completely unfounded, as I wasn't having any. Simon Brown was definitely having more sex than me. He and Debbie Clark had been going out since they were 14 and seemed to do little else, once asking my opinion as to whether or not she should go on the pill. Talk about rubbing it in.
Even when I got a proper girlfriend the status anxiety continued. She was called Anne Lynch, and it was received wisdom that I'd lucked out, as she was very pretty and had a bit of previous.
She'd been out with Ian Baker, a Mod from the year above, who everyone said she wasn't over, but who Julian Dobbins saw walking back from the spinney after lunch looking pleased with themselves. "They'd been at it," he said, conspiratorially. For a few short months I was besotted, far too much in awe of her to try anything, staying mainly on her mum's sofa while she was out shopping at Bejams (her mum, not Anne Lynch).
A few years later, I met Anne Lynch at a party and she asked me, in a voice loud enough to be heard over the stereo, why we never had sex back then, and compounded my misery by saying she left me because she got bored waiting. She went off with the school caretaker's son, Glenn Pluck, a monobrow whose name was a limerick writer's dream. Children can be very cruel.
Twenty years later, this vague sense of generalised envy is still with me, but now the source of my discontent is money. Everyone has more of it than me. They are out there splashing their cash around, buying second homes in the Dordogne, new Audi R8s and business class flights to New York while I get along getting by month after month.
Oddly, this group of people is not anyone I know. My friends are pretty much on the same rung of the income ladder as me. And if any of them make any real money I will freeze them out, turning my shoulder in the style of camp 1970s game show host Larry Grayson.
I've developed a very unattractive habit of pouncing on other people's daily worries. I'm never happier than reading articles about the pitfalls awaiting high achieving businessmen, how stress is going to kill them by the age of 60 or that despite their enormous wealth they are empty inside and crave a new start, perhaps harbouring a desire to downsize and get some work life balance.
The psychologist Oliver James has a name for my condition: affluenza. He says you can never know real happiness if you are using external criteria such as money and possessions to judge your progress. James suggests that the problem is rife across the English speaking world as we are all comparing ourselves to other people and feeling sad about it.
So imagine then my genuine sense of deep joy when I read this week we were about to enter a long and very damaging recession.
I sat grinning like a loon at the picture of a city trader, head in hands, slumped across his desk, phone cords flung over his shoulder, as red numbers flashed by on the ticker behind him.
At last, after years of a dread filled bull market, I can feel with some justification that "those people" are going to be having a much harder time of it. I haven't felt so liberated in years.
Bring on the New Austerity, when we cut down on needless expenditure and ostentatious consumption, and pour our efforts in to reducing carbon emissions and leaving a positive legacy for our children. I'm all for this.
For the next few years I can sit back and rest easy, knowing "those people" are out there driving small powerless cars, recycling and eating seeds and roots; nothing to get jealous about there. Standing by while everyone else is saving the planet makes me feel guilty, but that's much easier to deal with than envy and regret.
