Two.

Note to self: never forget to turn off your mobile phone alarm when you have someone sharing your bed for the first time.

The morning after my birthday party, which had ended with a small cluster of wellwishers taking to a darkened Soho dance floor whilst I got close to a best friend's Cambridge manfriend, I woke up at eight to the sound of my phone alarm going off downstairs. I turned over, sleepily, and saw said manfriend still asleep.

Bugger.

I ran downstairs to switch it off, but it was too late, my family had been wakened. As long as I could keep them out of my room, I figured, all would be fine. Both other occupants of my family home were due to go out that morning, all I had to do was keep up the lie-in until I'd heard the door slam a couple of times, and the two of us could make it downstairs in peace for some top class instant coffee and a bowl of branflakes. Delicious, I thought. Unfortunately, this was clearly not meant to be.

After returning to the bed upstairs I heard the slow plod of my early rising mother descending downstairs. One down, I thought, only my sister to go and I'd be safe.

Two minutes later however, there came the horrified shriek of a menopausal woman possessed. "Whose shoes are these?!" she bellowed. Shit.

I leapt over the manfriend, sprinted below and tried to reason with my mother. It didn't work. Two minutes later came the "I want him out of my house, now!"

Always a great way to introduce a guy to the family at ten past eight in the morning after very little sleep. I haven't heard from him since.

One.

Last year, somewhere between my fourth and fifth gin and tonic at my final year prom, I decided it was a good idea to discuss the disastrous all-consuming problem I had spent the last three weeks despairing over, with my headteacher.

"The problem, sir, is that I met this fantastic man in a club. I had to lie about my age; he didn't know I was a decade younger than him and still at school. He was, is, a brilliantly intellectual graduate who I lusted after as soon as Madonna was turned off and the club lights turned back on. I had to turn down his stay-over invite to catch the night bus home, in order to complete the A Level revision targets I'd set for myself that day. Two days later my mum dropped me off at a party in Hackney after a trip to see a West End musical, a friend at the party drove me to Camden, I met up with this guy, ended up staying over, losing any innocence I had once had and leaving home in the morning feeling blistering embarrassment. And, it's now been three weeks and the only time he contacts me is super early in the morning when he's drunk and horny, and to be quite frank, I don't know what to do."

Not quite what my headmaster might have expected from his head girl.

"Live life like a novel," he said, "what happens next, the following chapters are up to you. See it as an adventure."

And that is what I have decided this blog will be. An ode to adventure and disappointment and excitement and success that marks my nineteenth year.

To being 19, and to living life like a novel.

Cheers.