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‘Sam, there’s just no way we’ll get in. You’ve got to be eighteen,’ I said, deflated.

‘That’s not a problem. I know somewhere we can get fake ID,’ Sam replied confidently.

This was a tremendously thrilling and illegal prospect. Fake ID could open up the entire adult world to me. A world I was desperate to gain entry to. Thank God for Sam, he’s so cool, so well connected. We’ll hook up with his contacts at MI5 who will furnish us with new passports, new names, new identities. Identities of eighteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds who have sex, I’m going to have sex as a fake eighteen-year-old with a new name.

Maybe I could select a name that might help me seduce women, like Don Juan or even David Juan, Don’s older brother who taught him everything he knew. I could choose the name of a dynasty synonymous with wealth, like Kennedy or Getty or Rothschild. I could choose a family name that has become a successful brand, like Cadbury, Ford or Guinness. I could be a Freud or a Von Trapp. The possibilities were endless and exciting. After much deliberation, I decided to keep my first name. Michael was a name I was used to. I liked it and I was worried that if I changed my name to, say, Jake, I might confuse myself unnecessarily. I imagined myself dancing in a nightclub just off the King’s Road when a gorgeous eighteen-year-old girl approaches: ‘Hi, it’s Jake, isn’t it? I want to have sex with you.’

‘No, I’m Michael, I think you’ve got the wrong guy,’ I reply. ‘No, wait, I actually am Jake, look, look at my fake ID, I mean ID.’ I couldn’t risk it.

So it was decided my new name would be Michael Casio-Sony. I decided to take advantage of my oriental looks and pretend to be heir to both the Casio and Sony empires after my mother, Kati Casio, married my father, Ray Cameron Sony, in a ceremony that started precisely on time and where the music for the first dance was listened to on Walkmans.

‘Where are we going to get the fake ID from?’ I asked Sam.

‘The YHA,’ Sam said.

‘The what?’ I questioned.

‘The YHA, the Youth Hostel Association,’ Sam explained.

‘What is that?’ I asked.

‘It’s the association of youth hostels, what do you think it is? You just join up and fill in your details and apparently they then give you a card with your details on,’ Sam explained.

‘How does that help us?’ I was genuinely confused.

‘You don’t give them your real details, you give them a fake name and date of birth, and then they give you a card with whatever you told them written on it. Bingo, fake ID.’

It might not have been the passport issued by Q from James Bond that I was hoping for, but it seemed worth a shot. Although I was worried that even if the nightclub bouncer believed we were eighteen, did he really want to let in people who were members of the Youth Hostel Association, was that really the kind of clientele this trendy hotspot was looking for? I wanted to look like someone who was going to be drinking cocktails and chatting up girls, not someone seeking shelter.

Sam and I headed down to YHA headquarters in central London and joined the massive queue of foreigners lugging enormous backpacks. I bought my passport-size photo and filled out my form with the key lies. Name: Michael Casio-Sony, D.O.B: 21/2/1974. When I finally reached the front of the queue, I handed over my false information and, just as Sam had said, it was instantly processed with no questions asked. Within minutes, we were both fully fledged YHA members. With a bit of luck, we would be handed cards to use as fake ID to get into nightclubs, and as an added bonus, if we pulled, we could take the lucky ladies to over 20,000 youth hostels worldwide.

We were indeed handed official-looking YHA memberships that displayed our photos, our new names and ages. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the membership card was an enormous piece of paper, about A4 size. It was basically a certificate. But we had queued for most of the day, we’d come this far, it was too late to back out. We