Paula Cocozza on the beach in Worthing, the town where she grew up Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Paula Cocozza on the beach in Worthing, the town where she grew up Photograph: Peter Flude/The Guardian The year I turned 18 Life and style 18 again: I returned to my life in 1990. Who - and what - would I find there? I doused myself in Poison perfume and made the trip back to my childhood home, friends and college. What could I learn by re-immersing myself in a world that brimmed with hope and potential?
Prefer the Guardian on Google T he house in which I turned 18 was full of clocks. Dark wooden things with aged faces. Every room ticked. If you stood in certain doorways, you could hear all the misaligned second hands racing. I could not understand why anyone would want to count away life like that or decorate their living quarters with so many symbols of mortality.
There was no escaping time. Shortly before each hour, a mechanical whir heralded the first chime. We lived in a retirement town with an elderly and conservative population, which amplified the ticking. Worthing, on the south coast of England, was known as “God’s waiting room”. Death was there in our wide, slow roads and low bungalows, the grey sea mists and blue rinses.
But I was young, and I scorned the clocks. Time was no master of mine. I answered only to love. And poetry. And fashion. And boys I liked.
At least, I think I’ve got that right. But how well does any of us remember being 18? For 17 years, we set our sights on that beacon of independence, the coruscating wonder of adulthood and all the freedom we imagine it entails. But within a few years, the day slips from view.
How did you celebrate? What did you wish for? Who did you hope to be? And if, like me, you’ve lost all memory of your 18th and need an HRT patch, creatine powder and phone alarms to recall anything, can you get it back? Over the past month, I have tried to return to April 1990 – when I became an adult – to turn back the clocks and rediscover what life was like then. And what I was like.
Sadly, no one has invented the machine for this yet. But no worries. I have other tools: vintage Poison eau de cologne, a clutch of letters I wrote and never posted, photographs, books, college reports, my teenage poems, Facebook, a bottle of Southern Comfort and a bag of granny smith apples.
With these, I hope to send myself back in time, to visit my old best friend, and the guy I loved, and to experience life, however fleetingly, as my 18-year-old self experienced it. I hope to see again how the world looked to my peers and me as we hatched into adulthood – right there at the dawn of the 90s, a decade coveted by natives of every decade since, but from which I longed to teleport to the 60s.
The cap’s off the purple flask, wrists doused with Christian Dior’s Poison. I’m on my way. “Most sensory inputs go first to an area of the brain called the thalamus,” says Catherine Loveday, a podcast host and professor specialising in memory. “Smell goes directly to the memory centres.” I’ve been catapulted into my 18-year-old body. It’s a blitz. A spritz of pure joy and promise. I keep sniffing my own wrist: I can’t get enough of me. I smell dramatic. Strong. Sweet. Potent. Ready. Something is going to happen .
Drenched in plum and spicy tuberose, I drive the 60 miles from my home in London to Worthing. At the general election in 2024, Worthing West got its first ever Labour MP, partly due to…