well, quite

I have written short themed essays for each of my last three birthdays, and had accepted that this was going to be the year I broke my streak. There is nothing new or life-changing I can offer to the ‘so you’re turning thirty’ genre. I was sure that any post I wrote on the topic of getting older would turn into some kind of dated listicle in which I poorly repurposed memes about unexplained muscle cramps and the way that organising an activity with a group of more than two friends after the age of twenty-seven demands the same amount of notice and planning as a general election. There was no point in fondly reflecting on and romanticising my twenties, because I’ve been doing that for at least the last five years, constant self-mythologising and fast-tracked nostalgia being an endemic trait of the millennial condition. Nor did I really want to forecast my thirties with the optimistic glamour of a Sex and the City moodboard (although I do expect to follow Samantha Jones’s example by showing up to at least one baby shower with a bottle of Scotch).

There has not been any grand shift in my circumstances or psyche since my birthday just over a week ago; I spent the first day of my thirties mostly on trains trying not to vomit because I managed to get food poisoning from half a bag of Haribo (don’t ask). Absolutely boked up my ring in a TransPennine Express toilet, and then I misread the train timetable somewhere along the journey so I ended up with an hour-long layover in Bidston, where the station bathroom was out of order, so I limped through a small area of wasteland to a nearby retail park, and I seriously considered peeing in the long grass on the way except the path went alarmingly close to a pylon and anxiety-science convinced me I was going to be electrocuted, and then I had a small cry in the disabled toilet of a Marks and Spencer. Thirty, flirty, and clearly thriving.

I was travelling for a four-day trip to Gladstone’s Library in Wales where I was planning to overindulge on scones and work out a very sticky section of the novel I’m writing. I told my agent I was off on a writing retreat and was looking forward to sending her a completed manuscript in the not-wildly-far-off future. Because I felt slightly nauseous for most of the week, in the end it wasn’t necessarily the oasis of creative fertility I’d wanted. But I did write some things, and some of them were quite good, and I’m trying very hard not to beat myself up for not producing work of Dickensian length and quality while I was quietly popping Immodium in the Gladstone’s reading room.

There is a line that’s been on my mind a lot over the last month or so, since I rewatched Little Women (2019) at Christmas. Amy March’s speech in her Paris studio about art and genius and the economics of marriage is gorgeous in full, but it’s the line, ‘I want to be great, or nothing,’ that keeps coming back to me. I think about this phrase a lot because it makes me consider how often I think or say the words I’ve done nothing today when what I really mean is I’ve done nothing particularly great today. I felt this very keenly when I was leaving Gladstone’s, because there was a cynical part of me that thought if I hadn’t produced pages and pages of inspired prose while I was literally living in a library then I might as well have written nothing.

An equally seminal text I’ve been thinking about alongside Little Women is the 2020 essay collection Quite, by Claudia Winkleman (a natural pairing). Particularly this part of the introduction:

‘And why is it called Quite? Well, because it’s my favourite word. It’s a raised eyebrow, an aside. ‘Well, quite.’ But at the same time, it’s firm, restrained, and it manages your expectations: ‘I think you’d quite like this film.’ ‘That egg sandwich was quite good.’ And that’s what we need, I think. Things to be quite good. […] The thing about ‘quite good’ is that it leaves you somewhere to go.’

I spent a lot of my twenties thinking everything about me had to be great, or nothing. Everything from my work to my body to my General Craic—anything I felt to be bad or mediocre was a colossal source of shame, and ‘quite good’ was never quite good enough. If I make one change to mark the start of my thirties then I would like it to be swapping the Amy March dichotomy for the Claudia Winkleman creed. (I am, after all, already a dedicated follower of her most vital teachings: religiously wearing too much eyeliner and a wide variety of excellent blazers.) Maybe thirty will be my year, my year of great and glorious things, my (exclusively Heaton-based) Eat Pray Love. Maybe it will be the worst year of my life so far. Or maybe it will just be ‘quite good’; and that’s quite all right with me.

Cover photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash