One-shouldered shrugs

When I was thirteen I made two new friends, Natascha and Krista, who were sisters from Brighton — the polar opposite of Snowdonia, as far as I was concerned. Krista had a white-blonde bob and wore a ripped army shirt, and Natascha had a superfluous letter in her name. How much cooler could you get?

They had better shops in Brighton than in my little Welsh village. In Brighton you could buy all your clothes from the Army & Navy and get your eyebrow pierced; in Dolwyddelan you could buy half a pound of bacon and the Daily Mail. So one day the three of us were traipsing around some hippy shop when Natascha — who was a couple of years older than me and about a hundred times cooler — picked up a packet of hemp joss sticks and sniffed at them.

"Mmm," she said, breathing in. "Smells like marijuana."

Um, what? Isn't that what Kurt Cobain smoked? Or was that Heroin? Well, whatever: same thing.

"Marijuana?" I whispered, my eyes widening in awe. "You smoke marijuana?"

"Occasionally," said Natascha, giving a one-shouldered shrug and putting the incense back in the rack.

Isn't that the coolest thing you ever heard in your life? It was as if I'd asked if she ever watched Neighbours, or visited the dentist. "Occasionally," she'd said, nonchalantly. And so for the next year I practiced that one-shouldered shrug in front of the mirror, in my ripped army shirt and combats, just in case anyone should ever ask me a difficult question.

This proved useful later on, when my parents asked why I was running around dressed up like a little soldier. I never really understood that myself — wasn't the army bad? — and so I didn't let on; just gave that nonchalant one-shouldered shrug and hoped for the best.