– Drunk men on the street telling me they’d never shag me
– Drunk people ‘trying on’ (stealing) my hat at parties
– Losing jewellery
– Falling out of a window
– Accidentally killing a baby
– Parlour games
– Talking about the history of American politics
– Starting fires everywhere
– Not understanding the washing machine
– Cancer
– STDs
– Biting down on wooden lolly sticks
– Plane crashes
– Plane food
– Working in an office
– Being asked if I believe in God (a bit)
– Being asked if I believe in horoscopes (a bit)
– Being asked why I believe in the above
– Going into an unarranged overdraft
– Never owning a dog
Being Björn Again
After I stopped seeing Hector, I assumed it would be only a matter of time before Farly and Scott fizzled out. I had been the glue that bonded them and when I left that grimy block of flats in Notting Hill, I assumed they’d have little left in common. But, within a few weeks, Farly dropped into conversation that they were going on a mini-break to Cambridge. Jealousy pumped through my blood system and my whole body stung like it was vinegar. I was the one who had always had a boy on the scene and yet now she was the one with an actual proper, older boyfriend. Not one who wore her knickers into work, not one who made her wear a fishnet body stocking or didn’t know her surname or only texted her once a week. Farly had a boyfriend who spent more time with her sober than not sober, who took her on mini-breaks and rang her instead of texting and wanted to have actual conversations with her.
‘What’s even in Cambridge?’ I ranted bitterly to AJ. ‘What, like, a Bella Italia? Well good luck. Have fun.’
‘What’s he like?’ AJ asked. The truth is, I barely knew.
‘Bad news,’ I said gravely. ‘Too old, too serious for her.’
And then, three months in, almost to the day, he told her he loved her. She announced it at a dinner with mates. We all toasted it and shrieked with joy – I wrote a sad soliloquy about it on my iPhone notes on the night bus home.
Although I had hated watching Farly be treated so badly by stupid teenage boys over the years – being led on, ignored, dumped – I realized there had been a safety in it. As long as boys weren’t taking any serious notice of her, I still had her all to myself. The minute a grown-up man with a brain stopped and took interest in her, I was utterly fucked. How could he not fall in love with her? She was beautiful, funny. The kindest person I knew – she had spent years lending me money to get out of trouble and picking me up at three a.m. in her car when my bus home had stopped running. She was made of the stuff that would make the perfect partner: she thought of others first; she listened; she remembered things. She left notes in my packed lunch box before I went to work and sent cards just to say how proud she was of me.
The way I had always made boys like me was with smoke and mirrors, exaggeration and bravado; heavy make-up and heavy drinking. There was no performance or lies with Farly – if a boy ended up loving her, he loved every cell of her from date one, whether he knew it or not. She was my best-kept secret, and now it was out.
We had our first row since adolescence at a Christmas party at our friend Diana’s house the following year. I was there with Leo. She arrived late with Scott and it was the first time I had seen her in a month. I made no visible effort to say hi to her but watched them out of the corner of my eye. I made a point of laughing very loudly at very unfunny things so she knew I was there and having demonstrative levels of fun without her.
When she came over, the conversation was stilted and curt.
‘Why have you been ignoring me tonight?’ she finally asked.
‘Why have you been ignoring me for a year?’ I replied.
‘What are you talking about, I texted you yesterday.’
‘Oh yes, texting. Texting, you’re great at. Texting is your “get out of jail free” card that means you don’t have to see me for months on end and go to Scott’s flat every night and when anyone asks you about it you can say, “Oh, but I text her. I text her every day.” ’
‘Can we do this upstairs?’ she hissed.
I refilled my plastic cup with Glen’s vodka and a splash of Coke and stomped up to Diana’s bedroom. For two hours, we shouted at each other. We started very loud, then got quieter, until finally we were too pissed and tired to carry on and we made up. I told her she had abandoned me; I created a complicated metaphor about how I’d realized she’d always viewed me as Björn Again.
‘WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?’ she shouted.
‘Björn Again. They were the warm-up band for that Spice Girls gig we both went to. They were shit and we couldn’t wait for it to be over. I’ve realized I’ve just been your warm-up act for eleven years until your headliner came along. Well, you’ve NEVER been my warm-up act, you’ve ALWAYS been my Spice Girls and I wish I’d known sooner so then I could have put you down the bill and MADE YOU BJÖRN AGAIN.’
She told me I was being melodramatic, that she was allowed to have her first boyfriend. I told her she was allowed to have her first boyfriend, I just hadn’t realized she would prioritize him above everyone else. We emerged with our faces smeared like canvases splattered by Jackson Pollock with a bucket of mascara. Scott and Leo stood sheepishly at the bottom of the stairs in silence, having obviously run out of football and gentle current affairs chat. We grabbed them and our coats and left separately. Years later, Diana told me they’d turned down the music downstairs so the entire party could listen to the argument.
‘He’s her boyfriend,’ my infuriatingly rational academic boyfriend said as we did the long walk back to his Stockwell flat while drinking tinnies. ‘They’re in love, she’s changed. That’s fine, it’s part of growing up.’
‘You’re my boyfriend,’ I snapped. ‘I’m in love. I haven’t changed. She’s still the most important person in my life. She’s still the person I want to see the most. I don’t prioritize my relationship.’
He took a swig from his can of beer.
‘Well, maybe that’s not normal,’ he replied.
After two years together, Leo and I split up. I had tried with all my might to make it work, but so much had changed since we had met as students wandering around a house party in Elephant and Castle. We’d both grown up and turned into very different people.
For nine long months after I finished journalism training, I had drifted from magazine to newspaper as an unpaid chair-filler under the guise of a work experience placement. I had been turned down as an intern at Tatler, an editorial assistant at Weight Watchers magazine and a waitress at a local Pizza Express. I reprised my old job as a promo girl to support myself, walking down Old Brompton Road with a bunch of out-of-work West End dancers and air hostesses, handing out flyers for a rib restaurant. I quit the day they made me dress up as a pig and was attacked by anti-fur demonstrators outside Harrods.
I was desperate for a job. It was all I thought about from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to sleep in my childhood bedroom. I yearned for a job in my early twenties with the same hunger as I did for my first boyfriend in my early teens – obsessing over who I knew who had one; grilling them on the details of how they acquired one. Lying in bed night after night, wondering how many more years this could go on for.
Finally, one early evening, I was standing on a train platform when I got a call from an unknown number. It was Tim, a story producer for E4’s new structured reality show Made in Chelsea. I had written a series of online reviews of the first series (again, paid in the post-grad currency of ‘exposure’ – this time it actually worked) that the production company had read and found funny. He asked me to come into their East London office to talk about a potential creative job on the show.
I was intervie
wed by Tim and Dilly, the thirty-something, teeny-tiny, fresh-faced BAFTA-winning executive producer. They explained that they had read my review of the final episode which had included some tongue-in-cheek advice to the producers of the show on how to make the following series better. The owner of the company, Dan – who had found fame in the 1990s as the producer and co-host of a hugely successful late-night chat show – had scoured every review on the internet. When he found mine, he printed copies off for all the producers who read it on the way to a meeting with the channel – surprisingly, they agreed with all of it.
I left my first half-hour interview with Dilly and Tim relaxed about the fact it was very possible I would never hear from them again. I couldn’t grasp at all what they were after and we spent the majority of the interview dissecting the habits of posh people and psychoanalysing the cast. We didn’t really talk about my qualifications or work history or the job requirements at all. Little did I know then that accurate psychoanalysis is 90 per cent of making successful reality television. And my years of observing the habits of posh people while feeling on the outside of their club – standing in boarding school tuck shops and in the smoking areas of King’s Road nightclubs – would, for once, over-qualify me for a job.
I got the second call from the series producer three days later while I was at a music festival with Leo. We had become the Official Glitter Appliers of our camping party; a role we took to with aplomb. A boy coming up on acid heard repetitive ringing coming from my tent and thought it was Kraftwerk doing a surprise set. It was, in fact, Dilly. She told me I’d got the job as the show’s story producer and to come in for my first meeting the next day.
I arrived at the office straight from the festival, having not showered for four days, my nose sunburnt, my white-blonde pixie hair matted into a Mohawk. Leo waited in reception with our backpacks and tent while I went to my first ever story meeting. I had run out of clean clothes, so wore Leo’s oversized T-shirt as a dress with his denim jacket, laddered tights and a pair of ballet pumps. The outfit was a fitting send-off: it marked my last day as a kid and my first day as a grown-up.
I fell in love with the creativity, fun and relentlessness of my new job, my new colleagues and my new bosses nearly as ferociously as I had fallen in love with Leo. When I wasn’t in the office or on location, I began picking up freelance journalism work so I would write in the evenings and weekends, leaving me with little to no time for anything else, much to Leo’s frustration. He felt a little cheated. He had fallen in love with a rootless girl who wanted nothing but to pack a bag of plimsolls and jeans and go on any adventure he took her on; who embroidered his initials into jumpers and spent the entirety of a party locked in a bathroom with him, sitting in the empty bath, staring at his face with eyes like saucers. He ended up with a woman with her own adult identity and a preoccupation with her work.
I felt our relationship had been one of the most enriching experiences of my life and I knew he would always be a huge part of the person I had become, but we had outgrown each other. I knew I had to let him go so he could be with someone who really wanted to be in a relationship with all the love and commitment he deserved.
Farly, AJ and I were finally moved out of our parents’ suburban homes and into our first London home. AJ, too, had newly become single. Farly was still with Scott.
A part of me hoped that by living with two single women, Farly would realize what she’d been missing throughout her twenties and she’d break up with Scott. But if anything, living with AJ and me only made her treasure him more. She once watched me rush around getting ready for a first date, trim some new fake eyelashes, apply them, then scream in agony as I realized I had used the kitchen scissors that I chopped chillies with over a pizza the night before. She found a bag of frozen potato smiley-face shapes and held them on my eyes as I texted the bloke to cancel. ‘God, I don’t miss this,’ she sighed.
One night, when Scott was away on a work trip, Farly, AJ and I had been out dancing in our favourite Camden dive bar. We came home and opened a bottle of out-of-date Tia Maria, and things got confessional in the way they so often do in the afterglow of a night out.
‘I miss Scott,’ Farly announced after knocking back the last of her Tia Maria.
‘Why?’ I yelped. AJ stared at me. ‘I mean … he’s only away for a few days.’
‘I know, but I still miss him when he’s gone. And I get excited to see him, every time. Even if he just goes to the corner shop and comes back, I look forward to hearing the front door open again.’ She saw my frown. ‘I know it sounds cheesy, but it’s true.’
‘I think she really loves him,’ I said the next day.
‘Of course she loves him,’ AJ said, while lying on the sofa and gnawing through a bacon sandwich. ‘Why do you think they’ve been together for three years?’
‘I don’t know. I thought maybe she just wanted to see what having a boyfriend was like.’
AJ shook her head in disbelief. ‘Come on, mate.’
After I realized this, I finally started noticing small signs everywhere. Scott’s parents met Farly’s parents. Farly spent more and more weekends with his grown-up friends, doing grown-up things like ‘thirtieth birthday weekends in the Cotswolds’ and wine tasting on a weeknight. Scott was round quite a lot, which I hated. And I also hated it when he wasn’t there. He couldn’t win. I didn’t want him to win.
The Most Annoying Things People Say
– ‘I’m not going to have a starter, are you?’
– ‘I’m more of a boys’ girl’
– ‘I’m a natural salesperson’
– ‘I’m engaged!’
– ‘You’re always late’
– ‘You were quite drunk last night’
– ‘You’ve told me this story before’
– ‘He says it like it is’
– ‘She’s very handsome’
– ‘I think you need a glass of water’
– ‘I’m quite OCD’
– ‘We’ve got a very complicated relationship’
– ‘Would you like to sign Alison’s birthday card?’
– ‘Let’s go en masse’
– ‘Let’s have a catch-up’
– ‘Are you across this?’
– ‘Marilyn Monroe was a size 16’
– ‘You are due your next dental appointment’
– ‘When was the last time you backed up?’
– ‘How do you find the time to do all those tweets?’
– ‘Sorry, it’s been mental’
– ‘Holibobs’
The Uncool Girls of Uncool Camden
When I was twenty-four, in the first year of living in London with Farly and AJ, I went out for a drink with a friend on a Tuesday night after work. Despite my attempts to keep her out until last orders, she had to call it a night at half eight due to an early meeting the next morning. I texted anyone in my phonebook who I knew might be around and want to carry on the night with me, but everyone was busy or in bed or tired. I sulkily got on the 24 bus home – my trusty steed that took me from the centre point of London to right outside my door in twenty minutes – and felt restless and disappointed that I couldn’t stay out for just one more hour and one more glass of wine. It is a feeling I grew very used to – panicked and throaty; a sense that everyone in London was having a good time other than me; that there were pots of experiential gold hidden on every street corner and I wasn’t finding them; that one day I was going to be dead so why bring any potentially perfect and glorious day to a premature end with an early night.
I snapped out of my sulk when the 24 pulled up at a pub at the end of my road. It was an NW5 hovel, a once-famous music venue turned grim boozer for the nine a.m. drinkers of Camden. I got off the bus and went in. It was the first time I’d been since the day we moved in when we were told Farly had made history by being the first patron in forty years to order a coffee. The landlord went across the road to the corner shop to buy some Nescafé Gold Blend an
d milk and charged her 26p.
I ordered a beer and made small talk with the barman, who seemed completely unsurprised to be serving yet another solo drinker. A man next to me in his late sixties and sporting a grey yeti beard asked how my day had been and I lamented the lack of a drinking buddy to see the night through with me. He said he was the man for the job. As we drank, he told me all about his life spent growing up in the area: the school he’d truanted from, how things had changed, the watering holes that had closed; the John Martyn gig he’d been to at the Camden Palace before I was born, the live recordings of which I had listened to obsessively. I left at midnight, scrawling the man’s number on the back of a beer mat with the mutual promise that we’d spend an afternoon together listening to records, but knowing I’d never be in touch with him again. He was just ‘a night’, of which I wanted many. An experience, an anecdote, a new face, a memory. He was a piece of advice, a gossipy story and an interesting fact that lodged in my inebriated, unconscious mind, only to be pulled out and regurgitated as my own one day. Where did you hear that? someone would ask. I haven’t the foggiest, I’d reply.
The next evening, when I came home from work with an unmoveable hangover to find Farly and AJ curled up on the sofa, I told them how I’d ended up in a dingy pub down the road the night before.
‘Why on earth did you do that?’ AJ asked bemusedly.
‘Because it was Tuesday night,’ I replied. ‘And I could.’
I am so grateful that I fetishized the measured-out-in-coffee-spoons minutiae of adulthood so vividly as a teenager because the relief of finally getting there meant I have found very little of it to be a burden. I’ve loved paying my own rent. I’ve adored cooking for myself every day. I even used to get a thrill sitting in the GP’s waiting room, knowing I registered and got myself there without the help of anyone else. In my first year of bill-paying, I’d practically go weak-kneed over a letter from Thames Water addressed to me. I would happily take on the administrative weight of responsibility that comes with being an adult in exchange for the knowledge that I always have the freedom to go to the pub on my own and make friends with an old man any day of the week.
Everything I Know About Love Page 8