Good Material

by Dolly Alderton

sprezzatura.

heightening ourselves for the other one’s enjoyment (she, the fauxhemian corporate West London girl; me, the scruffy comedian who never had enough bog roll in the flat). We made too much comedy of our differences and placed too much meaning on our similarities. It was flirting to a Premiership standard.

it. I loved us. I loved that Jane and Jen knew things about each other that Avi and I didn’t know. I loved that Jen and Avi had “their song” that, when played at Jane and Avi’s wedding, made them rush across a dance floor to find each other. I loved that Jane took the piss out of me and I took the piss out of Jane. I loved that when I saw a film or a festival that looked like it would be fun, I’d send a link to our WhatsApp group and a question mark. I loved that we all knew each other’s family members and our drinks orders and most embarrassing sex stories. I loved that Jen and I were godparents to their first child. I loved that they FaceTimed us from the hospital bed an hour after their second was born.

There are so many hidden miniature break-ups within a big break-up. There are so many ahead of me that I haven’t even thought of yet.

I watch Avi, otherwise so impatient and bad-tempered—the sort of man who complains in restaurants and mutters in queues—do it all with no grumbling. Not just that, with genuine joy. It’s quite incredible.

Like my dad

flat. Each taking turns to present an emotion they’ve felt and all of them putting it under the microscope for inspection, as if it were a gem with a billion faces.

Women.

The tenor of our messaging is how I remember conversations during my brief time on dating apps—flirty without ever feeling the flirting is aimed specifically at me. Friendly without friendship. Suggestive without ever really suggesting anything. I

She seems to want to message all the time, but about almost nothing. She’s resistant to giving me many details about her life. She doesn’t want to go into depth on anything—interests, ideas, jokes. All we seem to message about are the happenings of our day, tinged with slight horniness.

This is why comedians make the best drinking companions. They will never have enough validation, enough success, enough love, enough good stories, enough material. They will always be looking for something

It’s like I was off sick from life for a while, and sometimes it’s nice to be off sick. Sometimes it’s nice to not be a thing, in the world, trying so desperately to be a person. Here’s what I’m getting at: I don’t know if I really want to move on, because the further away I get from the pain, the further away I get from her.

hazy, low-fi photos of Emma and Thalia reclining in London parks with cans of beer and on sofas with bed-hair and mugs of tea.

I miss my room mates.

We can just talk about being sad, if you like. You don’t have to make the sad thing funny for me.

Because I am starting to think that talking about the sadness might be the same thing as processing the sadness. And if we’re not doing that, then we only have our thoughts for company, and our thoughts are unreliable and they invent things and they lie to us and give bad advice. Not talking about the sadness is what leads us into The Madness.

We toast everything unremarkable because the length of time we’ve all known each other makes the simple laws of time so very remarkable.

shambolic—a

As thirty-five approached, nearly every woman I know got pregnant, keen to hand in their homework to mother nature before the famous deadline.

Love this image

In the same way our group of friends dealt with every crisis, I was going to talk my way back to sanity with them.