“You’re all about being somewhere else.” A potential friend told me that during college orientation week. He was right. I was too busy trying to prove I was too cool for the room. We never became actual friends; my fault, not his, and my loss.

I preach so much about paying attention. Not getting lost in a phone; really thinking about where you are, what you’re doing, why. But can that be carried too far? If I’m always questioning whether I’m in the right place, living the right life, am I forgetting to be actually here, living it? Am I not appreciating what I have?

Almost everyone I know wants to be somewhere else. Hannah wants London proper, not the farthest reaches of Romford. Kate wants anything but Walthamstow, but will settle for Bath. Sarah wants France but actually Surrey, but Drew just wants not to get beat up. Maddy says she’s N7 til death but actually she takes a break in Nice every six weeks. I think she’s got it sorted.

Rebecca asked me – shop chitchat – where my perfect place would be. “It’s not one place,” I told her, “it’s two.” No one place ticks all the boxes; everywhere is a compromise. You need two, each to be an escape for the other.

Think about it: You go on vacation and after a few days start looking forward to going home. You’re home, but dreaming of vacation destinations. We always want to be where we’re not, and we never appreciate where we are til we leave it.

I never saw the morning 'til I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine 'til you turned out the light
I never saw my hometown until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the song ¹

Okay, so that’s sorted. Two places. Bringing balance to the Force. …Where?

The thing about home ed is that once you start questioning the system it’s hard to know where to stop. We’re saying “This shit is broken, okay, we’ll design our own.” We’ve opened the door and the whole fucking world is on the other side.

But it’s always easier to alter something that already exists than it is to design from scratch. I’m a great reorganizer; I’m not an architect. I find working with constraints an exciting challenge; a completely blank space would be paralyzing.

One place has to be a city. Start there. Or… list all the things I want, total, and then make sure they’re all represented – distributed somehow between the two places? Ok then:

Theatre
Swimmable water
Good food
No need for a car
Different country
Friends/family close by

It’s a start.

Richard was saying that he’s happy now. He’s got this life, here, figured out, and it works. And I agree. But that’s the point where I say, That means we’ve finished here, right? I left NY not because I didn’t love it but because I knew what it was to live in NY, and I did love it, but I’d done it. I wanted something new. And now I know what it is to live in London, and it works for us now but there will come a time when it will have been enough.

Only in complete privacy am I allowed to denigrate England, so I’ll repeat instead what Kate told me yesterday:
"This is the definition of depressing: sitting on the bus home, it’s raining, 4pm, it’s already dark, you’re sitting next to a stranger coughing."

There are many adjectives to describe the other places I’ve lived, but England really has a lock on grim.

I’m not sure a move to Bath will help her with that. It’s something, but is it enough? Hopefully at least it's enough for the next ten years. It helps to remember that you don’t have to move anywhere forever.

Despite what Instagram influencers would have us believe: A Forever Home is not necessarily a desirable thing. Buying a place and deciding to stay in it for the rest of your life does not make you an adult.

My uncle once told me that his definition of adulthood was owning matching mugs, which is sort of the Forever Home ideal writ small. But I’ve never wanted matching mugs. In point of fact, Richard and I decided years ago that mugs were the ideal souvenir. Because it’s important to buy a souvenir – you have to make a point of it – but we wanted something useful, not just decorative. Mugs are the perfect solution. Plus over time they break so then you have an excuse to go away and find another one.

It’s appealing, the Forever Home. A place that is ours with everything in its place, where we always know where the Christmas tree will go, where we can paint the wainscotting and build a greenhouse out of discarded windows and not worry about resale appeal. It’s fun to imagine. But that’s all. It’s a fantasy, and like all fantasies it’s not meant to come real.

When you’re a kid, being an adult is simple.

And when I grow up
I will be smart enough to answer all
The questions that you need to know
The answers to before you're grown up ²

There are markers, after all: At 6 you can rock climb; at 8 you can swim alone; at 12 you can baby-sit; at 16 you can drive; at 18 you can vote; at 21 you can drink; at 25 you can rent a car. But after that you’re on your own. Your brain is fully formed, congratulations and good luck out there.

But we keep searching. We keep wanting to be told, yes, you’ve made it, you’re here.

"I'm so glad that you finally made it here,"
"You thought nobody cared, but I did, I could tell,"
And "This is your year," and "It always starts here,”
And oh-oh oh-oh-oh oh-oh, "You're aging well." ³

But only Dar Williams is there for us. We have to craft adulthood ourselves. From scratch, every time.

¹Tom Waits, "San Diego Serenade"
²Tim Minchin, "When I Grow Up"
³Dar Williams, "You're Aging Well

Recipe: Sweet Potato Tea Cake but for god's sake leave off the meringue.

I work with a 24-year-old. More than one, actually, but some embody it more than others.

He’s called Alf. He starts his cover letters for other – what he imagines are better – jobs with “My name is Alf.” He wants to write but seems to spend all his time in the pubs where his friends work, drinking free beer and playing pool. He also attends weekly meetings of the Revolutionary Communist Party. As I said, 24.

He seems to think his life lacks direction. He’s not wrong, but that doesn’t mean he’s right either. When I was 24 I was finishing up a stint teaching English in Japan, about to embark on six months of backpacking across Southeast Asia, China, and New Zealand, followed by a homecoming to… friends’ couches?

I wanted to write too. Somewhere along the way I forgot that if you wanted to write there was only one thing for it: Write.

It didn’t have to lead anywhere. It might have, but that isn’t the point. You do a thing because it is a thing you want to do. It is not part one; it is not a step; you are not progressing.

He says he doesn’t want to work in a bookshop because he should be able to buy a flat in London. I say, “Why do you want to buy a flat in London?” Alf says it’s home, and his Mum and sister and friends are here, and okay, sure, but just because you have a place you identify as Home doesn’t mean you have to live there. New York will never not be my home.

But Alf says it’s more the idea of a Proper Job. A Proper Job should pay the bills and buy a flat. He has this idea of what an adult looks like, and what we are isn’t it.

Fair. I once thought I wanted a Proper Job too. So I found one. And I spent 7 years working it, and another 5 working another, and then I had a baby and moved to London and wondered what the hell I’d been doing all that time.

A lot, I suppose. And not enough. None of it was wasted; if I hadn’t decided on a “career” I wouldn’t have met Richard. Much follows. But I wasn’t writing, and I should have been. Not to publish a book but because… Look, if you’re a Librarian, you will always be a librarian, whether you work in a library or not. If you’re a writer: you write. I don’t want Alf, who says he wants to write, to forget that.

Right now his main concern is dating. More important than finding a new job is finding a girl he can be crazy about. He thinks the way to do this is to have, as one of his Hinge questions, “What is your madeleine moment?” As if a girl, a) getting this reference, and b) thinking it’s profoundly meaningful, is the key to lasting happiness.

I asked him how many volumes he’s read. “Two?” Right, of course. And did you like them? I mean look, Alf, if you’re going to attach this much weight to a reference, it has to be both a lot more obscure and a lot more important to you. And it has to be something that if they don’t get it, once you explain (with no judgement you ponce) they'll think, okay, this is interesting and I want to learn more.

I once had a dating profile (on a book-based site) with the fake name Carrie Kelly. No one got it. And it’s worth noting that I did once date someone who would have, and am glad I stopped, and that Richard still wouldn’t. But I know if I handed him the book he’d enjoy it and agree that I should totally dress as her for Halloween. Why else do I keep rollerblades in the closet?

Well, Alf can’t help being 24. I was no better, and I can’t stop him from making his own mistakes and learning his own lessons. In 20 years he’ll agree that office jobs suck, but maybe he’s got to have a few first.

He really does need to read more science fiction though. Most people do, but especially if they’re in danger of becoming one of those people who Do Not Read Science Fiction. Nip that shit in the bud. Otherwise you end up yet another old white man going into the bookshop and asking for military history and reading only books about WWII, of which there are way, way too many.

(The British obsession with WWII: Discuss. My theory is that this country has been involved in many wars over the centuries, many of which they should not have been, and in all that time, all those conflicts, about only one can they feel fairly unambiguously proud. 1939: The other side was Nazis. ‘Nuff said.)

So please Alf, don’t become that guy. Don’t hang all that meaning on Proust while sneering at literal time travel.

Because… I can’t believe I have to explain this… The literal “science fiction” stuff that happens in those books is all metaphorical. It’s time travel because time travel is fun to think about but also because it gets at the human condition. Could you kill Hitler? Should you, sure, but could you? At the end of the day the best science fiction is not about the future, or aliens, or space ships, or the apocalypse; that’s window-dressing. Science fiction is about people. Who are we, really? When we’re at our best, and our worst? When we follow the logic and ask What If?

(Potentially much more meaningful Hinge questions: Which of Heinlein’s 3 kinds of SF appeals to you most? Or, Do Asimov’s Laws of Robotics need updating? Would you kill Hitler? Would you travel forwards or backwards in time? Would you push the button and invite the aliens in?)

Because humans are not, after all, homo sapiens. Wise my ass. We are (I don’t know if Pratchett originated this or if that’s just where I heard it first, but I’ll take the opportunity to plug another SF name) pan narrans. Just another ape, but with stories. So many stories.

You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I wanted to crawl into a cave and watch stalagmites with Frostfrog for the remainder of my days, that would also be both fine and good. You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live. That is all most animals do.¹

It is not easy, explaining this to a 24-year-old: that your life is what you do with it, every day. Your obituary will have a narrative but your days, hours, minutes are discrete, and yours alone. I don’t dislike office jobs; I dislike spending my days in an office. I left the archives not because the collections weren’t fascinating (hello, Maya Angelou’s porn), but because no matter how fascinating they were (that frisson when I held Malcolm X’s briefcase) it didn’t change the fact that I was spending all my time a) commuting, to b) sit in front of a computer, in c) a windowless room, temperature-controlled for the comfort of paper, not people.

And that’s it, isn’t it? Pan narrans to our own detriment. So good at stories we conflate them with reality or worse, believe the story we tell is more important than the reality we live.

Alf tells himself a story where he has a Proper Job. He is a writer, editor, publisher – a person of that world – attending salons, drinking cocktails with people who, it goes without saying, understand what a madeleine moment is. He goes home to his North London flat with his very attractive lady friend who will not pressure him to have children, where the walls are lined with the books of people he regularly meets, as well as a tasteful number of his own, perhaps translated into Russian and French. The Booker, when it arrives, he keeps in the downstairs loo.

¹Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Recipe: The sleeper hit of last Thanksgiving, an updated creamed spinach.

I like having rules. Not other people’s; my own. Other people’s rules are restrictive, impersonal, arbitrary; mine are born of experience, designed to save me from regret and recriminations. When in doubt – I don’t have to be in doubt; there’s a rule for that.

Rule 1:
If you’re wondering whether or not you should pee, go pee.

Rule 2:
If you don’t know whose turn it is: it’s yours.

Rule 3:
Always toast your nuts. I don’t care what the recipe says. And double the cinnamon.

Rule 4:
Never get the soft serve. It is always disappointing, even with the chocolate shell/sprinkles.

Rule 5:
If you want to keep something secret, don’t leave it lying around.

Rule 6:
Do not underestimate children. Do not underestimate girls. Trust your Boop.

Rule 7:
You never regret going for a swim. I know it’s a faff. Do it anyway.

Recipe: I'm not vegan but that doesn't mean I can't eat Vegan Mushroom Tantanmen.