But this birthday was unlike any birthday we had celebrated together. Farly was tinier than I had ever seen her, as diminutive and fragile as a baby bird. There was no boisterous hugging, no binge drinking. We were quiet and gentle, no one more so than Scott.
He had got up early to go to the fishmonger, as AJ and I had both stopped eating meat. He made the most beautiful sea bass stuffed with fennel and oranges with roast new potatoes and laid it out with the bitten-tongue concentration of a MasterChef contestant. He kissed Farly’s head every time he walked past her. He held Farly’s hand under the table. I saw the man she had fallen in love with.
I texted Scott in the kitchen to tell him I had a tray of birthday cupcakes hidden behind the sofa. We waited for Farly to go to the loo and AJ barricaded her in with a chair while I manically scattered the cakes across a platter and Scott searched for a box of matches.
‘WHAT’S GOING ON?!’ Farly yelped.
‘ONE MINUTE!’ I shouted as Scott and I lit all the candles.
We sang her ‘Happy Birthday’, and presented her with her gifts and card. She blew out the candles and laughed while the three of us enveloped her in a big group hug.
‘Why did it take ages?’ she asked. ‘Did you bake them while I was having a piss? I was in there so fucking long I started doing my thigh exercises.’
‘What thigh exercises?’ AJ asked.
‘Oh, these new lunges I’ve read about.’ She started leaning up and down, some of her old, vibrant colour trickling through her face. ‘I try and do them every morning. I don’t think it’s making any difference. My legs still look like giant gammon joints.’ AJ started emulating her, bobbing up and down stiffly, being instructed by Farly like a Rosemary Conley video.
Scott looked across the room and caught my eye. He smiled at me. ‘Thanks,’ he mouthed. I smiled back at him and all at once realized the world that now lay between us. The invisible dimension created from the history and love and future we shared for this one person. It was then I knew everything had changed: we had transitioned. We hadn’t chosen each other. But we were family.
The Bad Date Diaries: A £300 Restaurant Bill
It is December 2013 and I am on my third date with a handsome entrepreneur I met on Tinder. He is the first rich man I’ve ever dated and I feel deeply conflicted about him spending money on me. Sometimes, when he politely picks up the bill, I feel flattered – like this is how adult courtship is meant to work. In other moments, I feel frustrated with myself for getting so predictably weak-kneed about an older bloke with a fast car and a drinking problem buying me champagne. This manifests itself in incontrollable anger at him.
‘You can’t own me!’ I shout for no reason in the Mayfair restaurant he has chosen, three bottles of wine to the good. ‘I’m not a possession for you to own – I won’t guilt myself into getting all dressed up just so you’ll buy me lobster! I can buy it myself!’
‘Fine, darling, buy it yourself,’ he slurs.
‘I will!’ I squawk. ‘And not going Dutch – the WHOLE thing.’
The waitress comes over with the bill for £300.
I go to the loo to text my flatmate AJ, asking her to lend me £200 and to transfer it into my account immediately.
The Bad Party Chronicles: My House in Camden, Christmas, 2014
I have been pushing for a Rod Stewart-themed party since we moved into our Camden house two and a half years ago. My thinking is that Rod Stewart, as a concept, bridges the gap of the extreme campness of Christmas and the careless joie de vivre of a twenty-something house party.
My flatmates, Belle and AJ, reluctantly agree that our Christmas drinks party be Rod Stewart themed, but stress that they want no accountability for it.
In the run-up to the party, I both prematurely age and bankrupt myself by tracking down Rod Stewart-themed memorabilia. We have plastic cups with his face on, Rod Stewart ashtrays, mince pies customized with sugar paper Rod Stewart faces, a life-size Rod Stewart cardboard cut-out, a Rod Stewart sign signalling where the loo is and a Rod Stewart banner with MERRY CHRISTMAS, BABY!! on it. Sabrina, India, Farly, Lauren and Lacey come early to help deck the house out with Rod decorations, and all of them agree with Belle and AJ that it was a complete waste of money.
‘Oh God,’ I say, pinning the banner to the wall while Sabrina holds the chair I stand on. ‘I’ve just realized the Faces posters I ordered haven’t arrived on time. Do you think anyone will mind?’
‘No,’ she sighs. ‘No one will mind about any of this other than you.’
The first guests to arrive at seven o’clock on the dot are my charming, rather loud new American friend who I have only met once previously and her bearded boyfriend. It is clear they have been drinking all day. They have also brought their Cavalier King Charles spaniel, dressed in a tiny Christmas jumper.
The other guests don’t start trickling in until nine o’clock, so we try to catch up with our first two guests but, alas, the boyfriend passes out on the sofa with his spaniel on top of him for the rest of the evening, so he is in plain sight of anyone who enters the party. Friends trickle in slowly, one by one. Things are stilted. The man continues to be passed out with the dog on him, which creates an arresting eyesore on entry to the party. One guest – a friend of a friend; a music video director from the cool Peckham contingent – walks in, takes one look at the tableau, makes up that he has another event to go to that he forgot about and leaves.
Halfway through the evening, I go to the bathroom to take a break from the crowd, made up of completely disparate social groups who have nothing to say to each other, ‘You Wear It Well’ playing on repeat in the background while people complain about the Rod-only playlist. AJ and Belle are in there, AJ sitting on the loo, Belle on the side of the bathtub. We talk about how bad the party is. We think of ways we can get people to leave and make it end. AJ says she needs to have a lie-down for ten minutes because she feels tired and miserable. There is a knock on the bathroom door and my brother comes in.
‘Quite a weird crowd down there, guys,’ he says.
When I reappear downstairs the guest mass has dwindled in size even further. There is a very tall skinhead bloke in a leather bomber jacket raiding the fridge.
‘Um. Hi. Who are you?’ I ask.
‘I was told to come here,’ the man says in a thick Romanian accent, sipping from a can of beer he has helped himself to. ‘For delivery.’
‘Delivery?’
‘Yes,’ he says, looking at me conspiratorially. ‘Delivery.’
‘OK, would you mind just –’ I guide him to the front door – ‘just waiting here.’ I walk past the American, who is slow-dancing with her be-jumpered dog to ‘Sailing’ while a perplexed audience looks on. Her boyfriend has been passed out lying across the sofa for well over three hours now.
‘RIGHT, I THINK SOMEONE’S DRUG DEALER IS HERE,’ I announce irritably to the crowd. ‘I’m sorry to be a party pooper – and I don’t blame you for wanting to get high at this terrible party – but can you please ask all your drug dealers to wait outside or at least in the hallway.’
The party wraps shortly after midnight.
The next morning over coffee, me and Belle do a two-man Chilcot Inquiry into how it all went so wrong. I suggest that the preparation I did for the theme might have built up expectations too high.
‘You made a Rod for your own back,’ she says, nodding sagely.
We keep the Rod Stewart cardboard cut-out in the living room for a while. A reminder to never get ahead of yourself in this life. We deck him out topically – putting a pink bra on him during the Lord Sewel hooker scandal, a leprechaun’s hat on St Patrick’s Day. When we move flat eight months later and pack up the house, we leave nothing except the Rod Stewart cut-out in the middle of the living room, passing the curse of bad parties on to the future tenants.
Recipe: Got Kicked Out of the Club Sandwich
(serves two)
Regularly eaten with AJ as we sat on the kitchen countertop, swingin
g our legs back and forth, shouting about that dickhead bouncer who said we were too drunk to go back in and that we were ‘letting the rest of the group down’.
– 2 eggs
– 4 slices of bread (sourdough preferable, white Hovis acceptable)
– Mayonnaise
– Dijon mustard
– Rocket (optional)
– Olive oil and butter, for frying
– Salt and black pepper, to season
Fry eggs in olive oil and a smidge of butter in a piping-hot pan. Spoon the oil over the eggs once or twice to cook the yolk.
Toast the bread.
For each sandwich, spread one slice with mayonnaise and one slice with mustard.
Fill each sandwich with one fried egg and a handful of rocket. Season with salt and pepper.
Eat in about five big, sloppy bites. Get mustard on your face.
Pour any alcohol left in your flat into two clean receptacles (for us, this was usually the old bottle of Toffee Vodka Farly got given at Christmas 2009 that lived at the back of the freezer).
Play a Marvin Gaye record.
The Bad Date Diaries: A Mid-morning, Completely Sober Snog
Spring 2014. I wake up to my alarm on a Saturday at nine a.m., having had five hours’ sleep. There is a WhatsApp message from dishy American Martin: ‘Doll face – we still on for a cup of joe?’ My head feels like it has been turned inside out like a dirty sock, but I tell him I’ll be there. We matched on Tinder three days ago and it’s been a solid stream of ‘No way that’s my favourite Springsteen album!’, ‘I believe in reincarnation too’, ‘Yes, perhaps we are all wanderers’ and so on. In this moment, as I search my room for last night’s fake eyelashes and glue them back on, I am convinced he will be my boyfriend by the end of the week and I will move to Seattle with him next month. For this is the only logical solution in the head of a single, hung-over woman who is embarrassed that she fell off a bus the night before – marriage and emigration.
The outfit: a huge Aran jumper so oversized it hangs like a dress, denim hot pants because all my jeans are dirty, a pair of laddered tights and white plimsolls.
‘No coat?’ my hung-over housemate AJ croaks as I rush past her on the stairs.
‘No need,’ I say breezily.
‘You STINK of Baileys by the way,’ she shouts as I close the door.
Martin sits at the bar of Caravan King’s Cross. Thankfully, he is identical to his pictures. He is writing in a notebook as I arrive, which I think adds a nice touch of theatre to the whole nomadic lost-soul agenda he pushes with his whimsical Instagram account I’ve already stalked.
‘What you writing?’ I ask, over his shoulder. He turns, looks at me and smiles.
‘None of your business,’ he replies and kisses me on both cheeks. It is already extremely flirty and we haven’t even had a coffee, let alone six beers. I think it’s because he is American.
Martin tells me the story of his life: illustrator from Seattle nearing forty, earnt a load of money from a big job and decided to use it to travel the world for a year and write a book. He’s doing some ‘Tinder tourism’ to meet new people. He has been in England for a month; he wants a few more weeks in London then he’s on his travels again.
(Aside: I noticed at the time that Martin was particularly vague when I asked him what his book was about, other than saying it was non-fiction. I also noticed he wrote a couple of things down when I was talking. He took the notebook with him when he went to the loo and was in there for quite a long time. I decided either A) his bowels had a bad reaction to caffeine and he wanted to pass some time on the loo relaxing with his thoughts; B) he was just a private man and sensed I was a nosey, hung-over person with no boundaries who might want to read his notebook when he went to the loo; C) he was writing something embarrassing like his cosmic shopping list or how many people he had slept with and didn’t want me to read it; or D) he was writing a book about all the women he’d dated in England and I was up next. I have always thought it was option D and to this day am still waiting to see a book called Green and Pleasant Slags: My Time With English Women on the shelves at Waterstones with an embarrassing paragraph about me in it.)
After our coffees, we sit outside the cafe on a bench, staring at the water fountains spurting in a rhythmic, pornographic way, and he quotes Hemingway, which I think is a little overkill, but I am enjoying the fanciful tone of the date so I go along with it. He gets out another notebook that he’s illustrated with maps of every country he’s visited so far, his tracks sketched as twee footprints. I ask if he has a girl in every port. He laughs and says ‘something like that’ in his annoying, wonderful accent.
He takes me by the hand and leads me down the steps at the front of Central Saint Martins art college to the canal. We walk a little until we stand under the nearest bridge, then he unbuttons his coat, pulls me in and wraps it round me. He kisses my head, my cheeks, my neck and my lips. We kiss for half an hour.
The time is eleven a.m.
Martin and I part ways at eleven thirty and thank each other for the lovely morning. I am back in bed by twelve thirty and sleep all afternoon. I wake up at four, convinced I dreamt the whole thing.
Predictably, Martin falls off-radar after our coffee morning and is vague about when our next date is when he does get in touch. A week later, tanked up on Friday-night Prosecco and encouraged by my friends, I send Martin a WhatsApp message riddled with spelling mistakes asking if I ‘may be frank’ and suggesting we embark on a ‘platonic but sexual relationship’ while he is in London. I suggest I become his ‘girl in the London port’. I tell him it’s ‘what Hemingway would do’.
Martin never messages me again.
Everything I Knew About Love at Twenty-five
Men love a woman who holds it all back. Make them wait five dates to have sex with you, three dates at the very least. That’s how you keep them interested.
The boyfriends of your best friends will, annoyingly, stick around. Most of them won’t be exactly who you imagined your best friend would end up with.
Suspenders and stockings can be bought cheap and in bulk on eBay.
Online dating is for losers and I include myself in that. Be endlessly suspicious of people who pay to have an embarrassing profile on a dating website.
Forget what I said earlier about using hair-removal cream when you’re dating someone. If you go bald, you’re letting the sisterhood down. We need to actively take a stand against the patriarchal control of female anatomy.
Never make an album as good as Blood on the Tracks ‘our album’ with a boyfriend because, years after you break up, you still won’t be able to listen to it. Don’t make that mistake at twenty-one.
If a man loves you because you are thin, he’s no man at all.
If you think you want to break up with someone, but practical matters are getting in the way, this is the test: imagine you could go into a room and press a big red button that would end your relationship with no fuss. No break-up conversations, no tears, no picking up your things from his house. Would you do it? If the answer is yes, you have to break up with them.
If a man has always been single at forty-five – there’s a reason. Don’t hang around to find out what it is.
The worst feeling in the world is being dumped because they say they don’t fancy you any more.
Always bring a man back to your house, then you can trick him into staying for breakfast and trick him into falling in love with you.
Casual sex is rarely good.
Fake orgasms will make you feel guilty and terrible and they’re unfair on the guy. Use them sparsely.
Some women get lucky and some women don’t. There are good guys and bad guys. It’s sheer luck who you end up with and how you get treated.
Your best friends will abandon you for men. It will be a long and slow goodbye, but make your peace with it and make some new friends.
On long, lonely nights when your fears crawl over your brain like cockroaches and
you can’t get to sleep, dream of the time you were loved – in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. Remember how it felt to find shelter in someone’s arms. Hope that you’ll find it again.
Reasons to Have a Boyfriend and Reasons Not to Have a Boyfriend
Reasons to have a boyfriend
– More likely to get a proper birthday cake
– Access to Sky TV?
– Something to talk about
– Something to talk at
– Sunday afternoons
– More sympathy when you do something really wrong at work
– Someone to grope your bottom in the queue for popcorn
– Holidays for one are very expensive
– And it’s impossible to put sunscreen on your own back
– Sometimes you can’t manage a whole large pizza to yourself
– Might have a car
– Nice to make a sandwich for someone other than yourself
– Nice to think about someone other than yourself
– Regular sex that isn’t weird
– Warmer bed
– Everyone else has one
– If you have one, people will think you’re lovable
– If you don’t have one, people will think you’re shallow and dysfunctional
– The relief of not having to flirt with people
– Fear of dying alone, the void, etc.
Reasons not to have a boyfriend
– Everyone annoys you other than you
– ‘Debates’
– They probably won’t like Morrissey
– They definitely won’t like Joni Mitchell
– They’ll point out when you exaggerate stories
– Going to their friends’ boring birthday drinks in Finsbury Park
Everything I Know About Love Page 12