Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  Recipe: The Seducer’s Sole Meunière

  (serves two)

  I made this for the aforementioned musician I dated when I was twenty-four in the early stages of our courtship to try and make him love me. It worked for about a week. I’ve since made it for other boys worth my time and brown butter and the effects have been successful and more long-lasting.

  – 4 tbsp plain flour

  – 2 fillets of lemon sole

  – 1 tbsp rapeseed oil (or sunflower will do)

  – 50g butter

  – 2 tbsp pre-cooked brown shrimps

  – juice of ½ a lemon

  – 1 tbsp capers

  – A fistful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped finely

  – Salt and black pepper, to season

  Mix the flour and seasoning on a plate then dip the fillets in the mixture so they are evenly coated. Shake off excess.

  Heat the oil on high until it is very hot. Cook the fillets for two minutes on each side. They should be crisp and golden.

  Set fish aside and cover with foil to keep warm.

  Lower the heat of the pan, add the butter and melt until it is lightly brown. Take off the heat, toss the shrimps through the butter, add the lemon juice.

  Place the sole on the plates, pour the butter and lemon mixture over each fillet, finish with a sprinkling of capers and parsley. Season.

  Serve with a side of green salad or green beans and roast new potatoes (don’t serve with your big open heart).

  3rd February

  Dear friends who I normally only ever get completely leathered with,

  I’d love to have you round to witness my attempt at behaving like an adult. Some call this a dinner party, but I think that sounds a bit stuffy, so I’m going to call it something vague enough to seem relaxed but nothing that hints at a knees-up, like: ‘a get-together’ or ‘some food and drinks’ or ‘a casual, chilled-out dinner’.

  The important thing is, this definitely won’t be a knees-up.

  Please arrive at my flat at seven o’clock. By which I mean, please plan to arrive at seven o’clock until you get a very panicked message from me at six o’clock asking you to come at eight o’clock because I couldn’t find kohlrabi anywhere for Jamie Oliver’s Asian slaw, so had to get a £25 Uber to Waitrose and back and it put me behind an hour. As I said, it’s all very casual and chilled.

  The guest list is as follows:

  1 x Outrageous gay friend (Ed) who is happy sharing colourful stories from his varied sex life. He will be the sort of truth-telling court jester of the evening – think Julian Clary meets the Gravediggers in Hamlet.

  1 x Benevolent new boyfriend belonging to Ed (name TBC) who everyone will make a huge effort with until just after the main course when he will be largely ignored until he books an early Uber home but no one will realize he’s left until two hours later.

  1 x Northern feminist friend (Anna) who will make Ed feel more comfortable because of her liberal outlook and left-leaning politics and vice versa.

  1 x Single man I don’t know that well from work (Matthew) who will flirt with everyone. Matthew isn’t generically attractive, but he’s tall and has a loud voice. The plan is that everyone will fancy him as they get drunker and realize he’s the best of a bad bunch. A bit like how we all felt about Nick Clegg in the 2010 election.

  1 x Posh engaged couple (Max and Cordelia) to add a touch of grown-up homeyness to the evening. They will happily talk about every detail of their upcoming wedding to keep things ticking over in moments of conversational sparseness. NB Keep Max and Anna apart from each other when talk turns to the welfare state or climate change.

  1 x Slaggy friend who drinks too much (Leslie) who will make us feel like we are still in the white heat of youth while simultaneously making us feel better about our lives (thanks for this, Leslie). She will also take the lead in documenting the evening on Instagram with a hashtag such as ‘#asianslawgivememore’ or ‘#sinnershavingdinner’ or something else to this effect.

  Please bring a bottle of wine. I will assume you’ll bring Oyster Bay as it’s the only one we all know that isn’t rubbish-tasting but also only costs a tenner. Jacob’s Creek will do. Echo Falls is of course welcomed but its price point will be noted.

  After throwing all your coats on a bed and giving you a glass of warm white wine, of which I will have already consumed half the bottle before you arrive out of sheer anxiety induced by the earlier Challenge Anneka chase for kohlrabi, I will present you with four bags of Kettle Chips. This will be your starter.

  Having set myself the challenge of making eight separate dishes to follow the trend of what everyone calls ‘Mega Relaxed Ottolenghi-style Dining’, I will be absent for the first two hours of the evening. Safe suggested topics of conversation for the semi-sober are as follows:

  – The efficiency of the Victoria line

  – Comparing respective rent costs

  – Recent celebrity deaths

  – Hairdresser recommendations

  – Who will be the next Bond

  – The dollar/pound exchange rate on a recent trip to New York

  – How much water we should actually all be drinking

  – Any play currently in production featuring a recognizable TV actor

  – Budgeting apps

  – Bedding

  Dinner will be at ten p.m. By this point everyone will be drunk enough to make sexual innuendos relating to the meal – ‘Have you got hummus up your end?’, ‘Let’s toss the salad’, etc. – but not quite drunk enough to all get their phones out and watch mildly amusing videos on YouTube. This will happen after the main course and before pudding.

  Suggested videos:

  – News reporter bloopers

  – Cats getting stuck in things

  – Children getting upset about missing chocolate

  – Dogs falling asleep in odd places

  – Any Louis C. K. routine

  – Anything with Céline Dion

  Leslie – it would be great if you could incorporate drugs into the evening after this. Either by sharing some old weed you have in your handbag or texting your dealer for some cocaine. If you plump for the latter, everyone will put up a bit of a fight, citing being ‘so skint this month’ or having not done it ‘since two birthdays ago’ but, rest assured, they still want it and will cough up when Candy Man arrives.

  If you do go for the second option, Cordelia and Max will have an argument as Max will offer to pay for an extra gram. Cordelia will be confused – they’re apparently too broke to have a string quartet play ‘Signed, Sealed, Delivered’ as she walks down the aisle, but he’s willing to drop £60 on Class A drugs for a room of people he barely knows?

  Past midnight, it’s time to get on to what I will call the ‘Pointless and Trite Debating’ portion of the evening. This House Believes in Something Obvious I Read in a Guardian Column vs This House Believes in Something Slightly Less Obvious I Read on a Vice Blog. All topics and opinions will be broad, non-committal and predictable with made-up statistics and exaggerated personal anecdotes to support flimsy arguments. Suggested subjects:

  – Is there such a thing as left wing or right wing any more?

  – If women want genders to be equal, why is it called feminism and not equalism?

  – Is it art if I could make it?

  – Why do we eat pigs but not dogs?

  – What is the legacy of Tony Blair according to all of our parents that we will pass off as our own opinions?

  – How late is too late to have children?

  – Was Margaret Thatcher a feminist?

  – Will soaring London property prices mean people will actually move to Margate?

  – Is it OK for Matthew to be wearing a Ramones T-shirt despite not being able to name one of the Ramones or any of their songs?

  When things get too heated between Max and Ed during ‘Homosexuality: nature or nurture?’, it’s time for Leslie’s Drunk Overshare, in which she reveals a secret about herself
in a long and winding monologue to a silent audience.

  Suggested confessions for Leslie:

  – You don’t like any Welsh people

  – Recent chlamydia contraction

  – Your uncle groping you as a teenager

  – Affair with a married man

  – You think you can communicate with the dead

  – You think voting is pointless and boring

  – Fear of infertility

  Scheduled times of departure:

  Ed – four a.m., after he’s proved he knows the original dance routine to Hear’Say’s ‘Pure and Simple’ and every word of Lil’ Kim’s rap for ‘Lady Marmalade’.

  Cordelia – two a.m., because of a made-up brunch the next morning.

  Max – two thirty a.m., after getting an angry text from Cordelia to come home.

  Matthew and Anna – four fifteen a.m., in the same Uber.

  Leslie – four p.m. the following day.

  Really looking forward to it, guys! Will be so good to have a chilled one!! Xxx

  Recipe: Apple Pizza With Can’t Be Arsed Ice Cream

  (serves four)

  A recipe given to me by my mum, to impress people when they came round to my crap house for crap dinner parties, requiring zero skill or effort.

  For the ice cream

  – 4 egg yolks (must be very fresh)

  – 100g icing sugar

  – 340g mascarpone cream

  – vanilla essence

  Whisk egg yolks and sugar until pale and creamy.

  Beat in mascarpone cheese and vanilla essence. Put in a Tupperware box.

  Freeze overnight or for at least 3–4 hours.

  For the apple pizza

  – Pack of puff pastry

  – Pack of marzipan

  – 500g apples, peeled and sliced

  – Jar of apricot jam

  Roll out the puff pastry.

  Cover with a circle of marzipan.

  Lay the sliced apples on top.

  Bake in the oven at 200°C till golden and meanwhile heat apricot jam on the hob.

  When the apple pizza comes out, pour the warm apricot jam over the pizza and leave it to rest.

  Serve with the ice cream.

  ‘Nothing Will Change’

  One of the things I hated most about Farly meeting Scott is that I never saw her family any more. I missed her mum and dad and stepmum and brother and sister. For years, I spent every other weekend and holiday with her family and they were like my own. But after Scott came on to the scene, I didn’t get the call-up from Farly any more, so I only saw them once or twice a year. Scott now occupied the seat I had been in at the dining-room table for birthdays and Sunday roasts; he was the one who joined them on cool, cosy autumnal half-terms in Cornwall while I looked at the photos on Instagram.

  After a few months of living in our new London house, Farly invited me out on a walk with her family one Saturday afternoon. We stopped at a pub for lunch and I basked in the warm familiarity of their rituals: the nicknames, the in-jokes, the stories about Farly and me when we were teenagers. I felt smug; whatever space Scott had been occupying for the last few years was a different shape to mine, because nothing had changed at all.

  On our last leg of the walk, we lagged behind the rest of the group and the dog, like we’d always done as teenagers, due to competitive over-eating at lunch.

  ‘Scott’s asked me to move in with him.’

  ‘What have you said?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m going to do it,’ she said almost apologetically, her tentative words floating in the cold air. ‘It felt right when he asked me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After I’ve done a year with you guys in Camden,’ she answered. I resented the phrase ‘done a year’ like I was a gap-year ski season or a TEFL course in Japan; a thing you do once for an interesting anecdote.

  ‘OK,’ I replied.

  ‘I’m so sorry, I know it’s so hard.’

  ‘No, no, I’m happy for you,’ I said. We did the rest of the walk in silence.

  ‘Do you want to bake chocolate chip cookies?’ Farly said when we got back to our house.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Great. Make a list of what we need and I’ll go get the ingredients. And why don’t we watch that Joni Mitchell documentary that’s been sitting on the shelf for ages?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. It reminded me of the time my mum took me to McDonald’s when I was eight after my goldfish died.

  We sat on the sofa eating cookies, our legs intertwined, our tummies poking out from pyjamas. Graham Nash was talking about the soul-baring lyrics of Blue.

  ‘I know every single word of that album,’ I said. It was the only album we’d taken on a three-week summer road trip when Farly passed her driving test aged seventeen.

  ‘Me too. “Carey” is my favourite.’

  ‘ “All I Want” is mine.’ I paused to eat the last of my cookie and wipe the crumbs from my mouth. ‘We’ll probably never do a road trip like that again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re moving in with your boyfriend, you’ll do all your road trips with him now.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘Nothing will change.’

  I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about ‘nothing will change’. I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my twenties when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. ‘Nothing will change.’ It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity and the intimacy of our friendship will change for ever.

  You know when you were a teenager and you’d see your mum with her best friends and they’d seem close, but they weren’t like how you were with your friends? There’d be a strange formality between them – a slight awkwardness when they first met. Your mum would clean the house before they came and they would talk about their children’s coughs and plans for their hair. When we were kids, Farly once said to me: ‘Promise we’ll never get like that. Promise when we’re fifty we’ll be exactly the same with each other. I want us to sit on the sofa, stuffing our faces with crisps and talking about thrush. I don’t want to become women who meet up once every couple of months for a craft fair at the NEC.’ I promised. But little did I know how much work it takes to sustain that kind of intimacy with a friend as you get older – it doesn’t just stick around coincidentally.

  I’ve watched it time and time again – a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don’t like this rigmarole any more than men do, but they’re better at it – they just get on with it.

  This means that when a woman my age falls in love with a man, the list of priorities go from this:

  1. Family

  2. Friends

  To this:

  1. Family

  2. Boyfriend

  3. Boyfriend’s family

  4. Boyfriend’s friends

  5. Girlfriends of the boyfriend’s friends

  6. Friends

  Which means, on average, you go from seeing your friend every weekend to once every six weekends. She becomes a baton and you’re the one at the very end of the track. You get your go for, say, your birthday or a brunch, then you have to pass her back round to the boyfriend to start the long, boring rotation again.

  These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together any more. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like. I now understand why our mums cleaned the house before their best friend cam
e round and asked them ‘What’s the news, then?’ in a jolly, stilted way. I get how that happens.

  So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip, the cycle works when it comes to holidays as well – I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.

  Farly moved out on my twenty-fifth birthday. She and Scott found a one-bed with a roof terrace to rent in Kilburn. It was opposite a gym, which they said was good because they liked to play badminton, apparently. She made a fuss of showing me there was a direct bus from Camden to Kilburn High Road. I took it in a sulk on the way to their house-warming drinks.

  I spent the party chain-smoking on the roof terrace with Farly’s teenage sister, Florence, on my lap, showing me her yearbook. Later, when I was drunk, I told her I secretly hoped one of them was unfaithful or Scott was gay so Farly would have to move back to our house. She laughed and gave me a hug.

  ‘I hate that,’ Farly said, pointing at a framed Manchester United shirt covered in the team’s signatures and hanging in the hall, sensing I needed something to pour my misery into.

  ‘Yeah, it’s horrible,’ I replied.

  ‘Rank,’ she said. ‘Living with a boy. Urgh.’

  ‘Girls are so much better to live with.’

  ‘The best.’ She smiled. ‘Do you like the flat?’

  ‘I love it. I think you’re going to be really happy here.’ And, annoyingly, I finally believed it.