Want to feel like a teenager again? Just dig out the books you were forced to read at school | Nell Frizzell

All it takes is a few pages of Animal Farm and I’m 14 again, braces on my teeth and longing in my heart

This isn’t one of those social media writing challenges or book trends you’ve missed such as NaNoWriMo or #ReadWomen. But perhaps it should be. Re-reading the opening chapter of Animal Farm is like turning the page on an old photo album. There I am, a teenager in an ill-fitting Punkyfish T-shirt, under my white nylon school shirt. My hair is tied up with plastic butterfly clips, my armpits smell of my mum’s Amplex deodorant, and there is the near-constant taste of blood in my mouth thanks to the loose wires of my braces slicing the flesh on the inside of my cheek.

Reading about Boxer and Clover’s quiet love, I am filled once again with longing for a miscellaneous boy in skater trainers, who listens to Finley Quaye and flicks his curtains out of his eyes so regularly that he’s developing a new muscle down the side of his neck. And yet, aged 39, much of the book strikes me in a totally new way. Since that first reading I have actually been to Russia; I have been in a union; I have sat through interminable local government meetings; and I have mixed cement on a building site. Not to mention reading the rest of Orwell’s books. So much of the political nuance, the simplicity of the prose, the postwar depiction of the English countryside slipped past me when I was 14.

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