This was meant to be my first settled weekend in my new flat. I was set to move in at the start of December, to a one-bed flat above a corner shop in Stoke Newington. I was in a position to pay eight months upfront and replace the existing tenants when they left, but the landlord didn’t believe that my payrise would be backdated, so despite evidence of my savings, it fell through and my holding deposit was refunded. For a week or so, though, I was eagerly imagining unpacking and establishing a new space. Finally, I would get out the Aesop handwash I got a Black Friday or two ago: one for me, when I moved out and one for my friend who had just bought a two-bed flat in inner London with no family assistance, having rented privately from the start of her graduate internship a decade ago. Maybe even time to get out the Hornsea pottery I got off a girl I follow on twitter on a bench in Clissold Park.
You see, I have been collecting, and squirrelling away little objects and artefacts for ‘the next place’ for a while now. I always do this; when I was living at home I got a set of six champagne flutes from the Oxfam on Kilburn High Road ‘just in case’ I needed them when I made my escape. My current room, which I have till the end of February, is a small double; my head rests right next to the door which is undeniably appalling feng shui. So I had a jolt of excited recognition when reading Amy Key’s Arrangements in Blue during my interrail trip, to learn she had done the same.
Arrangements in Blue is a memoir, originating from Key’s Granta essay about her relationship to Joni Mitchell’s album, Blue, but focussing on what it means to live a life without romantic love. Key, a writer in her 40s, presents the fullness of her existence, including where she might not always be perfect, in a way that can challenge societal expectations for the single woman. Just last week, I saw someone on twitter say they mentioned going to the cinema solo in the office, only for one of her colleagues to approach her with a hug and say it’s going to be alright. People are truly scared of the prospect not just of a life alone, but even hearing about people going into a dark room to watch something without a chaperone! I hear this and think about how sad and daunting my life must sound sometimes, and how I am grateful it doesn’t seem that way to me.
Truth be told, I had not intended for the interrail trip to be completely solo; I had expected some overlap with friends, but this year provided me with a definitive answer to the question “Can you go through a breakup ten years after your last boyfriend?”. The answer is yes, and it likely will be more painful at 31 than the initial split at 21. This week, after nabbing return trains to Amsterdam in the Eurostar flash sale, I got informed my return train would not be stopping at Amsterdam so I’d have to rearrange my itinerary. No real bother — it was only me going anyway and I hadn’t yet booked my accommodation. A hotel recommendation I got seemed not to understand my wanting to understand the prices for one room with a single occupier despite my plugging those very details in so why did it seem like it was trying to charge me for two breakfasts? And why did it keep on with the number 2? In the wrong week, when the prospect of having no one to split bills with in an overpriced property guardianship looms large, an administrative error on a website can feel like a very pointed dig at your inability to hold down a romantic relationship.
Before I formally got onto the waiting list for my fibroids surgery, my big fear was ending up like Miranda in Sex and the City, who suffers the indignity of being scooped up off her bathroom floor after a slip and a fall by Carrie’s drippy but practical boyfriend, Aidan. Her best friend felt she could just delegate such an intimate favour because she was part of a ‘we’ and Miranda had no one else to call upon. I knew this wouldn’t be the case. In fact, my friend Ava spent so much time on the ground floor of the hospital before I got discharged that the guy at the corner shop at the bottom of UCLH asked who it was she was willing to wait for for so long. Nevertheless, I am now in two group chats where I am the only single person. At some point between Eat Out to Help Out and the mini-budget, the majority of my friends who were not in relationships…got into relationships. I am about to say ‘this is fine’ which I realise sounds as though it is very much not fine, but please believe me when I say that almost all of the time I am up and about in the world, this is fine. Except for when I wake up from my sleep the week of my oldest friend’s wedding because I am afraid I am the only person attending I know without a postgraduate degree or a partner. Or when I decide it matters, which is mainly when I want to go away somewhere.
In the same way that it might seem as though I ‘really love cooking’ and always enjoy it, when actually midweek I find the prospect of another onion to shop and another tin of tomatoes to reduce weary in the extreme, but it was better than blowing my budget when I had less money than I do now, I am not always good at being alone. Being alone is good for me in that it allows me to listen and think and read and write; being alone is bad for me in that I never try to fill it with finding someone which I probably should do if I am ever to have my intermittent complaints about not being of interest listened to in good faith. Being alone also means I can indulge my longstanding verbal tic which comes out when I’m unaccompanied. I call myself stupid or a bad person, I think to fill the vacuum I created when I stopped allowing other people, who used to me stupid and lazy on a daily basis, into my life much anymore.
While Arrangements in Blue struck a particular chord with me, fundamentally Amy Key is a writer and I am recommending it to read because the writing is good and the book is an interesting structural and technical example of memoir. So I’ll round off today quoting from the text itself. First, from a section on holidaying alone:
Travelling alone as an adult rather than as a student never occurred to me. I wonder now if that’s because the category of holiday was to people who’d found themselves alone later in life, after divorce or the death of a spouse. They were sold holidays that would give them a new lease of life after their big romantic love had been lost; were promised new friends, potentially new partners. To be a working-age adult without romantic love at all, rather than one who had cruelly withdrawn from them, wasn’t how I saw myself ending up. Surely only a very unloveable person would have to go on holiday alone.
And on this, about hosting:
Having people over has become as integral to my sense of self as writing, music and being in the water…I love the few minutes before my guests arrive and I’ve arranged everything just how I like — a tablecloth, my prettiest glasses for water and for wine, candles lit, cold cold fizz in the fridge…When the first guests arrive, usually my hair is still wet as I’ve spent too long getting flat ready and left too little time for getting myself ready. But it doesn’t matter, I have a sense that it’s how the house feels when people enter it — the ‘warm chord’ of the house — that will make them feel loved.
loved this!