I wore a high-neck, low-back black dress to my birthday drinks. I didn’t wear a bra, simply to show off that I don’t have to wear a bra, which is a paltry consolation for having such small breasts. But I didn’t mind any more – I had become mostly indifferent to my body. I was an irritating size 11, totally average height at 5 foot 4 and happy that big arses had come back into fashion, so much so that I had observed with pride that we now occupied more than two categories on any given porn-streaming platform.

There were a number of people I didn’t invite to the birthday drinks this year. In particular, my ex-boyfriend. I wanted Joe to be there, but inviting Joe meant inviting his girlfriend, Lucy. Lucy was harmless enough, despite the fact she owned a handbag in the shape of a stiletto shoe, but Lucy always felt like there were unsaid things between us. Once she’d drunk her three glasses of specific rosé (‘Is it blush?’ she’d ask the weary barman, the 134th white woman to do so that day), she wanted all the things to be said. She’d ask if I had a problem with her, or if I sensed awkwardness between us. She’d tell me how important I was to Joe and how special he thought I was. She would give me a series of hugs and repeatedly tell me that she hoped we’d be friends. We’d met at least five times, and she and Joe had been going out for over a year, yet she still believed there were declarations we had to make to each other in quiet corners of social situations. I had thought about why she did this a lot and, rather generously, had come to the conclusion that Lucy was a woman who’d watched too many structured reality TV shows. She evidently felt a party wasn’t a party until two women in peplum dresses clutched hands while one says: ‘After you slept with Ryan, I stopped liking you as a friend, but I will always love you like a sister.’

There were, in total, twenty guests who came to the pub, made up of mostly university friends, a couple of school friends, old colleagues and a handful of people I was currently working with. There were also a couple of friends who I saw precisely twice a year – once at their birthday drinks, once at mine – and there was a new-found mutual understanding that while we didn’t want to let go of the friendship altogether, we had absolutely no interest in investing time in it beyond these biannual meet-ups. I found this unsaid pact to be both sad and cheering in equal measure.

Etiquette demanded I invited partners and spouses. These were mainly well-meaning men whose charismatic conversational prowess I had long given up on and instead knew they’d spend the evening sipping pints on a bench, saying nothing other than ‘happy birthday’ every time they passed me to get to the loo until they got tired and whingy and made their girlfriend go home. I was fascinated by the men all my friends had chosen to merge their lives with, particularly how they all interacted with each other. When I was with Joe, the girlfriends and wives of all his friends came together at every gathering with something akin to the Blitz spirit. We talked, we listened, we learnt about each other, we gradually grew closer every time we intersected by way of our boyfriends. I had noticed over the years that a group of male other halves do the absolute opposite to this when they find themselves shoved together. Time and time again I observed that most men think a good conversation is a conversation where they have imparted facts or information that others didn’t already know, or dispensed an interesting anecdote, or given someone tips or advice on an upcoming plan, or generally left their mark on the discourse like a streak of piss against a tree trunk. If they learnt more than they conveyed over the course of an evening, afterwards they would feel low; like the party hadn’t been a success or they hadn’t been on good form.

The thing they liked the most were instances of trivial commonality. I watched them do it at every one of my friends’ birthday drinks – search for a crossover of thought or experience as a way of feeling instant connection with a fellow man without having to make any effort to get to know or understand him – Oh yeah, my brother went to Leeds uni too. Where did you live? YOU’RE JOKING, oh my God okay so you know Silverdale Road, right by the Co-op? Like, to the left of the Co-op. That’s the one. My brother’s friend’s girlfriend owned a house there! Such a small world. Have you been to the pub on that corner? The King’s Arms? No? Oh, you should, it’s a great pub, really cracking pub.

The one other half I adored was Gethin, who was the long-term boyfriend of my university friend Dan. All three of us were close and had spent some of my wildest nights and most brilliant holidays together. But, in truth, they had disappointed me recently. I’d thought I could always rely on Dan and Gethin to flout tradition, but they had begun making the most conventional choices of anyone I knew. They had ‘closed’ their relationship, which was a let-down because their respective sexual escapades made for riotous stories and I held them up as the only successful example of non-monogamy I had encountered. They’d created an incredibly complicated alcohol-restriction schedule, which meant they were allowed to drink on certain weekends but not other weekends and they definitely couldn’t drink during the week. They’d stopped coming out because they were always saving money for something. They had just begun the adoption process. They had bought a two-bed in Bromley.

Dan and Gethin stayed for two lemonades, told me about the nightmare they were having with an overgrown tree in their neighbour’s garden which was overspilling into their garden, then left before eight to ‘make it back to Bromley’ like it was a quest to Mordor.

I received a number of thoughtful presents from people, indicating to me that who I was and how that manifests in my taste and lifestyle choices had been received loud and clear. There was an early edition of The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, a brand of smoky hot sauce that I love and can only be bought in America, a Chinese money plant that doubled up as a house-warming gift and a lucky mascot for my new book. The only rogue contribution was from my former boss at the school I worked at, who bought me a framed print of an illustrated 1950s woman doing the washing-up, with the caption: If God wanted me to do housework, he would have put diamonds in the sink! This was not the first time I had been given a gift of this ilk, and I decided that it was my prolonged state of singledom plus my fondness for a Vodka Martini that had made people think that I like this sort of kitsch vintage sloganism which made light of women being drunk, desperate, childless, chocoholics or overspenders. I thanked her.

I was offered a line of cocaine by my friends Eddie and Meera, who were desperate to have their ‘first proper night out together in eighteen months’ because in that time Meera had been pregnant, given birth and had just stopped breastfeeding, which meant she could now fill herself to the brim with booze without passing it on to the baby. Eddie and Meera had a feral look in their eyes that I had come to recognize in new parents on their first night out. I politely declined. I didn’t mind them taking it at the party, but I was very aware of how much Meera talked about the need for paternity leave when high, especially the phrase: ‘the default patriarchal constructs of parenting’. Eddie did a lot of restless shuffling from foot to foot – he couldn’t get settled – and they both continuously spoke about Glastonbury like they were its founders.