Leave me alone, I don't want to find myself

Every day we tread a veritable minefield of clich potential, aware that with everything we choose to wear, say, buy, eat, write or perform in the dairy aisle of Tesco, a great cavernous clich will open up like a bear trap below our little feet and crunch us firmly in its jaws for the world to point, laugh at and draw comedy felt-tip moustaches upon.

Which is another clich. Drat.

In trying to sidestep one big hole of clich (going to a sports night to play bar footsie wearing a rugby shirt and pair of Claire's Accessories light-up deely boppers, say) you inevitable fall straight into another one while feeling smug about the first (those who feel smug and superior for not going to a sports night to play bar footsie wearing a rugby shirt and pair of Claire's Accessories light-up deely boppers but instead spend the evening getting excited about a half-price avocado in the Budgens bargain bin, say).

There comes a point where you believe the only existing escape will be to buy 34 cats and a bungalow, call yourself Maude, and enter the realms of a entirely different clich universe in order to leave this one behind.

Besides, the Women's Institute has a nice way with chutney.

Of all the taxonomical divisions which befall the average student body '“ state school vs public school, drink vs drugs, beefy sports types vs people who non-ironically wear USB sticks round their necks, daddy's money vs the government's/Mecca Bingo's/ much older, secretly married boyfriend's money '” perhaps none is so obvious or clich-ridden than the quietly seething division of: gap year vs came straight here.

So poor old Max Gogarty.

He's the now-famous chump given his own blog on Guardian website in which to document his gap-year travels, who in his first 24 hours live on the net the other week managed to accumulate nearly 500 comments of pure, venomous cyber-hate.

"I'm 19 and I live on top of a hill in North London," he chirruped in his opening.

First mistake '” only posh bods live on top of hills in North London.

I should know, I live halfway up a hill in North London, and it's me they spit at from their horse-drawn helicopters on their way to St Barts.

Apart from the crimes of spending his money on "food, booze and skinny jeans" (that's why indie boys shouldn't go gap yearing '” have you any idea how badly drainpipe denim will chafe in monsoon season, chaps?), shock horror, having a father on the Guardian staff, and having the journalistic talent you'd expect of someone who claims to "write bits for Skins", young Gogarty seemed to offend largely because there is nothing more arm-knawingly, scab-peelingly boring than listening to other people's gap year stories.

Or, as one venomous blog-reader put it: "it's funny how by labelling it 'travelling', people somehow attach some sort of profundity to their couple of months lounging and partying in the sun."

I'll hold my hands (relatively clean, free of henna, mud from a Somalian school yard or the blood of a Thai security offical) up now and say I Didn't Have A Gap Year.

There are many reasons for this, depending on whose company I am in, but largely they consist of a) if I'd stopped the chundering ferris wheel of learning to get off and play for a year, I would never, ever, have buckled myself willingly back in again.

As it is, I still forget how to write after every three-week holiday.

Education is like an Elastoplast '” rip it all off in one swift, 17-year motion or dilly-dally about and suffer the drawn-out, hair-pulling agony of the bit-by-bit approach.

And b) I have no desire to find myself.

I'm fairly happy with the self I've got right now, sub-par though she clearly is, because she doesn't boss me around or judge when I eat peanut butter and cake mix straight from the fridge with a spoon.

To go to the effort of finding myself, in whichever paddy field or rainforest or trip round the Neighbours set she might lurk, is to risk the possibility that I might not like her.

I've a feeling she'd be self-righteous.

Then I would have to fund another whole trip to lose her again.

It just isn't practical.

Besides, I'm lacking all the vital elements that obviously make that backpacking clich worthwhile '” skinny jeans, a nice hill view, and some nepotism from the national press.

Until that day I shall stay put and concentrate on those chutney recipes.