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I am wearing short trousers today, they are moss green and reach to just above my knees, and although they are more comfortable than long trousers in the heat, there is something faintly unpleasant about them, it is as if they make me smaller, as if I am too old for them. The very term, short trousers, is infantile in its simple descriptiveness, like a word a child might have come up with, akin to foot ball, tree house, sand box, see saw. If instead I write that I am wearing shorts today, it feels somewhat less childish, and if I add that they are army green it no longer sounds like I am dressed in the outfit of a ten-year-old, more like a young man in his early twenties heading for a music festival. In the mid-1990s I read a novel which made a big impression on me, and which gave form to certain inclinations and zones within me that had remained undefined until then. The novel was The Child in Time by the British author Ian McEwan. The main narrative is about the greatest fear of all parents, a child who goes missing, but what stayed in my mind was one of the novel's parallel stories, about regression and infantility – a man, who as far as I can remember was a member of parliament, regresses to his childhood, he dresses in short trousers and begins to climb trees, builds tree houses in them, plays the games he played as a boy. It seemed grotesque to me, for his fall was completely stripped of dignity to an extent and in a way quite different from a descent into alcoholism or drug addiction. At the same time it held a certain allure for me, for not only was I filled with a powerful nostalgia for everything to do with my childhood – the smell of melting snow and the sight of the white ice banks from which water trickled into the road beneath a foggy sky, for example, might produce a yearning to return to the time when I experienced the same thing as a child, so strong that it hurt – I also longed to be taken care of as I had been then. Not explicitly, the longing wasn't even articulated until I read The Child in Time , and all these vague, unacknowledged emotions flowed into the novel's mould so that I could see them from the outside as something objectively existing in the world. The grotesque side of it was also apparent to me. The adult who wants to be a child is even more grotesque than the old person who wants to be young, an insight I had used to write my first novel, in which the longing to be a child again is transformed into longing for a child – I remembered the intense feelings my very first infatuations produced in me when I was still in primary school, and I let my protagonist go there, into that zone, and fall in love with a child. Now all these yearnings and feelings seem peculiar, and when I put on short trousers this morning, since it looked like it would be another hot day, I felt a little jolt of distaste, for there is something life-denying about always looking backwards, and I had to tell myself, it's just a piece of clothing that lets you go about bare-legged. But although the nostalgia has passed, or has been weakened to the point where it is no longer recognisable, I know that there are other such unconscious inclinations and patterns within me – my whole adult life, for instance, I have entered into relationships that resemble those I was in while I was growing up, so that the person I loved came to hold the same position my father had had, as someone I wanted to placate, someone I wanted to satisfy, whom I also feared and could be spellbound by – and becoming an adult is perhaps primarily to liberate oneself from these patterns by becoming aware of them and acknowledging them, so that one can live in harmony with the person one is or wants to be, not the person one was or wanted to be in the past. The advantage of maintaining the old patterns is that they feel safe, regardless of how painful or destructive they may be. Freedom is unsafe, when one is free anything can happen, and one of the paradoxes of life, at least one of the paradoxes of my life, is that now, as I head into a free and open existence, I no longer have any use for freedom, it was during the first part of my life, until I reached my forties, while all possibilities still lay ahead of me, that I had use for it and could have enjoyed it. For what use is freedom to a middle-aged man in short trousers?