Dear Tom,

Snap out of it! With all due respect you are an upstart. You are impatient, a know-it-all, quick to anger, often lacking in critical judgement before rushing in with your loud-mouthed arguments, often embryonic to the point of uselessness.

You are severely lacking in social skills, and you are of the opinion – of course you are! – that it is everyone else who is wrong, and not you. Not poor, sweet, kind, innocent you.

You feel as though your peers are beneath you, and there are tiny salient threads of truth to these thoughts, but as you will find out in time, it is this superiority complex that is your greatest downfall when it comes to making friends. The people you share classrooms with, these Alien, spectral figures who leave you be for the most part, these things that seem to vanish altogether the moment you leave the classroom only to magically reappear, coalesce in to their belligerent, disruptive, corporeal forms again at the start of every school day; they could be of such infinite value to you if you only start treating them as equals. Give it some thought, will you?

I have little else to say on social matters – what is there to discuss? I have only one more point to make, and it is this – in a week, your (own?) parents will move you from your fancy private all boys school, to the sixth form down the road. I remember well the anxiety of these transitional months; the horror stories you will conjour up of falling foul of some illegitimate gang of youths and winding up in a gutter somewhere. Let me tell you now, not to worry. It will be the sudden cultural displacement that will ultimately lead to many a miniature epiphany on your part. Without wishing to spoil the journey for you too much, you’ll learn that people will almost always respect you if you respect them. You’ll learn that people who over the years you’ve shunned for being on some lower spiritual plane than you were actually people you could have been great friends with (and you’ll realise how awful it was of you to even think like that). You’ll learn about girls. You’ll learn that they aren’t looking for some mythical ‘nice guy’, and you’ll realise that they just want to be treated like (gasp!) ordinary people. You’ll learn about boys, too. You’ll start meeting ones you like, and as time goes on, you’ll meet people who like you back. You’ll have girlfriends. You’ll grow into a much kinder, more considerate person, made all the better by another in what will be a never-ending stream of epiphanies – the realisation that you will always be inconsiderate by nature, and being a decent person is a constant struggle. Right now, you wish you could immerse yourself in the adult world, because you feel you are ready to take your place there. Know this – the more you learn about yourself, the more you’ll realise that your path to adulthood is only just beginning, and you know what? I still don’t know when it’s going to end.

Best of luck!