I went to see A Complete Unknown this weekend. The music was rendered brilliantly, Timothee Chalamet inhabited the character of Dylan compellingly and Edward Norton was astonishing as Pete Seeger. And I felt welling emotion watching it.

I first was really aware of Dylan in the 70s, when I was most intensely interested in music for the first time more generally. However I didn’t really like 70s Dylan. I particularly didn’t like the arrangements on Bob Dylan at Budokan (Live), which seemed to be omnipresent at times. I then got interested again in the 80s when he repelled many of his fans with the religious records and went back to the 60s stuff on the back of that, which resonated with me very deeply. In the 90s and noughties I got interested all over again with Time Out Of Mind and Modern Times. I finally got to see him play in 2010 in Birmingham and, like most people who tried, failed to get tickets to see him last year in Wolverhampton. And that is my history with Bob. However this piece isn’t really about that.

In A Complete Unknown we see Dylan arrive in New York in 1961 at the age of 20 and follow him all the way to the July 1965 Newport Folk Festival when he went electric for the first time at the age of 24. So these are the doings of a very young man, whom Joan Baez refers to as “kind of an asshole” in the film.

This got me thinking about what I did between the ages of 20 and 24. To quote another Dylan line, I “just kind of wasted my precious time”. I wasted most of it at the University of Oxford. I had spent seven very happy years at a school in Oxford before going there, five of them actually living in the city as a boarder, so my unhappiness was definitely with the people and institutions of the university rather than their location. And I was seen as so much of an asshole myself that I left with no friends from my university days other than people I had known before going there and a group of chemists from a different college who I ended up sharing a house with in my middle year because noone in my own college wanted to.

However unlike Dylan, whose assholery clearly had a purpose and was for him a way of getting his art done in the way he wanted to do it, mine was of a more self-pitying unproductive kind. I hated the structures the very confident people were building around me but followed them anyway, all the way into my first job which was for a company which made ID cards for the Chilean and Syrian regimes. I realise now, thanks to the excellent Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough among many other things I have read since, that I was being prepared for a career of facilitating power and, although I would not have been able to articulate this at the time, I like to think that I resented this on some level even then.

It took me another 20 years to recover from my university education and those structures of power seem more confident than ever. However now I realise how brittle that confidence is and how little we know about the foundations we base it on, I feel much more optimistic about the prospects for challenging it and putting something kinder in its place.

I went for a walk to mull over how to finish this piece earlier and today I got a bit of help. Heading back via the newsagents where I like to monitor the front pages each day, I was just taking in how they all seemed to be celebrating the return of the three Israeli hostages when a man pushed past me and grabbed a Daily Mail from the front of the pile. As he turned back on his way to the till he glared at me and snarled “You’re supposed to buy them you know”, before stomping off.

By the time this gets to some of you via your inboxes Donald Trump will have been sworn in as the 47th President of the United States (POTUS), eight years on from when he became the 45th. The UK will be facilitating him like crazy over the next four years, just like we have facilitated the destruction of Gaza over the last 15 months, all cheered on by most of the media. But we don’t have to buy what they’re selling.