"To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, we would like to oppose the story of Abraham leaving his family for ever to go to a still unknown land and forbidding his servant to take even his son back to the point of departure." Emmanuel Levinas, "On the Trail of the Other."

I hate Thatcher. I hate her primary teacher voice. I hate her castrated cabinet ministers. I hate our house. I hate the mock-Georgian front door. I hate the permanent polythene sheeting on the furniture. I hate my parents. I hate my Dad's small mindedness. I hate his black and white World War II films. I hate his attempts at middle-brow humour. I hate his herd-like Judaism, going to synagogue because you do it because you did it because you do it. I hate my Mum. I hate her obsession with diets. I hate the way she's swept along by every stupid fad and trend. I hate her cretinous friends, as empty and shallow as she is. I hate their slavery to imagined middle-class standards of thirty years ago. I hate my Dad's confusion about what happened to his business, and his blindness to what England in the 80's has become. I hate Arsenal.

I love my donkey jacket. I love the Doc Martens that I bought from Camden Market and the cheerful kick in the teeth they give to everything that's important to my parents. I love going into Luigi's caff, ordering eggs, bacon sausages, beans, chips and mushy peas in a well-hard voice, and feeling like I almost belong there. I love Ally Jones who comes down the caff at lunch time. I love the alluring looseness in the curl of her upper lip. I think I love the girl who was before me at my Oxford interview. I love the well-aimed word which demolishes stupidity or pretentiousness. I love the thrill of the hair standing up on the back of my neck when I read a poem and its power to transport me to a world beyond this crappy one where I live. I love the lines "When the stars threw down their spears/ And watered heaven with their tears," whatever the hell they mean.

I wish I had loadsa money. I wish I could buy all the records I wanted and blast them out as loud as I wanted from a set of top-of-the-line Wharfedale speakers. I wish I wasn't still a virgin. I wish I had a girlfriend. I wish I wasn't so lonely, I wish somebody understood me. I wish I didn't have to explain all the craziness and horror in my family. I wish there was world peace. I wish I could leave home and never come back. I wish there was something I could do which I knew really mattered, which would silence the voice inside that says "it's a waste of time, get stoned, go slit your wrists in a warm bath." I wish that I could write better. I wish the aching seething with undirected passion would flood out of my pen in prose of heart-wrenching and pellucid beauty.

Yesterday was Live Aid. Everyone was there, Sting, U2, Bowie, Jagger, McCartney, Quo...Even the Who got back together for it, which is pretty incredible considering what they've been saying about each other since Keith Moon ended up at the bottom of a swimming pool.

There were some incredible moments. Like when Geldof stopped "I don't like Mondays" in the middle, and the words "and the lesson today is how to die" seemed to hang in the ears of a billion people, a total, savage indictment of our society.

And also there was the saddest thing I've ever seen. This video of an Ethiopian kid trying to walk only he was too weak and he kept falling over and trying to push himself up with his matchstick arms, taking a couple of tottering steps then falling down again. Over this, the Cars track "Who's gonna pick you up when you fall? ..Can't go on, thinking that nothing's wrong…" Me and Dana were bawling.

Dad walked in at the end of the clip, watched for a moment, swallowed hard, then said "I know, it's really terribly sad, what's happening in Ethiopia, and I'm sure all these pop singers mean well, but the real problem is that they've got a Marxist government over there which doesn't want the food to get to people.

I went ballistic and started yelling at him about what a disgusting fascist he is and how anyone with an ounce of compassion in their little finger nail would be selling their house, their car and the clothes off their back, right now, this second and sending the proceeds to Live Aid and that if Thatcher hadn't sadistically clawed back the VAT from the "Do they Know it's Christmas" single, that little boy on the screen would probably still be alive today. Then he gave me this nauseatingly condescending speech about how he would have expected an intelligent boy like me not get swept up in all this mass hysteria.

Dad poked his head in again for the finale when Jagger, Geldof, and everyone all came back on stage and sang "Let It Be." He squinted at the T.V. then asked "Isn't that Paul McCartney?" "Very good, Dad", mocked Dana. Dad sauntered out of the room, looking dead chuffed with himself.

Since Live Aid, I've been agonising about whether or not to take a year off before university. I mean, I'm 18 and I'm working in Toys R Us at Brent Cross, selling Rubik's cubes to affluent brats from Hampstead Garden Suburb, while people in Ethiopia are actually starving to death. It's obscene. Obviously, anyone with a shred of a social conscience should be in Ethiopia right now. And if do go, then I will surely sweep into Oxford haloed in her eyes. On the other hand, I just don't know if I could face arriving at university, a nineteen year old virgin!!! Aaaaahh!!!

Non-stop orgy of family celebrations since my results came out yesterday. Mum and Dad sent me a huge congratulations card covered with top-hatted furry animals drinking champagne. Dad wrote in it "By your wonderful results and your success in gaining a place at de Savage College, Oxford, you've made us the proudest, happiest family imaginable." They've even put an announcement in the Jewish Chronicle, in between the forthcoming Bar Mitzvas and deaths.

I admit it: I'm excited too. For the honour that this lustrous achievement has conferred on my parents, my community and the entire Jewish people? Not likely. My excitement springs from visceral certainty that Oxford is where I will finally lose it, it, IT. And the conviction carries with it a vision that has refused to leave me in the eight months since I saw it, of a pair of dancing green eyes.

My interview at de Savage was an experience that I have almost entirely obliterated. All I remember is a blur of chilly shopping streets, fake Christmas trees, supercillious porters and public school bastards trying to psyching you out ("What, you haven't read Sheridan? Oh dear, what a pity. Of course he is Dr. Gray's favourite Restoration Dramatist.") And through the haze, those eyes still shine as bright as emeralds, belonging to a Mancunian named Siobhan who gazed at me in the lineup outside Dr. Gray's door with awestruck admiration at the way I faced down the toffs winding me up about Sheridan, eyes suffused with the promise that if the two of us came through this ordeal, (and she survived her impending mission of mercy to Mexico City with Christian Aid), then come the following October….