Downtime #2

Thirty-year-old full moon energy, Soho's best dish and a Succession confession

Spring has finally sprung and there is madness in the air. I don’t know whether it’s a trauma response to how bleak the world feels or a spiritual rebellion to turning 30, but it seems everyone I know has become gripped by a feverish determination to have fun.

Friends who stopped clubbing after university are now looking up events on Resident Advisor with a due diligence once reserved for settling their Splitwise accounts. Nights out that once ended at 1am are now ending at 5am. Festivals, to which several of my friends had years ago declared “never again”, are now being booked quite literally back to back.

End of the decade break-ups have even fuelled a monthly single’s party so raucous that those of us in relationships are desperate for an invite, hungrily awaiting morsels of gossip at dinners that used to be dominated by talk of promotions and pay rises. (Maybe this is what happens when millennials watch too many TikTok videos about Gen Z 'quiet quitting'.)

Then there is fancy dress, something we finished with after university and which I have always hated (a low moment was wearing the red coat I wore almost every day to a party as Little Red Riding Hood) has now made such a full frontal return that in the last year I have found myself twice dressed as Britney Spears in a full latex catsuit, hosted a birthday Matrix party and last week drunkenly put out feelers for a “Barbie” one this summer. 

And last month I went to a wonderful wedding where the bride and groom ended up on the dancefloor of a local Edinburgh nightclub, the bottom of the bride’s silk white dress grey from the grime, while a bridesmaid joyously held up a tray of 20 shots at 3am. 

One friend has even started referring to the coming season as “fuck it summer”, a phrase that, when first uttered, sent excited titters around the room. Now it has taken on a muscular state of intent, and is delivered forcefully, as one word, no doubt soon to become a toast: “FUCKITSUMMER!”

The other night, at a club surrounded by 24-year-olds, a friend and I wondered whether everyone knew how ancient we were. I asked one of them in the smoking area. “THIRTY? Sorry, you’re THIRTY?” spluttered the child, her eyes darting suspiciously as if searching for my stashed zimmer frame. I guess it was kind of a compliment.

So, yes, 30 year olds are feeling a little unhinged right now, please make us feel welcome when you see us in unexpected places.

This week in links

I’ve been watching Love is Blind for the first time, after I read this thoughtful comment piece about how the show simultaneously exposes society’s obsession with marriage all the while reducing it to insignificance. Well, I’m hooked, not so much because of the maverick premise – strangers must fall in love through a wall, only able to see each other once one of them proposes – but because of the pods in which the dates happen.

Tiny, plush, sound-proofed octagon cabins in which contestants spend entire evenings on their own with little plates of crudites and entire bottles of wine or whisky, often wearing their pyjamas and clutching a blanket in one hand and a notebook in the other, while speaking to their date through a wall, these pods are where I want to live on Mondays. The carpets look gloriously thick and even the sides of the pod look huggable. One candidate fell asleep mid-date, just as her man revealed he had fallen in love with her. Can you imagine how comfy she must have felt for that to happen?

I’ve been reading The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson. The reviews have been glowing, and I love Mendelson’s journalism (her recent Times piece on the dark side of Patricia Highsmith was excellent) but I couldn’t enjoy this book about a dysfunctional middle-class family hovering around the bullying patriarch and failed artist, Ray. Perhaps it was how frustrating I found his wife Lucia, who flattens her own artistic ambitions so as not to draw attention away from Ray’s success, or how his children’s parasitic dependence on him reminded me of a lesser Roy family. I wasn’t convinced by the dialogue, either. But my friend and Times assistant literary editor Susie Goldsbrough says it’s brilliant and until now our reading tastes have been aligned, so… if anyone else has read it I’d love to know what you thought. Speaking of middle-class family dysfunction I loved both At the Table by Claire Powell and I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait.

I can’t stop thinking about the famous Roast Chicken, Morels & Vin Jaune dish at one of my favourite London restaurants Noble Rot (Soho), which I finally tried after two years of lusting over it, thanks to a very nice publicist who treated me to the kind of decadent, boozy PR lunch that nobody seems to have anymore. The restaurant was launched by a former music A&R and has become such a spot that the last time I was there I spied Emma Thompson and Andrew Marr on neighbouring tables. It also has a surprisingly reasonable wine list. 

Also, this very wise edition of Haley Nahman’s Maybe Baby newsletter, in which she answers reader ‘prompts’, including one about how to handle annoying traits in friends that don’t warrant a confrontation, humorously using Newton’s law of cause and effect to reconcile bad traits causing good traits, and vice versa. “A friend who’s always late but has a calming way of not taking life too seriously. A friend who’s really bad at planning ahead but is always down for a spontaneous hang. A friend who’s bad at answering texts but is unusually present with you in person.” Unfortunately I have all these bad traits and none of their redeeming counterparts but hopefully my friends already know this.

And dare I say it… I am now officially bored of Succession, sorry – regardless of whether everyone thinks the last episode ranks as one of the very best in TV history. I can’t bear to hear the Roys say ‘dad’ one more time, insert “fuckin…” before every noun and verb or watch them not eat the posh snacks at an event. And I am furious with how little screen time Greg and Tom have shared.

The last episode – despite the giant plot twist my boss so kindly told me about last week – filled me with the same kind of mad twitching angst I get when trying to untangle three necklaces that have spent a year knotting themselves together at the bottom of my jewellery box. Just as the gold knot between them looks like it might unravel, the links pool together again and it’s back to square one. I think the moment has come for Willa to channel some main character energy. 

Thank you for subscribing to PassTheAux! There are now over 2600 of you, which is very exciting. Most of you these subscriptions are free, so I’d love for you to consider a paid subscription, which is only £3.50 a month — or £35 a year – to support my work and keep this newsletter going.