In my diary on August 17th 2000, I wrote: "I wish I had the Sixth Form all over again. I might just do it differently. In fact, I wish I could do everything from Year Nine onwards again." That day I had got my A-Level results. I had been predicted C's and D's across the board. I had got a place on a course at the University of North London that required I get 12 points. I got three A grades and one C. That's 36 points. I had been more over the moon about my merely average GCSE grades.

As I left my high school for the last time, I could see things clearly for the first time. I realised I had been living the perpetuated lie of the establishment all my life. Though I wrote that night how I wished I could repeat everything from 1995 onwards, what I should have meant was 1981, or at least, 1986.

I am the product of a bad education. It wasn't bad by the traditional sense in that I didn't learn anything, but in the sense that I learnt the wrong things, and was never given the intellectual means to realise this.

From 1986 until 1993, I went to St Mary's, Prittlewell in Southend. In hindsight, I can't believe that school was allowed to remain open. Nothing has given me more disdain of cosmopolitan socialism than the one-size-fits-all education that was applied by an Old Labour headmaster in that dreadful, dreadful little Church of England school.

A smart kid and a needy kid both have different demands that can not be met if you try to educate everyone at the same pace. The needy kid won't be able to keep up and the smart kid will be left bored. And that about sums up my education at St Mary's, particularly in my final year, when I learnt absolutely nothing, and spent my entire time doing arts and helping with a concert. I don't blame my teacher for this. She obviously realised the needy kids required her attention more than I did.

This isn't an elitist criticism on my part. There's nothing remotely pompous about flushing away with the sewage an education system that left so many students, for all intents and purposes, illiterate, and not because they were stupid, but just because they didn't get an education tailored for them. St Mary's was a school for Joe Average, and everyone else suffered in the name of equality of provision.

So obviously I was delighted when I passed the 11+ in 1993 and got into Southend High School for Boys, one of four local grammar schools. As far as I was concerned, I was getting an education tailored for my abilities, and everyone in the town's comprehensives was getting one tailored for theirs. My overall opinion of that school didn't change until that results day in 2000.

I don't oppose the principle of streamed education. Southend High's faults lay not in the relative quality of its teaching, but in the fact that it only really taught one thing, anyway: subservience to the system, fear of authority, adherence to the lie. Sometimes I wonder if, as they taught quadratic equations and covalent bonding, the teachers in that school knew it was all rubbish, and that the more important lesson was in developing an automatous Pavlovian response in the students: do as you're told, conform, or face the consequences.

And I bought right into the lie, because I was afraid. I jumped through all the hoops for those teachers because I feared what would happen if I didn't. I revelled in the meritocratic competitiveness that was encouraged, as if my worth as a person could only be measured in relation to how (and what) everyone else was doing. The pecking order of the establishment was being drilled into us. Know Your Place was the only real lesson that school was teaching, every hour, every day, every year, and probably still is. But I doubt it's alone in that.

My final two years, in the Sixth Form, most typify this. I became so fixated on the final goal that I couldn't see the wood for the trees. This was to the alienation of most of my friends, who had perhaps recognised the lie already, but likewise, had not been given the means to articulate it. Or perhaps they had, and I just wasn't ready to listen.

When the teachers at Southend High told me I was going to get C's and D's, I believed them, as authority figures, and my response was to work harder. I was afraid of getting C's and D's, afraid of what that would mean. I believed the central lie of the education system - that if you underachieve in school, you will have no future. Perhaps today's politicians should realise that perhaps today's kids are so disillusioned because they believe the lie, but unlike me, don't fear it. They see it's just a ruse to control them. I feared it because I didn't want to be at the bottom of the establishment's pecking order. But that pecking order's only there if you choose (or are taught) to see it to begin with.

In the end, I didn't get those A grades because I worked harder. It was my A-Level History result that gave it away. I had written three essays of my usual quality (i.e. C/D), and then blagged a fourth on a subject I knew little about. I went to get my results expecting to get the C/D grade I was predicted. Instead I got an A. I quickly realised I had obviously spent my entire career at Southend High meaning nothing to these teachers, just another amorphous blob to process through the machine. I dropped out of the University of North London a few days later.

My subsequent, impromptu gap year proved to be a journey of self-discovery, not to spare a hoary cliché. Whilst I had spent the Sixth Form deluding myself that I was still a part of the lives of everyone I had alienated, when they went off to university in September, I was left alone. It was a year of even more introspection than usual, and not always of the healthy variety. Much of it was depressing, as I found the world I thought I lived in unravelling when looked upon from this new perspective.

In the end I jumped back into the education stream, for the first year of university because I didn't know what else to do, and latterly because it proved to be a lesser demand on my time than a job. I got a place on an English Literature and Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and was quick to learn that only a dozen of several hundred applicants make it. It took me a few months more to realise I was just sitting on another production line regardless.

There were no creative writing modules in the first year. The one I did in the second year was terrible. And all the while the bureaucrats who run the university were badgering me into doing this unit and that unit, and I didn't want to do any of it. I knew by my second year what I wanted to do. I found it patronising when I kept being told what I must do, as if I had to meet certain requirements to prove I was sufficiently literarily aware to win one of their precious degrees.

Despite disillusionment, I stuck with it. My course required sitting in a seminar for just a couple of hours two or three times a week and submitting 5000 words for each unit at the end of the semester. The rest of the time was my own. I took up the guitar at the beginning of my second year. And at the end of it I started writing a 145,000 word fantasy novel. I wrote more in between my second and third year at university than I did in the previous five years combined.

Writing is what I do. I toyed with wanting to be everything from a computer programmer, to a detective, to a marine biologist, but my first ever story was about a shark attack, inspired by "Jaws", so I didn't really want to be any of those other things. I just liked the idea of spending a little while in another world. And that's what writing is to me. For a while, unsurprisingly coinciding with my Sixth Form days, I was overly concerned with having to say something with my writing. I think I've got over that pretension now. Now it's just about the words.

I know exactly what I want to be writing ten years from now. But I know I couldn't write it now because I lack the sufficient life experience to plunder. Imagination's only half of writing. The wisdom of experience can't be blagged. Life isn't like a box of chocolates; it's like a bottle of wine. You could drink a glass and tell me how it tastes, and I could write down exactly what you say, but I still wouldn't know myself. So I'm more open to life's potentialities these days. I've learnt not to say "No" by default. I'd rather see the real world in all its glories and depravities than go on living in a safe and cosy fantasy land.

I remember writing in teenage diaries how I longed to be rich, but whilst friends said they would rather be rich doing a boring job than poor doing the thing they loved most, I secretly disagreed. Being rich was just another passing fantasy for me. I'd be happy scraping a subsistence level income working part-time so that I can devote time to my writing. I don't think I will ever have a proper career, a fat wage packet, a nice home, nor do I think I will ever live within the 9-to-5 structure.

Like I said, I've already wasted twenty years being everyone else.