A few weeks ago, when the summer was autumnal and my reserves were depleted, I watched the entire second season of Heartstopper in a week. The feel-good drama about two teenage boys and their semi-secret relationship is a wildly successful adaptation from the web-comic and graphic novels by Alice Oseman. I wasn’t aware of them before they appeared on Netflix last year, but I rapidly became such a fan that when I saw the books being printed during a research trip last summer I was genuinely excited.

I’m pretty heterosexual, all told. I’m very aware that, in its joyful, sensitive and nuanced presentation of navigating queerness as a teenager, Heartstopper will mean something far more deeply for LGBTQ+ people. Still, I’m so glad Oseman’s work exists - for today’s young people who get to read about different kinds of love stories. I wish it had when I was younger; Section 28, Thatcher’s legislation that prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” from the year I was born (1988) was in place until I was 15. It had many grim effects, but one of them was banning teachers from educating or even talking to children about homosexuality, as well as making it very difficult to properly counter homophobic bullying.

It’s this context that makes those moments in Heartstopper where teachers (some of them LGBTQ+) console and sympathise with the heartache of their pupils quite so moving. In one scene, a pupil curates a table of LGBTQ+ literature in the school library. I found it so bold and brilliant to watch - Section 28 caused libraries to hide books that “promoted homosexuality” from children or banish them to behind the counter. Young people who wanted to try and find themselves in book (without making a pilgrimage to fearless speciality bookshops) didn’t even have a chance.

At school a number of my social group were - among friends at least - out in not being straight. It took hindsight to realise how unusual and courageous that was for the mid-Noughties; we grew up listening to the casual homophobia of BBC prime-time broadcasters, using “gay” as a pejorative in daily parlance and consuming pop culture (Friends, American Pie) that was inherently homophobic and transphobic. Looking back, I’m struck by the bravery of those friends in being unabashedly themselves. They taught me a great deal.

Other kids our age went clubbing but we didn’t - not to Oceana, at least. If you were under 18 you had access to two perks: being served at the one pub in each local town that wouldn’t refuse you, or riding the Eurostar for half-price. We chose the latter. During the last couple of years of school we went to Paris a handful of times, scraping together our babysitting earnings and Christmas money, staying in grotty little hotels on the outskirts of town, making our way around the junk shops and stretching onion soup and chocolate fondant out into bistro dinners. We’d always visit the Palais de Tokyo, marvel at the contemporary art and buy €10 magazines to pore over in the Gare du Nord afterwards.

There’s something about Paris and teenagers that Heartstopper alights on so well. Perhaps it’s because it’s one of the more accessible foreign cities from the south of the UK (as our Eurostar fascination attested), or one of the more familiar growing up, the curved spire of the Eiffel Tower and the oddity of eating snails and frogs’ legs making it into children’s books and TV shows. We became teenagers as Amélie was released and Audrey Tautou’s perfect little bob and merry-go-round whimsy painted a new kind of longing for home counties kids desperate for something more inspiring than Milton Keynes. Heartstopper’s characters were excited about having the space to be independent, to play with notions of romance, to visit the Picasso Museum and climb the Eiffel Tower. I think we wanted that, too.

The summer after we finished A-Levels my friends and I stayed in a pink-walled hotel with tiny rooms and faded bedspreads, somewhere near the Bastille. Unlike the scenes in Heartstopper we didn’t throw a party in one of them and we didn’t kiss anyone, but we roamed the city looking very young and very English and feeling very self-conscious. I think back to that time and I remember the sweat collecting beneath the straps of my backpack and the way the light bounced off the millions of blue-grey roof tiles. I think of the hours we spent waiting in train stations to make our way to Normandy, where we read books and danced around in our pyjamas for a drizzly week.

I watched Heartstopper so quickly because it is sweet and charming and low in peril, making it perfect viewing a time when I was sleep deprived and often slightly melancholy. But I relished it because it made me wildly nostalgic for the kind of low-stakes adolescence I was fortunate enough to have. Hosting school proms on a shoestring and sacking them off to sit in the beige comfort of your friend’s living room; spontaneous dancing to favourite songs in broad daylight, because you don’t know what club culture is yet; the grand adventure of going to Paris only to feel slightly at a loss of how to be there.

Heartstopper is about growing up different in a place that resoundingly expects the norm, but it’s also about what it is to feel at odds in your body, feeling both too small and too big for the world around you. Watching it prompted me to text the friends I stayed in that hotel with, think of the low-res photos we took with blocky little digital cameras, revisit the feeling that we were living the last summer we’d have together. It turns out that we were: after that we left home, grew up, found new friends. We went clubbing instead of riding on the Eurostar for half-price.

Paris became a more familiar thing. When I go I still feel very English. When I go I still remember, a little, of what it was to land there as a teenager. A place where you could go for lunch, if a PR company with a large enough budget was inviting you. A simulacrum of a romantic holiday. For the rest of us it became both more a less: a home, a place to work for a while. One of those girls and I still trade links to certain boutique hotels there, entertaining an idle dream, perhaps to create another version of what we had.