Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

I would happily take on the administrative weight of responsibility that comes with being an adult in exchange for the knowledge that I always have the freedom to go to the pub on my own and make friends with an old man any day of the week. To this day, I have never, ever been able to get over the fact that I don’t need to drink gin from shampoo bottles anymore; that there is no lights-out; that I can stay up watching films or writing until four a.m. on a weeknight if I want to. I am relieved, energized, invigorated that I can eat breakfast foods for dinner, play records really loud, and have a cigarette out of my window. I still can’t quite believe my luck. My entire life as a young twenty-something adult was lived like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York when he finds himself booked in at The Plaza and orders mountains and mountains of ice cream from room service and watches gangster movies. I blame this entirely on a strict upbringing. Nearly every adult I’ve met who went to boarding school cannot believe they now live a life where they can go to a Kentish Town old man’s pub on a Tuesday night and not be given a detention or a suspension or a rustication, whatever that means. If university had been a playground in which to live out my adult fantasies, my own house and salary in London was a veritable nirvana.