My Only Single Friend, Lola, took me to one side and twitchily told me she felt very judged and isolated by all the married people. She was wearing red lipstick and a very strange up-do which involved a number of tonged segments of hair half pinned up and half down, not unlike a barrister’s wig. She only ever did these sorts of hairdos when she was very hung-over and overcompensating. She admitted to me that she’d had a bit of a heavy one the night before – a date that began in a canal-side pub at seven p.m., moved on to dinner, then a bar, then another bar, then back to hers at three a.m. It was clear she hadn’t been to bed. My Only Single Friend Lola worked in events, but at the time I would have described her as a freelance dater. She’d been single for ten years and was desperately searching for a relationship. She was my closest friend from university and none of our extended group of mates had ever been able to work out why she couldn’t get beyond a handful of dates. She was charming, funny, beautiful and had greedily looted the genetic bank by being the proprietress of not only enormous tits, but enormous tits that didn’t need a bra. She told me she was ‘wigging out’ about her date from the night before. I made a joke about her hairdo reflecting her state of mind. She said she was going to get the tube home. I told her that Eddie’s younger brother was arriving shortly who was single, twenty-six and a trainee vet. She said she might have one more prosecco for the road.

Katherine, my oldest friend who I’d known since my first day of secondary school, asked me what I wanted from the following year. I told her I thought I was ready to meet someone. She responded with unbridled glee – I think she felt that my decision to search for a relationship was once-removed approval of her choice to get married and have a baby. I’d noticed this was a thing that people did when they got into their thirties: they saw every personal decision you made as a direct judgement on their life. If you voted Labour and they voted Lib Dem, they thought you were voting Labour specifically to let them know that their politics were incorrect. If they moved to the suburbs and you didn’t, they thought you were refusing to solely to prove a point that your life was more glamorous than theirs. Katherine had defected to long-term monogamy in her mid-twenties when she met her husband, Mark, and, since then, she wanted everyone to come and join her.

I had been inactively single – single and not dating – for two years since the end of my relationship with Joe (together for seven years, lived together for four, our lives and friendship groups were completely conjoined, I began to notice him say things like ‘on the morrow’ instead of ‘tomorrow’ and ‘the book of face’ instead of Facebook). After we broke up, I tried to catch up on all the sex I hadn’t been having in my twenties with a six-month promiscuity spree. But a ‘promiscuity spree’ for me meant sleeping with three men, all of whom I tried to make my boyfriend. After self-diagnosing as a co-dependent, I decided to stop dating before my thirtieth birthday and see what really being on my own felt like. Since then, I’d lived on my own for the first time, travelled on my own for the first time, made the transition from teacher and part-time writer to full-time published writer and generally unlearnt all the habits accumulated in a near-decade of cosy, comfy monogamy. Recently, I’d started to feel ready to start dating again.

It was last orders at eleven o’clock. Katherine left shortly before then because she was pregnant. She hadn’t told me she was, but I could tell by the way she kept eating pickles – she picked gherkins off everyone’s burgers and then ordered a plate of cornichons. She craved intensely savoury food all through her pregnancy with Olive. I asked if her craving of umami is what inspired the name of the baby – she didn’t like that. I’d learnt a lot about what pregnant women and new mums don’t like over the last few years and one of them is when you have any questions or comments about their baby’s name. One friend stopped talking to me when – I thought rather helpfully – I let her know that Beaux is a French plural and she should spell her son’s name Beau instead. It had already been registered. Another got cross when she had a daughter named Bay and I asked if it was in reference to the herb, window or parking space. They particularly didn’t like when they told you their baby names ‘in confidence’ and you accidentally told someone else and it got back to the mother.

But the worst faux pas – the asking-someone-how-old-they-are, belching-in-public, eating-off-your-knife no-go – is when you can tell a woman is pregnant and you ask her if she’s pregnant. You also can’t say you knew all along when they do finally tell you they’re having a baby – they hate that. They like the touch of theatre that comes with the big reveal. In all honesty, I understood and would probably be the same. You’ve got to get your thrills from somewhere if you’re not allowed a cocktail for nine months. Which is why I nodded along and said nothing when Katherine left the party with a made-up reason of ‘having to get the car fixed’ the next morning.

At around ten p.m., there were mutterings of heading to a twenty-four-hour club in King’s Cross, mainly from the newly arrived trainee vet, who Lola was already talking to and twirling her wig at, but come 11.15, no one followed through. Eddie and Meera had to get back to relieve the babysitter and, on their behalf, I dreaded the twitchy, sleepless night that lay ahead of them as I watched their jaws rhythmically jut from side to side. Lola and the vet went to go find ‘a wine bar’, which meant somewhere dark where they could talk some drunken nonsense at each other until one of them made the first move and they could dry-hump on a banquette. This suited me just fine as I was ready for bed. I hugged the remaining guests goodbye and told them, not entirely soberly, that I loved them all.

When I got home, I listened to half an episode of my current favourite podcast, which was a light-hearted romp through the history of female serial killers, and I removed my mascara, flossed and brushed my teeth. I put my new old copy of The Whitsun Weddings on my bookshelf and placed my Chinese money plant on my mantelpiece. I felt unusually and perfectly content. On that August evening, in the first hours of the second day of my thirty-third year, it felt like every random component of my life had been designed long ago to fit together at that very moment.

I lay in bed and downloaded a dating app for the first time in my life. Lola, a veteran of online dating, told me that Linx (with a silhouette of a wild cat out on the prowl as its logo) had the highest yield of eligible men and the best success rate for matching long-term relationships.

I filled in the About Me information boxes. Nina Dean, 32, food writer. Location: Archway, London. Looking for: love and the perfect pain au raisin. I uploaded a handful of photos and fell asleep.

My thirty-second birthday was the simplest birthday I ever had. Which was a perfectly lovely way to begin the strangest year of my life.

Part One

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‘It is our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person’

Marcel Proust

1

Living in suburban North London was nothing but an act of pragmatism for my parents. Whenever I asked them why they chose to leave East London for the suburbs when I was ten, they would refer to functionality: it was a bit safer, you could buy a bit more space, it was near the city, it was near lots of motorways and close to schools. They talked about setting up their life in Pinner as if they had been looking for a hotel that was close to the airport for an early flight – convenient, anonymous, fuss-free, nothing special but it got the job done. Nothing about where my parents lived brought them any sensory pleasure or cause for relish – not the landscape, nor the history of the place, not the parks, the architecture, the community or culture. They lived in the suburbs because it was close to things. They had built their home and therefore entire life around convenience.