seek at one point? Did we kick our legs out from behind pillars, like stupid pole-dancing ponies? As the sun rose, S and I went to an after-party in a bar off Leather Lane. It had a spiral staircase and a minor film star was there. We slumped on squishy sofas, teased the film star, made each other laugh.
We took photos of ourselves on our digital camera when we got home, thinking we were beautiful, but we looked sweaty and mad. Not that it mattered. We dragged the duvets to the sofa and watched nature films all day.
A few days later, I turned 33. And gradually, gradually, things began to change. Friends were finding partners, leaving house-shares, settling into new places with each other. Or they were leaving the country, resettling in a different way. We were still going out: just up the road, to Basement Jaxx’s Rooty in the George IV, or miles away, to Glastonbury, or Ibiza. We got excited about bands. The Strokes: I remember seeing them at Heaven, gorgeous cartoons, rock-star Muppets. The Libertines, not so much. UK garage gradually warped into what would become grime, which I really liked, but I danced to it in my kitchen or at festivals, not at clubs.
The money I got from writing the book on suburbia meant that I could put a deposit on a flat, so I did, and moved in with two flatmates. We tiptoed around the new place, marvelling at how grown-up it seemed: the previous owners were a family, and everything was painted and maintained. The rented flat we were leaving was not so pretty. There, the walls were beige anaglypta, fingerprinted, smudged. The kitchen was orange with grease. In the bathroom, part of the ceiling had collapsed and was held up by the shower rail. When you went to the toilet in there, you had to wear a cycle helmet, in case the whole thing came down completely (health and safety). The new flat had Victorian fireplaces, sash windows, stripped wooden doors with china handles, and it seemed astonishing, solid and artily bohemian, an entry point to a proper life.
And so it proved. After a few months in our new palace, one friend moved out; then S moved in; then, a year or so later, the other friend left. Now there’s no more moving: we still live in the same flat, S and I and our kids.
There were weddings, on and off over the decade. There were kids, too, to join the children a few people already had. A range of ages of parents and offspring, but a sudden rush of births after I was 36. We left everything to the final deadline, squeezed in adulthood as late as we could.
Time was doing what it does, ticking on, disappearing, bit by bit by bit. Opportunities were opening up as others were shutting down. There are people who are good at knowing when to move on, the best time to leave, the new thing to follow, where to go and when. They seem born with excellent timing. They’d somehow bought two-bedroom flats while they were in their early twenties. They were busy setting up companies, or were selling the ones they’d already established (when? how?). They were ‘moving into digital’.
But there are those of us who make decisions too quickly, or too slowly, or who don’t even realize there are decisions to be made. We continue with what we’re doing because it’s what we do, or because we like it, or we’re loyal to something that perhaps is long gone. Or we sack it all on a whim, move from job to job, changing but not progressing, trying out new versions of the same thing.
I’d been working for the Observer since the mid-90s, as a regular writer, but I was still a freelancer. This suited me, though I wasn’t always good at it. I said yes to jobs I was awful at, turned down opportunities that seem life-changing now. And when I got a new job, I couldn’t work out, always, how I was meant to behave, what I was supposed to be doing. I needed an editor, a producer; a mentor, maybe. I wasn’t concentrating. I landed another book deal, for a biography, but I couldn’t deliver. I wrote dramas that didn’t work out. I helped with online start-ups, I mentored teenagers who wanted to be journalists. I wrote columns and my columns were okay. But other columnists came along and they were sharper, funnier or more surreal: they were better.
S and I had met in 1999, and we gave each other an excuse to carry on going out, to continue with what we‘d been doing separately (we’d been going to the same places, sometimes even the same parties, we’d discovered) but now with each other. We extended our work trips and went to Thailand, to China and New Zealand. We found the cheapest flights we could to Trieste, Amsterdam, Cornwall, the Pyrenees.
I’m not so good at remembering what happened when we went away, what we saw. S tells me tales of our trips and it’s as though I never went. I remember the feelings, though.
‘God, do you remember how much we used to argue?’ I say to S. ‘How could we be arsed?’
Our relationship wasn’t smooth. It was difficult in the early years: we were both used to doing what we liked; our backgrounds were different; we found it hard to compromise into partnership. But we were cheap to run, we loved each other. Lucky us. Some of our friends had hooked up with the wrong person. Years of their time had been invested in a partner who suddenly didn’t want to stay around, or who was already attached and never leaving their partner, or who was playing them against someone else. Often, it was women who suffered the fall-out. There were emergency rescues from outside bars, long phone calls at odd hours, evenings spent drinking, bitching, comforting.
Love lives, always hard to make sense of, were becoming even more difficult, weighted down with future pressure. Where were these affairs going, what was the point if they weren’t going to make it? And it wasn’t only love affairs. Friends (and us) were losing jobs; there were pregnancies and non-pregnancies, sudden illnesses, dying parents, sick kids, debt. Adult problems that we weren’t qualified to deal with.
‘I feel like we’ve been sitting at the back of the class, messing about,’ said my friend L. ‘And now we’ve looked up, and everyone else has been knuckling down for ages, without us noticing. They’re going to pass the exams. We’re the only ones left back here.’
There were so many changes, behind the scenes, in front of our faces. And yet it’s easy to think that your thirties are not so different from your twenties. We thought this. You’re just carrying on, refining, tweaking, but essentially remaining the same.
Maybe you look better than you did in your twenties because you’re not slathered in make-up or wearing clown clothes. You’ve grown into your face; you know which haircut suits you. You can understand oblique conversational references (‘She’s grand,’ meaning, ‘I hate her’); you realize when jobs are being offered or are about to be taken away (be wary of any conversation that begins ‘I don’t know if you’ve heard our news?’). You don’t burst into tears quite so much. You speak up when you feel something’s wrong. You have less time for people you can’t get on with and they have less time for you.
The side-tracking is still there, though. The diversions. The wandering around town in the afternoons, the not-answering your phone, the lunches that turn into evenings that turn into weekends. The belief that you’re still an outsider, some sort of rebel manqué, sitting on the edges sniping at The Man. But The Man will only notice you if you’re doing something worth noticing.
What’s strange is that you do no more side-tracking than you did in your twenties, not really. You probably do less. You certainly spend less time drunk. But time is moving faster. It is, it is.
At that particular moment, the internet began to make a difference, to music and to books and to the media. The magazines I worked for started to close, one by one. Select shut down in 2000; The Face in 2004; Smash Hits, 2006. The Mirror launched a magazine in 2002, and I wrote a column for it; it was shuttered two years later. The Observer remained, and its sister paper, the Guardian. Both changed their size from broadsheet to Berliner in 2005. The new-sized printing presses cost £80 million, which was deemed a worthwhile investment, as though printing equipment was like London property.
Though most newspapers were still alive, there
