Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Author:Dolly Alderton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241982099
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-11-16T05:00:00+00:00

Tottenham Court Road and Ordering Shit Off Amazon

When I was twenty-one, at the tail end of my last summer spent performing at the Edinburgh Festival before I had to go home and find a job and start an adult life, I went out to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of my friend Hannah. She had been directing me in a comedy sketch show I had been flyering for, and me and two of the other actors took her out to a posh restaurant to mark the occasion. In the run-up to the day, she had made some vague noises about dreading turning thirty, which we all assumed were exaggerated for comedic purposes.

Halfway through dinner, she put down her cutlery and started crying.

‘Oh my God, Hannah, are you really upset?’ I asked, immediately regretting the ‘Happy Birthday Granny’ card I had given her.

‘I’m getting older,’ she said. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it everywhere in my body; it’s already slowing down. And it’s only going to get slower.’

‘You’re still so young!’ Margaret said, who was a few years ahead of her, but Hannah continued to sob, unable to catch her breath, tears falling into her plate. ‘Do you want to go?’ she asked, stroking Hannah’s back. Hannah nodded.

As we walked down Princes Street, chatting away about nothing, keen to keep the tone light and Hannah distracted, she stopped in the middle of the road and held her head in her hands. Her tears became wails.

‘Is this it?’ she asked us, bellowing into the dark night. ‘Is this really all life is?’

‘Is what all life is?’ Margaret asked soothingly, putting her arm round her.

‘Fucking … Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon,’ she replied.

For years, those words were stuck on the underside of my brain like a Post-it I couldn’t shake off. They hung there like a whispered conversation you overheard between your parents that you didn’t understand but you knew to be very important. I always wondered why those two specific things – Tottenham Court Road and Amazon – could cause so much sorrow.

‘You’ll understand when you’re not twenty-one,’ Hannah said when I asked.

I finally grasped the machinations and subtext of that phrase the year I turned twenty-five. When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy ‘when I grow up’ and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.

Once you start digging a hole of those questions, it’s very difficult to take the day-to-day functionalities of life seriously. Throughout my twenty-fifth year, it was as if I had created a trench of my own thoughts and unanswerable questions, and

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