One of the great things about getting older is no longer feeling under any obligation to try to like stuff you were doomed never to like. Steely Dan, Dickens, Stravinsky, Henry James, George Eliot, Wagner, the Grateful Dead, Robin Williams, the collected films of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, Graham Greene, the Clash, The Young Ones, Seinfeld, Emily Dickinson – obviously I could go on. I don’t like them; I never did like them; but the difference between then and now is that now I know I’m right, whereas then I thought it might be a personal deficiency.

Also fairly high on my ‘No’ list would be superhero comics, superhero movies and late-1980s graphic novels, including the excessively fawned-upon Watchmen. This was in the period of my life when I was trying to eke out my last flush of youth by growing my hair long, wearing black DM boots, dropping LSD and going to indie gigs (while trying to hold down a job at the Telegraph). If you did those things, it was sort of taken for granted that you were also into contemporaneous literature like Tank Girl (a comic about a skinny girl with a stupid haircut and a tank who had sex with kangaroos, or something) and the Sandman comic book series of Neil Gaiman. But I wasn’t.

Today I feel........

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