“In the canteen, we swap the labels round on the cheese sauce and custard, then observe students tucking into novel combinations.”

It’s 1984, and oddball undergraduate Phil has it all. He’s on course for a stellar degree. He’s engaged to spirited, unconventional Wendy. And with best buddy Noel, he’s having shedloads of anarchic fun.

But the days are ticking down, and Phil must soon return to his Black Country hometown. Then there’s the problem of Helen – mesmerising, seductive, and Wendy’s complete opposite. As his perfect life begins to unravel, can Phil keep avoiding grown-up realities? More to the point, should he?

Sweary, joyful, and filled with inexcusable behaviour, The Best Nuisance I Can Be is adapted from Phil Minty’s real college diaries. Alongside the daftness, these 275 journal entries form a bittersweet story of love, self-deception, and the struggle to find one’s true home.

Join Phil and Noel as they love, laugh, and steal anything that isn’t nailed down.

Welcome back to the eighties!

Four decades ago, we drove around in cramped death-trap cars, and wrote letters to friends, and rang home from payphones, and looked things up in books, and watched four channels on a telly that had knobs. Our parents didn’t quite get Boy George, and talked about the miners’ strike and that Maggie Thatcher, and were already ancient but would never die..

The Best Nuisance I Can Be lands a nostalgic gut-punch, evoking those far-off days when life was objectively worse than it is now… and yet somehow so much better.

A tale for the terminally uncool.

1980s students loved booze, hated the Tories, and had BMIs lower than Gandhi’s. That was the law.

Back then, anyone from the Black Country loved football, going to the pub, and being from the Black Country. That was the law too.

But Black Country student Phil doesn’t drink, couldn’t care less about the Tories, and has un-studenty muscles. He doesn’t understand football or pub culture, and wishes he wasn’t from West Bromwich.

At college, he’s terminally uncool. At home, he’s a freak.

Phil’s story is one for all the squares and weirdos out there, those of us who never quite fitted in… and didn’t want to!

Being twenty-one.

Phil’s diary is a love-poem to life in our early twenties, that sublime interlude between adolescence and settling down. An age when we’re unstoppable, indestructible, nuclear-powered by youth. Best of all, we’re old enough to know the sensible choices… and young enough to ignore them.

Imagine you’re old enough to be nostalgic for the eighties, that you enjoy stories of college shenanigans, and that you were (or remain) a bit of a misfit. Do you think any of this would appeal? Let me know in the comments or drop me a line.