“I’d never want to be a part of any club that would have someone like me for a member.”

It was with this immortal witticism from Woody Allen, attributed to Groucho Marx, that a neurotic monster was unleashed within my head. Perhaps that’s not quite fair; the monster may have been there all along, and Allen’s words simply anchored the previously unspoken feeling.

Whichever the case, I soon became obsessed with the world as presented in Allen’s cinema. Aren’t we all just neurotic, nerdy, bumbling messes bumping around from love-affair to love-affair, wounded and desperately craving the unobtainable?

Perhaps there was another path. Perhaps, If I had never turned on Annie Hall that day (and then devoured everything from Play It Again Sam to Hannah and Her Sisters in rapid succession), I could have lived a life free from obsession about what people say and what they really meant, free from self-analysis, free from the bitter-sweet cocktail of romantic idealism and bleak cynicism.

With the never ending patter of Allen’s self-assessment whirling in my head I encounter the world now as an ideal which will ultimately disappoint me – but which can’t disappoint too harshly as long as I look at it with the right soundtrack. I fell in love with Paris listening to Si Tu Vois Ma Mere, and my recent summer in New York was irrevocably coloured by Manhattan. Walking the streets with my boyfriend I kept feeling compelled to adopt an Annie Hall-esque persona (which I’m sure pleased him no end), and felt sure that behind every closed apartment door, lurking beneath every private dinner conversation, hid a world of dysfunctional relationships and beautiful but psychologically questionable women.

Strangely, I don’t see this as a negative thing. I see Allen’s determination to idealise the world, his dedication to the perfect voice-over and the even more perfect sound track, his irreverent and self-depreciating humour, as the keys to navigating this harsh and often unforgiving place.