the times Saturday June 11 20222 Body + Soul
things (horribly gendered, I know). One
housemate’s ex-boyfriend quietly Ama-
zon-Primed a new dishwasher cutlery
holder to the house when he discovered
ours didn’t fit (how I miss him). Then
again, he was always in the shower when I
needed it.
It’s tough being single when your house-
mates are all loved up. My heart twanged
at the sight of Maggie going desperately
through her phone on a Friday night, try-
ing to make plans while her friends were
out on dates. I will never forget the awful
Saturday night I got trapped in my room in
a purgatory of my own making, watching
The Silence of the Lambs alone, because the
only other housemate in was having a ro-
mantic dinner downstairs and I hadn’t
made plans. Anthony Hopkins still pops
up in my nightmares.My generation takes all
kinds of drugs —obviously...
Yes, obviously. Well not me, I’m the neu-
rotic one, but a lot of other people, sure.
Coke for clubs and corporate nights out (I
suspect they use those Amexes for morethan just paying for things); acid for sunny
summer days (“Sus, I want you to know
that the rug is wavy and I love you and
that my phone makes cool colours when I
type!!” reads a text sent to me at 7.34pm
a few Saturdays ago from Hampstead
Heath); and, naturally, hash brownies
for jubilee weekends. Well, they told us
to bake!... but smoking —
not so much
Much less prevalent than the show sug-
gests — Maggie and her friends are chim-
neys — which says a lot about the success
of the smoking ban (you really can’t smoke
anywhere these days). My house is pretty
clean-living but even my actual smoker
friends usually have an out-of-the-win-
dow policy at home. Pub gardens and club
smoking areas? Sure. Kitchen table? Not
so much. Also, we are now living in the
golden age of the Elf Bar (a brand of slim,
stylish vape that comes in a range of acid-
pop colours — something I am not being
sponsored to say, more’s the pity). “Try it,
it’s peach ice!” our resident puffer will say,
wafting the sugary fumes in my face.
Really, Maggie’s cigs are so 2012.
We have a low bar for
our standard-of-living
conditions
“While you’re here, can you take a look at
the damp on the wall?” snaps one of Mag-
gie’s housemates at their dodgy landlord
when he shows up halfway through the
show, trying to offload a sofa. Ah yes, the
damp on the wall (I came upstairs a fewLiving with your
girlfriends in
your early 20s...
It’s a dream. It’s
a nightmare.
W
hy is no one
ready?” wails
Birdy at the start
of Everything I
Know About Love,
Dolly Alderton’s
brilliant new BBC
drama about London life in your twenties,
as she tries to drag her three housemates
out of the door by their bra straps for a
night out. I watched, silently commiserat-
ing with her struggle, when I heard a snort
from the sofa. “She’s you!” chuckled my
housemate, waving at the screen.
Birdy, I get it. It’s tough being the short,
neurotic one in a house of willowy free
spirits (“Maybe I should try the jumpsuit
instead,” they will muse dreamily at
8.52pm, as I try not to gouge out my eyes
with the front door keys). This is one of the
many things that the show — which
Alderton adapted from her bestselling
2018 memoir — gets exactly right about
living with your girlfriends in your early
twenties. It’s a dream. It’s a nightmare.
Like Maggie (Alderton’s TV alter ego,
played by Emma Appleton), I’m 24 and
living in my first house share. (Although
unlike her we’re cool and therefore south
of the river. “Renting in Camden in 2012?
Whatever you’re looking for’s already left,”
one boyfriend tells Maggie sagely. Admit-
tedly it probably didn’t head to leafy Ken-
nington, where we are.)
It’s also where we’re likely to stay for
quite some time: estimates predict that
one third of Generation Rent, as my un-
lucky age group are known, will never own
their own home. We’re lucky enough to
have well-paid jobs but, like everyone else,
we’re at the mercy of landlord whims and
spiralling bills.
But that’s OK because what the seven-
episode show, which started last week,
captures so well is the joy and the chaos of
starting your post-university life with the
people you just spent three years growing
up with. You’re suspended in a strange jelly
of almost-adulthood: calling an engi-
neer to come and fix the boiler one
minute, ordering £4.79 fairy wings for
a party from Etsy and crying over
your ex-boyfriend’s Instagram story
the next. Is life as wild as Alderton
makes out? Is it all midweek Tinder
hook-ups and nights out that end
hundreds of miles away from where
they began? Well.
What we really think
about casual sex
Maggie has a lot of it, partly because
she looks like a supermodel, partly
thanks to Tinder, which was the lat-
est craze back in 2012. These days,
the dating apps are different — Hinge
is bog-standard; Bumble occasionally
if you’re feeling feminist — but the
lashings of casual sex remain (and
yes, I’ve read the articles that say my
generation aren’t having any; I’m just not
sure where they got that idea from). After
we finished the photoshoot for this piece,
one had to rush off to Angel to meet
an erotic audiobook reader for a drink
(well, she wasn’t about to waste the profes-
sional make-up).
Sometimes, on hungover Saturday
mornings, I amuse myself by trying to de-
code my housemates’ previous night’s ad-
ventures from the jigsaw of unfamiliar
shoes in the hallway. One of them recently
headed out from my birthday drinks to a
club to meet a guy she’d hooked up with
once or twice (American Bill, as we fondly
know him), only to return a few hours later
with an entirely different man. This one
was blue-eyed, polite and incredibly Ger-
man. We discussed the chances of rain as
I scrubbed sticky beer stains from the kit-
chen floor the next morning while he
located his jacket. I don’t think we’re
likely to see either of them again.The rules for
interloper boyfriends
of housemates
Not everyone’s knee-deep in
hook-ups. Most of the time at
least half my house is buttoned
into a state of blissful (or less
blissful) coupledom — between
us, there have been five different
boyfriends since moving in. A
lumbering new male presence can
be tricky to adjust to. (“Why is he here
all the time?” growls Maggie, of
Birdy’s new boyfriend. “And why
can’t he get the boyfriend-of-a-
housemate vibe right? It’s super
simple: talk a tiny bit but not too
much and always offer to make tea.”)
Boys, take note: this is an excellent rule
of thumb, to which I would only add: fixSex, love and overdrafts Tales of
Susie Goldsbrough, 24, on how
close her life is to the TV show
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