If you’ve been around recently, you’ll have watched me test this theory from both sides: first, what happens when alcohol gets too entangled with romance; then, what happens when you remove it altogether.1

So at this point, I’m aware that returning to the alcohol theme for a third week risks making “cultural commentary” sound like something I tell myself (or, in other words, alcoholism with good punctuation).

But this time, I’m coming at it from a slightly different angle.

Drinking and dating may be dangerous bedfellows – but the business of being alive is rather more complicated.

So far, the drinks have taken most of the blame. I’ve accused them of softening the lighting, distorting chemistry and manufacturing charisma in men where none was previously detected.

I stand by all of it.

And yet, martinis are not responsible for every disaster. Sometimes the house is already on fire – and San Pellegrino is not an emergency service.

As it turns out, there are moments when a drink is not there to make the night more interesting, the man more attractive, or to get you through a sober first date that somehow moved from M&A to Crimea without ever making a meaningful stop at flirtation.2

Sometimes it is simply what gets handed to you when there is nothing else anyone can do.

At some point in your thirties, life starts to feel more serious. No announcement, no rude awakening - the softer edges of your twenties just sharpen. SW4 flats become Surrey houses, first-year couples get wedding websites, spare rooms become nurseries and Saturday drinks start competing with first-birthday parties.

The stakes get higher. But unfortunately, so does the distance you have to fall.

At the risk of drifting into unsolicited lexical analysis, I’ve started to wonder why “falling” covers so many of life’s destabilising moments. I’ve already identified a suspicious overlap between falling in love and falling down the stairs: different settings, same general loss of control.

But what I haven’t yet covered is falling apart – or if we’re being precise, complete emotional collapse.

Because falling in love is one thing. But discovering that love can leave and take the floorboards with it is quite another.

And in my case, the landing was fairly literal.

There was broken glass across the floor, a photo frame in pieces, mascara somewhere south of where it had started – and me sitting in the middle of it all. I don’t remember exactly what I said when I called my mum, only that it was enough for her to get in the car and drive up the A23 at a speed she would now almost certainly deny.

When she arrived, there wasn’t anything left to fix. The photograph was shattered, the relationship was broken, and I was sitting on the floor doing a fairly convincing impression of both.

Now, my mother has spent most of my adult life expressing fairly robust views about my social habits. And this is not entirely without evidence: I have always been the daughter more likely to come home at 3am than 3pm, with a story, a hangover and very little appetite for criticism.

But she took one look at me, abandoned several decades of principle and poured me a large glass of Tesco’s Finest Pinot Grigio.

Sometimes wine is there to make the night better. And sometimes it’s there to get you to the other side of it.

Society loves to tell women that their thirties are the decade: more confidence, more money, better boundaries, better Botox – but this is the less photogenic side of the campaign. The things around you start looking more permanent, which makes it considerably more destabilising when one of them suddenly isn’t.

And nobody tells you that the aftermath of having your life rearranged rarely follows the dignified order promised by the five stages of grief3. So I spent much of what followed performing my own version of instead: black dress, heavy mascara and a central London postcode.

Because modern womanhood doesn’t grieve softly. It slaps on a full face of make-up and leaves the house.

The thing about London is that it’s very good at making a breakdown look like a social life. There is always somewhere to go, someone to meet and a bar open late enough to postpone being alone with yourself.

There were dinners, drinks, parties, dates, more drinks, more dates. I worked too much, went out too much and developed an impressive ability to be absolutely fine in public.

I spent my weeks buried in meetings, deadlines and late-night calls, taking on increasingly unreasonable amounts of work and deriving an equally unreasonable amount of satisfaction from being able to handle it all.

I spent my weekends moving through Soho basements, Chelsea bars, Mayfair dining rooms and whatever part of the City was still serving after 10, bouncing between restaurant tables and the backs of black cabs with my phone permanently on 12%.

The uniform was black: Bardot dress, cropped blazer, stilettos.

I looked somewhere between a mourning widow and a mob wife (minus the oversized Chanel sunglasses or access to hitmen).

Which was a shame, because I had a few names in mind.

As coping strategies go, all of this worked remarkably well – except for one small problem:

I had become catastrophically bad at drinking.

Whether this was the result of grief, a nervous system that had apparently resigned without notice, or the fact I weighed approximately six and a half stone, I couldn’t tell you. But suddenly one glass of wine seemed capable of achieving what previously required several drinks, a questionable second location and a man I had already been warned about.4

And one might have thought this would’ve been an excellent time to take a break from men altogether, but instead, this was when I decided to start meeting strangers from the internet.5

So, into modern dating I went: underweight, overdressed and a newfound skill in getting plastered before the starters arrived.

(Grief, incidentally, remains one of the more brutally effective appetite suppressants; Ozempic simply has a better marketing department.)

But to further complicate matters, I entered a dating landscape that had developed its own language while I wasn’t looking. Ghosting, breadcrumbing, situationships, soft-launching, orbiting – none of this existed when I was nineteen. When I was nineteen, the men around me still had their hairlines and the rest of us were busy uploading a heavily filtered photo of a tuna sandwich to Instagram.

More confusingly though, cause and effect appeared to have broken down entirely.

One man could take you on two apparently excellent dates, full of chemistry and all the usual indicators that a third might reasonably follow, only to close proceedings with:

“Haha yeh thanks – was fun x”

And literally nothing else.

Another could suggest a weekend away, propose the dates himself and discuss it with enough specificity that you made the mistake of assuming this constituted a plan – only to later mention, with complete casualness, a boys’ trip over the exact same weekend.

No explanation, no acknowledgement, not even the decency to pretend he had forgotten – the original conversation had simply ceased to exist.

A third could spend months behaving very much like a man who intended to remain in your life, only for it all to culminate in Battersea Park with the sort of scene that felt far too dramatic to be final: long conversation, high emotion, both of you saying far too much, and a closing declaration so theatrical it practically required orchestral backing:

“I’m going to regret losing you for the rest of my life.”

Only to never hear from him again.

So, either the regret passed remarkably quickly, or he was actually talking about “the rest of the afternoon.”

And so, it turns out, modern womanhood asks quite a lot of you. Modern romanticism, unfortunately, asks for more.

So, somewhere in the gap between the two is what I have come to think of as Glamorous Suffering:

Looking remarkably put together while privately wondering what the fuck is going on.

In a dating culture built on ambiguity, contradiction and mixed messages – where boyfriend-level communication can exist without boyfriend-level intention, grand declarations can be followed by complete silence, and “high maintenance” can mean desirable on Friday and difficult by Sunday, it becomes very easy to lose confidence in your own read on things.

So there is one rule above all others, one thing worth holding onto when the rest of it stops making sense:

STAY SANE.

Because nothing destabilises you faster than trying to impose logic on a man who has elected not to provide any.

So while my tolerance for alcohol and my tolerance for emotional chaos may have gone completely haywire at roughly the same time, several years on the London dating circuit have provided extensive rehabilitation in both. I have emerged with no husband, but a much stronger constitution and one useful conclusion:

A drink is never just a drink.

It is taste, signalling, Dutch courage, social shorthand and occasionally an early warning system. It tells you something about you, something about him, and more often than either of you realise, what kind of trouble you are about to get into.

So, in the interests of staying sane – here is some guidance.

The Little Black Drink Policy

Sancerre
The safest pair of hands on the list. Definitely more refined than Pinot Grigio and works well with both a man you fancy and a man you realise, approximately seven minutes in, that you absolutely do not. I have required it for both.

Versatile and sophisticated, the little black dress of the wine world.

Cosmopolitan
Very Sex and the City. Only order one if you genuinely like cranberry juice and are not using the drinks menu to audition for Carrie Bradshaw. Slightly dated, deeply pink. Also, vodka.

Femininity with consequences.

Champagne
If he orders it on a first date, you will briefly wonder whether this is going somewhere. It may well be. Sometimes that place is simply another bar.

Proceed with optimism, not projections.

Pinot Grigio

The white bodycon bandage dress of the wine world. Perfectly drinkable, widely available and tells me absolutely nothing about you other than that you have declined to engage with the wine list.

I have already given you Sancerre as a perfectly viable alternative, so from this point onwards you are making an informed decision.

Proceed, but know how it looks.

Aperol Spritz

Visually closer to a WKD than anything a grown woman should be ordering, but somehow chic once served over ice on a terrace. Best consumed on a City rooftop with a man who still seems promising because it is only 6:30pm.

Seasonal approval: permitted only in temperatures above twenty-five degrees.

Gin & Tonic

Crisp, refreshing and deceptively civilised for the first one. By the third, things have taken a darker turn – “mother’s ruin” feels remarkably appropriate when you’re staring into the abyss of his WhatsApp last-seen.

Best consumed with low expectations.

Margarita (spicy or otherwise)
Very Hinge. Usually arrives somewhere between exposed brick, small plates and a man describing himself as “big on travel.” Delicious, but statistically associated with decisions you will later have to explain.

(A lawyer with bad breath once commented on my chipped polish after too many margs in London Bridge. I still kissed him - a low point that even I somehow rationalised as flirting.6)

Proceed with impaired standards.

Espresso Martini
The date has already gone on too long and now you are adding caffeine to a situation that clearly needs closing remarks.

No.

Nyetimber

Champagne’s more discreet British cousin. Expensive enough to feel intentional, understated enough not to make a performance of it.

Extra points if he orders it unprompted. Deducted immediately if he looks pleased with himself for knowing what it is.

The grown-up option.

Prosecco
No. Absolutely not. You are not eighteen, nobody is pre-drinking in student halls, and this is not a hen do where dignity has already been collectively suspended.

Prosecco has its place. Date five. A friend’s kitchen island. Possibly the back of a wedding coach at 1am. But on a first date?

Have some self-respect. Order the Sancerre.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

After months of 28-degree optimism, bare legs in the office and City people treating every available pavement as a continental terrace, it finally rained on Thursday. It was only for an hour, but London seemed to take the hint: the mornings have grown darker, I wore tights to work, and the City just seems slightly more serious.

It’s starting to feel like the Sunday of summer. Nothing is over yet, but you can sense Monday approaching.

Mid-August has a suspended quality to it. London feels oddly thinned out - people are away, plans are sporadic, and everyone left behind is mentally fast-forwarding to the Bank Holiday. The bank that employs me, however, has not entered the same lull, and most of my week disappeared into sixteen-hour days.

Despite this, one of womanhood’s enduring absurdities is how a demanding week never cancels personal maintenance: you are expected to accommodate both and arrive looking as though neither has inconvenienced you. So I squeezed in a nail appointment on Wednesday - an hour spent surrendering the very limbs keeping me employed.1

And then Thursday gave the manicure somewhere to go.

If you’ve been here a while, you might be familiar with what I call the City’s Sabbath. It’s London’s sacred day of the week, and even the rain doesn’t cancel it; it simply moves everyone indoors.

So one drink became several, and by 10pm I was at The Ned with fading lipstick, a glass in each conversational direction and absolutely no idea whose corporate card was performing these acts of reckless philanthropy.

And then it ended, as these evenings often do, in the back of a black cab to SW3.

I have well-documented views on London’s transport infrastructure, including a publicly indexed analogy on Instagram comparing the Tube lines to the emotionally stunted men of the dating world.2

And this analysis does not end underground; the roads are no less revealing.

The Uber is logical, the black cab is emotional.

You don’t plan to get into a black cab, you just find yourself in one - desperate, drunk and often delusional, watching the metre climb with absolutely no recollection of the last five hours.3

And for the avoidance of doubt, none of this was romantic. Thursday is for corporate chaos; Friday is for romantic delusion - the distinction is largely administrative. The drinks are the same, only the expense policy changes.

At least, that was the theory.

Aside from Thursday’s six-hour exception, I moved through the rest of the week sober, sustained by spreadsheets, black coffee and investment bankers treating midnight as a soft deadline. And with the little brain space that remained, I kept returning to the thought that I had carried out of Hackney and back into the City:

Drinking and dating are dangerous bedfellows.4

Hardly a radical observation, granted - but modern dating has tied the two together so tightly that suggesting a sober date can still sound vaguely transgressive. So, in the interests of intellectual rigour, I asked Instagram the obvious question.

71% said yes to a sober first date. I spent the week reflecting on this summary and have concluded that this is an impressive show of confidence, considering no-one had yet heard about mine.

So I will tell you.

It is October 2025.

Summer has closed without consultation, Christmas is too far away to improve morale, and London has entered its annual holding pattern of wet pavements and darkness before dinner. It’s not bleak enough to be romantic yet; it’s simply inconvenient.

But if London was offering very little, Hinge was offering even less.

Dating apps are peculiar economies: everyone believes they are worth more than the matches they’re shown, while the apps themselves have very little commercial incentive to help anyone leave. A successful relationship removes two customers; keeping everyone vaguely hopeful is much better for retention.

And yet, delusion thrives on intermittent reward. So, into this vacuum entered a match with a Swedish man whose profile was an exercise in immaculate tailoring: clean-cut, composed and dressed as though every photograph had been taken between negotiations.

The suit could be explained by work. The pocket square could not.5

And as a woman who takes corporate fashion incredibly seriously, I treated this as a declaration of shared values.

He worked in private equity: decisive, deadline-driven and theoretically capable of making a plan without asking me to project-manage it - a preliminary assessment quickly supported by evidence.

Moving from Hinge to WhatsApp is the smallest possible act of romantic escalation, but the messages were even more promising. Crucially, the reservation existed before the question mark: a restaurant, a table and the pre-dinner logistics, all packaged inside a smiley face and two kisses. It was the romantic equivalent of the rarest Outlook invitation: clear agenda, confirmed timings and, most seductively - no actions assigned to me.6

Dinner on a first date is, admittedly, a slightly aggressive allocation of time, but I made a conscious decision to overlook it. The green flags were practically folding themselves into a pocket square.

I wore my signature set: all black, a sleeveless tailored top and high-waisted flared trousers - I am not a skirt person and rarely a dress person. Dresses are reserved for board meetings, where femininity is best introduced as a negotiating tactic.

I arrived at the bar a strategic ten minutes late: not enough to be rude, but enough to ensure he was already there and, ideally, had taken the initiative to order me a drink.

The green flags waved: of course, he was already there. He stood up to greet me and said, “let’s go straight to the restaurant. It’s too loud in here, we won’t be able to talk properly.”

Yet another green flag. As I spend most of my day fighting for my turn to speak in meetings, a man actively concerned with my audibility felt disproportionately charming.

I privately advanced him several stages beyond first date and into entirely hypothetical wedding logistics.

We arrived at the restaurant and sat down. Then, before I had even opened the menu, he opened his mouth:

“I’m not drinking alcohol at the moment.”

I received the news physically: one hand to my chest, the rest of me collapsing into the banquette. Had there been a chaise longue , I would have arranged myself across it.

HOW - and by what catastrophic sequence of events - had I been manoeuvred into THIS? He had agreed to meet me for a drink, waited inside the bar, removed me from that bar, committed me to an entire dinner and only then revealed that I would be doing it sober.

I ordered a Cosmopolitan anyway. Drinking alone on a first date does not qualify as Glamorous Suffering, it is borderline alcoholism - but I needed to process this deeply unwelcome news properly.

What then ensued was essentially a competency-based interview.

We started with the current M&A market, a common ground - I work in banking; he worked in private equity.7 I understood what he was saying, he understood that I understood, and for several minutes we enjoyed the professional intimacy of agreeing that debt was cheap.

Then, apparently keen to eliminate any residual sexual tension, we moved on to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the strategic importance of Sevastopol. An important subject, certainly, but not one widely associated with foreplay.

Was I on a date, or was this an industry panel with two speakers and no audience?

At this point though, the evening was not, entirely beyond recovery. I went to the loo and returned to find a doughnut on the table - the evening’s final opportunity to establish whether this was, in fact, a date. Sharing dessert is inherently flirtatious: one plate, two spoons, a tiny caloric joint venture.

But there was only one spoon. The doughnut was his. He ate it alone and in full while I watched.

What I had mistaken for a joint venture was actually a wholly owned asset.

At just gone 9pm, my Cosmopolitan was a distant memory and he was nearing the end of his mineral water. I wondered what else could be in store - the evening had been strange enough that almost anything felt plausible.

Perhaps he would kiss me?

Perhaps he would ask whether I had any questions for him?

Or perhaps he would wheel out a whiteboard and begin the case study?

But instead, he announced that he needed to return to the office.

I know enough about finance to accept that working through a Friday night is plausible, but I also know enough about dating to know that plausibility is not the same as truth.

Had debt suddenly become expensive while I was in the loo? Was a portfolio company in distress? Had my answer on Sevastopol fallen below expectations? Or had he taken one look at me in the bar, decide he did not fancy me and spent the subsequent two hours completing the process out of professional courtesy?

Then the bill arrived - and with it the final indignity.

Before I could offer to split, he took out his phone and photographed the receipt. Not discreetly beneath the table, and not later, once I had left - directly in front of me.

I had spent the evening wondering whether I was on a date or at a networking event, and with this, it had become clear.

He expensed me.

Suddenly, the distinction between Thursday’s corporate chaos and Friday’s romantic delusion collapsed. Friday had been corporate too: I had become client entertainment, except I was neither a client nor entertained.

Outside, it was raining. He delivered a hurried “nice to meet you”, kissed me on the cheek as a diplomatic formality and disappeared into the October night.

I stood there, profoundly confused and profoundly sober, while the rain undid several hours of work on my hair. Now, as we’ve established, the Uber is logical; the black cab is emotional - but I was feeling neither, so I took the Tube. This is apparently the mode of transport when reality needs to reassert itself one stop at a time.

On the platform at Oxford Circus, I opened Hinge. And even now, I’m not entirely sure why - perhaps I wanted reassurance I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Or perhaps I wanted to replace the evening’s complete absence of romantic validation with something cheap and immediate.

Instead, I discovered he had unmatched me.8

The journey home was sobering in every sense. Without several drinks available to rearrange the evidence, there was very little room for interpretation. The solitary Cosmopolitan, the unilateral doughnut, the urgent return to the office: these were not mixed signals. The man simply did not fancy me.

The obvious next step was to run an audit. Had I shown up too much like the woman I am at work - talking deal flow, portfolio companies and valuations - and not enough of whatever softer, more decorative version of femininity dating supposedly rewards?

Was it the trousers?

Modern womanhood is strangely paradoxical: the qualities that make you formidable in the office can suddenly feel like liabilities across a dinner table. You spend all day being rewarded for competence and self-possession, then go on a date and briefly wonder whether femininity was supposed to require pretending you have neither.

But whatever conclusions I drew about myself on the journey home, there was at least less room for ambiguity. Modern dating is already built on grey areas - mixed signals, slow fades, ghosting, the endless forensic analysis of what somebody “meant” - and alcohol only adds another layer of fog.

Sobriety does not improve the outcome; it simply accelerates the findings. Last week’s incompatibility took six weeks and a sustained quantity of alcohol to reveal itself.

This one took two hours, one Cosmopolitan and a doughnut I wasn’t allowed to share.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

There is a very thin line between falling in love and falling down the stairs.

I know this because I have done both – one more recently than the other.

Before anyone panics, no, Bella hasn’t fallen in love. Her romantic circumstances remain unchanged, but her commitment to fashion over function remains absolute - even when it throws her down the stairs.

This commitment is not theoretical, it is stitched into the hem of an unreasonable number of black flares, all tailored to be intentionally, impractically long. This sartorial instruction can be attributed to Victoria Beckham, the matriarch of fashion, who has spent the better part of two decades convincing mere mortals like me that trousers absolutely must skim the pavement – and basic mobility is the price one pays for an elongated silhouette.

And this is a trade-off I am generally willing to make. There is something about a pair of trousers dragging half an inch along the floor that makes me feel extraordinarily competent. Nothing quite compares to walking into the office and dismantling several egos before lunch, whilst looking like my legs begin somewhere around my ribcage.

They are, however, less effective on stairs.

So, it was my own ego that was aggressively dismantled this week, whilst walking down the stairs at Victoria station. I caught my heel in the hem, lurched forwards and performed the sort of descent that begins as a stumble and very quickly becomes a public event.

I landed hard. Nobody helped.1

And before you blame the obvious: no, it was not Thursday. So no, I was not drunk.

It was 07:45 on Tuesday morning. I was stone-cold sober, having already spent an hour sprinting under red lights in the name of wellness, beginning my commute to the City like the high-functioning woman society insists I am.

Falling over sober is bad luck. Falling over drunk is a lifestyle.

Which is why it felt like a personal betrayal that only a few days earlier, I had spent almost twelve hours under the influence, and yet remained miraculously upright.

And not within the safety of my usual orbit, either. Because London is a city where your postcode slowly threads itself into your identity – but sooner or later, someone you love will ask you to venture into one fundamentally incompatible with your personal brand.

And for me, that postcode was East.2

I don’t have anything against Hackney - I just have very little business being there.3 My natural habitat sits somewhere between Battersea, Chelsea and the City, with occasional migration west when somebody has made a sufficiently compelling dinner reservation. East London requires a different sort of woman entirely: one who owns interesting sunglasses, drinks natural wine and can wear something she found in a charity shop without looking like she has recently fallen on hard times.

Hackney Wick is old industrial brick covered in graffiti, railway arches, warehouses converted into bars and the Overground rattling past buildings that look as though they have survived several separate attempts at demolition. Everything is painted, stickered, sprayed or slightly falling apart, and nobody appears remotely concerned by this.

But still, friendship requires sacrifice, and so on Saturday afternoon I crossed the river, travelled east and prepared to reacquaint myself with a version of Bella I haven’t had much cause to summon lately.

I made no attempt to assimilate - I arrived as myself.

Against the graffiti and railway arches, I was slightly overdressed and entirely unbothered by it.4

You see, Glamorous Suffering has range. Sometimes it is emotional damage in a five-star hotel; sometimes it is Chanel in Hackney Wick.

Afternoon drinks on Mare Street became one of those nights that gathers speed rapidly. Another round, another bar, somebody knows somewhere else; shots appear, lipstick disappears, strangers become best friends and every conversation on the pavement outside suddenly feels like it may, in fact, change your life.

By 3am, the woman who had arrived in Hackney looking faintly overdressed was folding herself into the back of a £120 cab to the other side of London5 - mascara smeared, financially compromised and, for once, just letting the night unfold.

This is one of alcohol’s more impressive talents. It doesn’t simply change how somewhere feels, it changes who you are whilst you’re there.

And this is where drinking and dating become dangerous bedfellows.

If enough warm lager can make Hackney feel like home, imagine what a bottle of wine can do for the man sitting opposite you.

And yet, alcohol is so embedded in dating that we barely notice it: first drinks, then dinner, and somewhere between the first glass and the second you are expected to decide whether said man could conceivably become the father of your children.

I have long maintained that a first date does not require an alcohol licence - a position once tested by a Hinge match who flatly refused my suggestion of coffee, as if I’d asked him to attend couples therapy before we’d even met.6

I knew where I stood, but I was less certain about everyone else. So last night, I put the question to Instagram: would you do a sober first date?

The answer was emphatic: 71% said yes. Apparently, we are far more willing to assess a man without chemical assistance than modern dating etiquette would suggest.

Which is interesting, because the last man I dated was almost exclusively experienced under the influence. Aperol Spritzes in the City, wine in Wimbledon, dinner in Spitalfields that carried on well after the light disappeared. The only sober interludes were sixty minutes of HIIT training (engineered by me) and a small handful of mornings, because even I draw the line at wine for breakfast.

It was fast, fun and deceptively easy, but the weekends started to expose the difference between us. He saw an empty Saturday night as a problem to be solved; I saw one as a small personal victory. He was genuinely alarmed to discover that I sometimes spend Saturday nights alone, and looked at my plans for sofa, skincare and absolutely nobody speaking to me like I had announced my admission to a convent.

I even caught myself wondering at one point: am I boring?

No, I am not boring. I am in my mid-thirties. There is a difference, and it is largely measured in how much you value waking up without a neurological emergency.

But despite the difference in our Saturday-night philosophies, things appeared to be progressing well. Six weeks of dinners and drinks culminated in one long evening in Richmond that had all the right ingredients: late-summer light, riverside views and just one more drink.

Then he disappeared for forty (yes, 40) hours and returned with a remarkably definitive conclusion:

“Something doesn’t feel 100% right.”

A suspiciously precise sentence for one that contains almost no information whatsoever.

It wasn’t too far from being taken out by my own trousers at Victoria: one minute you think you know where you stand, the next you are on the floor.

So, since he couldn’t name what was missing, I will. The missing percentage was, dare I say it - sobriety.

And this made me think about how, in the continued and increasingly speculative search for the love of my life (assuming he exists somewhere outside the imagination of my mother) I might avoid this situation again.

My conclusion is simple: by date three, or four at an absolute push, you need to see him sober and in daylight.

NB: The morning after does not count; you are still love-drunk and he is benefiting from residual goodwill.

And in addition to this, it should be resolutely boring: a coffee, a walk, a trip to Tescos. An environment with no bravado, no flattering lighting, no luxury props and no sommelier hovering in the corner conspiring in his favour.

Otherwise, you are not dating a man. You are dating a cocktail of borrowed confidence, suspicious eloquence and chemically assisted emotional depth.7

And if you ever find yourself on the receiving end of the modern man’s favourite non-answer – perhaps don’t spend too long searching for the missing percentage.

Sometimes the missing percentage isn’t you, or him. It’s whatever had been making the other 99% feel so convincing.

It wasn’t chemistry. It was Chablis.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

It’s the city that takes more than it gives. It swallows your salary in rent, steals your twenties in commute time and, more often than not, leaves your dignity somewhere between Bank station and a cancelled Uber at 1am. You go to work in the dark, come home in the dark, then spend the brief British summer pressed against a stranger’s armpit on the Central line in forty-degree heat.

It demands a great deal, offers very little reassurance and leaves you constantly wondering what more you could be doing to keep up.

If my ongoing emotional dispute with London is of no interest to you, you can skip to the venue rankings here.

London is the matriarch of the emotionally unavailable.

She gaslights you into questioning your own definition of success. In the right lighting, I can make my life look extremely convincing: I have the career, the flat, the independence and, occasionally, the audacity to behave as though none of it costs me anything. And yet, London has a incredible ability to make all those markers feel strangely theoretical: I oscillate between feeling like I have finally made it and wondering whether I can actually afford the life I have worked so hard to make.1

But most of the time, I can live quite happily inside this contradiction. Until London turns around and throws the whole city at my head.

Six consecutive days of rain, by which point London starts to feel like an expensive reservoir and I find myself pricing canoes as a viable alternative to the District Line.

Then, after forty hours spent firefighting a client crisis, staring at spreadsheets and surviving largely on Diet Coke, an email lands with “Bella” rather than “Hi Bella” – a single missing word that also stands as incontrovertible evidence that I am terrible at my job and should resign immediately.

And then, London’s closing number: the man who has spent several weeks behaving like my future husband announces that “something doesn’t feel 100% right” and swiftly exits my life, taking with him several hypothetical Christmases and the small (but tasteful) wedding I had already pencilled in.

And so, every few months, usually after some combination of professional exhaustion, romantic disappointment and sustained British precipitation, I reopen the case for leaving London and convince myself that perhaps an entirely different continent might fix me.

If my ongoing emotional dispute with London is of no interest to you, you can skip to the venue rankings here.

My career takes its payment in evenings, weekends, sleep and psychological stability, but at least returns the favour by offering an international relocation policy. According to my own investigations, the bank would quite happily relocate me somewhere with better weather, friendlier people and an economy in which a flat white does not constitute a minor financial decision. This is dangerous information to give a single woman during an emotional crisis.

And so, I flirt weekly with the idea of Sydney, New York, Dubai and Singapore – rotating fantasies according to the weather, my workload and my menstrual cycle.

And yet, I never go.

Because the paradox of London is that she is particularly well designed to survive your attempts to leave her: she never gives you enough to feel completely satisfied, but always gives you just enough to stay.

If my ongoing emotional dispute with London is of no interest to you, you can skip to the venue rankings here.

There is always somewhere else to go, and always the possibility that the next night might be different. A rooftop in the City, a dark corner in Soho, a hotel bar in Mayfair, a restaurant in Notting Hill, a table beside the river. London has an extraordinary talent for making the beginning of something feel important – even when the man sitting opposite you is not.

And in a city of nine million people, hope feels like an unlimited supply chain.

I know this because I’ve lived it. When I became single for the first time in my adult life, I did not ease myself gently into modern dating. I approached it in the only way I knew how: with urgency, excessive organisation and the misplaced confidence of a woman accustomed to keeping several live deals moving at once.

My evenings became another pipeline: drinks on Tuesdays, dinners on Thursdays and occasionally two dates in one weekend if deal flow was strong.

So when I say I’ve dated half of London, I am not entirely joking – I have the logs to prove it. My Notes app hosts a running record of men, venues and outcomes, maintained with the optimisation instincts of a McKinsey consultant and the emotional judgement of someone who should know better.

Yet despite the strategic management, post-date analysis and frankly unnecessary level of governance, a disproportionate number of London’s nine million residents have still managed to disappoint me across an impressive range of venues, postcodes and price points.

This is not a recommendations list. It is a record of everything I have chosen over Singapore.

Elite Tier: The Husband Edit

The sort of place that makes an unsuitable man look briefly viable.

• Wagtail, the City
Expansive views of the Shard. Revealing views of his hairline.

• AIRE Ancient Baths, Covent Garden
A birthday “gift.” Thoughtful in theory – though the low lighting, steamy corners and notable lack of clothing suggested it might’ve been a joint present.2

• Sky Garden, the City
Conveniently near the office. Hard to fault the venue, easier to fault the man when he ordered a girly cocktail.

• Sushi Samba, EC2
Earned points for remembering I love sushi. Lost all of them by asking for a fork.

• Ham Yard Hotel, Soho
Venue my choice. His lateness forgiven on account of taste (mine) and the bill (his).

• The Ned, the City
Marble, martinis and a man who seemed far more interested in being seen there than in seeing me.

• 1 Hotel, Mayfair
He stood me up, and the staff let me put the drink on his room anyway. Five stars for hospitality, zero for him.3

• 14 Hills, the City
Ordered Nyetimber with confidence. A rare vintage: emotionally unavailable but well-informed.

• Greenwich Peninsula Driving Range
An unexpected candidate – refreshingly therapeutic. Possibly because I was hitting things.

Mid-Tier: The Boyfriend Edit

The sort of place where potential can survive two drinks.

• The Waterfront, Battersea
Four visits, four different men. A place saturated with failed potential.

• Gold, Notting Hill
Venue: acceptable. Doc Martens: not.4

• Black Book, Soho
A basement full of first dates pretending not to notice each other. Siblings, careers and exes on every table.

• Third Space, Wimbledon
Subtle salary flex disguised as a fitness activity. Difficult to separate chemistry from endorphins.

• Soho House, Mayfair
Spent fifteen minutes in the rain trying to find the entrance, whilst he remained indoors – dry, warm and blissfully unaware of chivalry.5

• Barry’s Bootcamp, SW1
My attempt at a date without alcohol. I outran him, he blamed a bad shoulder to avoid the bicycle crunches, then dumped me a week later.6

• City Social, the City
Good views, good negroni. Took a rejection for a second date with grace and then picked up the £200 tab without flinching.

(Still keeps me up at night wondering if I made a terrible mistake.)

Bottom Tier: The Lessons Learned Edit

The sort of place you survive rather than recommend.

• Tapajax, Clapham Junction
A second date accepted out of politeness. I spent most of it avoiding accidental encouragement and drafting the rejection in my head.

• The Alma, Wandsworth
Not a date. A caloric incident involving pints, sausage rolls and enough beige food to eliminate sexual tension entirely.

• Northcote Road, Clapham Junction
Started in April sunshine, ended with blue lips and no feeling in my legs. He did not notice.7

• St. James’ Park
Three weeks before the marathon, I’d stopped drinking and held no interests beyond running. It was glorious sunshine, but I wouldn’t recommend a first-date 5k to even my worst enemy.

• Battersea Park
Has hosted a first date, a fourth date and a ceremonial dumping. I can no longer walk past a certain bench without picturing multiple different men explaining their feelings badly.

And yet, several years down the line, I am still single. Say what you will about my romantic judgment, but this cannot be attributed to poor efficiency in volumetrics.

And even if you take nothing away from this, I will attempt to leave you with the following Little Black Rules:

1) Never confuse a man knowing a rooftop with a man knowing what he wants.

2) A members’ club doesn’t manufacture manners - said man can, and will, leave you outside in the rain.

3) A tasting menu cannot compensate for an avoidant attachment style, though it can delay its discovery by approximately three courses.

No venue can make the wrong person right.

Still, should you insist on learning this for yourself, you may as well know where to order the negroni.

^ The raw materials.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

The final week of July. This is when summer enters its most psychologically manipulative phase: everyone is both exhausted by the heat and terrified it might end.

My week has been largely uneventful: gym, work, repeat. In practice, this means a 4:57am alarm, Barry’s Bootcamp, then eleven hours helping companies buy and sell one another for sums that could buy a Holland Park townhouse outright (including the basement excavation and the inevitable legal dispute with the neighbours).1

Not every week has a plot. While London was having the summer of its life, I was inside adjusting column widths.

Then came Thursday. As I explained in some depth last week, Thursday is the City’s Sabbath – except nobody rests, and communion is served in large glasses on Watling Street.2

Last week, I observed Thursday so enthusiastically that I accidentally ended up in Whitechapel – so this time, I kept the faith with slightly more dignity. Thursday was still Friday’s better-dressed, slightly more dangerous older sister, but this week she was under adult supervision: one Cosmopolitan, one glass of Chenin Blanc and sushi in Covent Garden.

Before you get excited: no. This was not a date.

This was dinner with a friend I met at work as graduates, when friendship was forged through shared deadlines, bad coffee and the dawning realisation that nobody senior knew what they were doing either.

Between pieces of sashimi, we conducted a forensic examination of a man who liked to leave several business days between text messages. We reviewed timestamps, punctuation and whether “hahaha” indicated warmth, avoidance or an underdeveloped vocabulary.

“He replied on Tuesday,” I said.

“And when did you message him?”

“Saturday.”

We stared at the phone.

Nothing in the messages was technically wrong, but this is often how you know something is.

We eventually concluded that his behaviour meant one of three things: he was busy, he was emotionally unavailable, or he was a man. The third explanation appeared to cover the first two.

As we stepped outside, Covent Garden glowed in the early-evening heat, its cobblestones warm beneath the fading pink sky. Beneath the theatre signs towards Leicester Square, couples moved slowly with shoulders touching, as though neither wanted the evening to end. London looked soft, expensive and deeply in love with itself.

For a few streets, love seemed effortless – which is usually how it looks when it belongs to someone else.

I wondered whether they had simply found each other at the right time, before romance was outsourced to algorithms and the internet industrialised ambiguity through read receipts, response times and strategic silence – with women extracting meaning from the spaces between words, while men simply get on with their lives.

Perhaps men hold their own inquiries, but I have never seen two of them spend £80 on sushi deciding whether “hahaha” means that you’re funny, or whether it means he’s about to disappear.

Then somewhere between the theatre lights and the hot, metallic violence of the Piccadilly line, one unanswered question opened the archive on another. The memory belonged to a darker, emptier London – and to a man whose silence was considerably less ambiguous.

It is January 2026.

(I appreciate this is an aggressive amount of knitwear to introduce in August, but stay with me.)

London is cold, grey and offering very little.

The New Year hangover has passed, the existential dread has stabilised. I have three days before returning to work and, unable to leave free time unmonetised or emotionally unproductive, open Hinge.3

The algorithm presents David: a lawyer, over six feet and broadly acceptable, aside from one photograph in which he has paired running trainers with jeans and an Hermès belt. Dress sense is a solvable problem, I reminded myself, while mentally enquiring whether the same man is available in better shoes.

More concerning than the trainers, however, is the small matter of geography: David lives in America and is in London visiting friends for New Year’s Eve. With this news, I immediately started to prepare a swift and dignified exit from the conversation, but he redeemed himself quickly.

“I come to London all the time for work. Would you meet me for coffee at Harrods tomorrow?”

Coffee at Harrods in broad daylight felt reassuringly inconvenient for a man seeking only sex.

So within minutes, I downgraded the Atlantic Ocean from “fundamental incompatibility” to “minor logistical detail” and concluded that a transatlantic relationship was entirely manageable. I could keep the Power Station view, retain full control of the thermostat, and occasionally be flown to dinner whilst enjoying the theoretical benefits of a dual income without ever sharing a bathroom.

That afternoon, we met outside Saint Laurent. He arrived fifteen minutes late, which irritated me, but I granted him seasonal clemency. He is on holiday. It is Christmas.

Perhaps time moves differently for men staying in Mayfair.

The coffee date was fine. We talked about travel, family and the usual first-date subjects designed to establish whether someone is interesting, dangerous or likely to mention Hyrox. There was possibly some light chemistry, but no kiss, no moment and nothing that particularly stood out.

Whilst I filed the afternoon under pleasant but inconclusive, David reached a much firmer verdict and suggested drinks the following evening before flying home.

I was a bit surprised, and not especially sold. Perhaps it’s him. Perhaps it’s me. Perhaps romance simply cannot survive broad daylight, caffeine and several hundred tourists attempting to locate the Egyptian escalator.

By the time I left Harrods, it was barely 4pm and already dark. The Christmas lights were still hanging over Knightsbridge, but without Christmas they looked faintly unemployed. Couples disappeared into taxis and restaurants whilst I make my way back across London alone.

At the Power Station, the river was black and my beautiful flat was immaculate, warm and very quiet.

No Christmas tree. No boyfriend. But a package from the Zara Boxing Day sale was waiting downstairs.

Inside was a pair of immaculate black flares: high-waisted, fitted through the thigh and falling in one severe, leg-lengthening line over the shoe.

Very Victoria Beckham. Very woman with a driver waiting outside. Very much the sort of trousers you buy twice.4

I called a friend immediately, because trousers like these are not clothing – they are an event. I spent several minutes explaining the cut, the leg and the second pair, and then, almost as an afterthought, that I had also been on a date - and he wanted a second one.

“You should go,” she said. “It’s Saturday night. What else are you going to do?”

It was a compelling case. When all your friends are undertaking Dry January with their husbands and boyfriends as a joint exercise in health, discipline and domestic unity, a Saturday-night invitation starts to feel like a seasonal window: miss it now, and you may not see another until the clocks change.

Then she sealed it.

“Plus, you can take the new trousers for a spin.”

Clothes require context. A perfect pair of flares cannot be properly assessed beneath the domestic lighting of a ninth-floor flat. They need a proper public debut, preferably somewhere with flattering lighting and expensive glassware.

David had dinner plans with friends on his final night in London, so we agreed to meet afterwards for drinks at the 1 Hotel, where he was staying.

“Afterwards,” it transpired, meant 9pm.

A late drink in a hotel.

It’s not necessarily a crime, but it’s not exactly neutral territory either. Under normal circumstances, this would suggest a fairly limited range of intentions, but I felt the coffee date had neutralised the situation. Besides, alcohol might succeed where caffeine had failed and reveal chemistry previously suppressed by department-store lighting.

I desperately wanted the transatlantic relationship to work: all the benefits of a boyfriend, with the Atlantic protecting my wardrobe space.

I arrived at the 1 Hotel a strategic fifteen minutes late, having adjusted for his previous form. As I stepped inside, he messaged to say he was running late.

Then what followed was six messages and several early warning signs.

Late, vague and still unsaved. A pattern was forming. It was not flattering.

I sat alone at the bar, drinking a Cosmopolitan in a black suit, looking like a stylish undertaker waiting to discuss the estate.

Around me, couples leaned across candlelit tables and friends crowded around cocktails. Everyone else had successfully completed the basic administrative task of arriving with the person they had arranged to meet.

I had lipstick, tailoring and an empty chair.

A full 25 minutes of silence passed. The double question mark is not curiosity - it is early-stage disbelief.

For the avoidance of doubt, there were many worries throughout – significant ones.

I do not believe David ever intended to arrive. The prolonged silences, shifting geography and increasingly drunk typos suggested an elaborate lie built around one American man’s alleged inability to navigate London.

A man who is genuinely on his way gives you a location. A promise is not a location.

There were many things I wanted to say – and as an aspiring writer, I had paragraphs available. Several were excellent. But meeting humiliation with an essay rarely restores dignity; it merely gives the recipient more material than they deserve.

I asked for the bill and felt a sudden wave of rage. Why should I pay for the privilege of being stood up when I could have been at home with the Power Station – the only dependable expression of masculinity currently visible in my life?

I asked the waiter whether the Cosmopolitan could be charged to David’s room. He asked for his name, nodded and said he would sort it.

Justice, served with a lime wheel. Then, suddenly:

David continued. An hour later, he sent another apology and, with extraordinary confidence, suggested meeting again. But accountability is slightly less impressive when nobody else is under suspicion. “I hope you’re home safe” reads like concern, but arrived late enough to require neither urgency nor a reply.

So, in return for wasting my time and squandering the public debut of an exceptional pair of trousers, I reported him for “off-Hinge behaviour” and went home.

And once I got there, I took a minute to look out of the window and reflect on the last few hours. Battersea Power Station stood across the Thames: distant, imposing and reliably where it said it would be.

And I realised, perhaps this was the transatlantic relationship I was looking for all along.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

Thursday isn’t just the new Friday. It’s Friday’s better-dressed, slightly more dangerous older sister.

On Thursday this week, London climbed back to 29 degrees. Our third heatwave of the year – but thankfully, we’ve left the 38-degree apocalypse behind us. Nobody was hallucinating on the Central line, and I was no longer considering a nationwide apology tour to every man I’d ever dated in exchange for visitation rights to his Dyson Air Cooler.1

This is the kind of heat that makes “just one” feel like a civic duty.

Big Ben chimes. It’s half past five.

Meetings evaporate. To-do lists dissolve. Responsibilities start to reschedule themselves for Monday morning.

(Or Sunday afternoon, if your email signature belongs to a bank).

Pubs spill onto the pavements. Pints glitter in the evening light, and the suits - once sharp, starched and obedient - begin to loosen.

The sun ricochets off the glass towers of the Square Mile, catching the Cheesegrater, the Walkie Talkie and the Gherkin as the City quietly slips out of office hours.

Leadenhall Market transforms into a greenhouse of corporate debauchery. White shirts surrender to the heat. The air is thick with aftershave, sweat and expensive optimism.

A few minutes away, Broadgate Circle beats to exactly the same rhythm. Negronis. Networking. Investment bankers discussing EBITDA as though a woman nearby might accidentally sleep with them because of it. Conversations overlap like pitch decks: loud, jargon-filled, and full of people saying things they don’t entirely mean.

It’s impossible to tell who’s flirting, who’s fucking, and who’s simply trying to make it to Friday.

The bubbles are cold. The intentions are not.

Because when you’re in the City on a Thursday, having a drink isn’t optional.

It’s the law.

Three glasses of wine, an empty stomach and several questionable decisions later, I’d somehow boarded a train travelling in the exact opposite direction to my entire lifestyle. Battersea Power Station was patiently waiting for me to get home, whilst Stratford, Hackney and Whitechapel were becoming alarmingly plausible outcomes.

So, forty-five minutes later, I was inching home on a bus.2 If Glamorous Suffering had a natural habitat, this was it: opposite me, a man had folded himself across three seats in a position more fitting to Renaissance paintings. Beside him sat an abandoned curry, slowly marinating into the TfL fabric.

Thursday’s spell had finally broken.

By Friday, I was working from home with my camera resolutely off, yesterday’s mascara making a convincing case for permanent residency beneath my eyes.

And this is when I realised: Thursday is finding your voice. Friday is “you’re on mute.”

By late afternoon, I wasn’t working so much as carefully escorting myself to 6pm. Every new email felt vaguely offensive. Every Teams notification was met with mounting resentment.

Eventually, I shut my laptop and crawled onto the sofa. Too exhausted to think about the logistics of cooking, I opened Deliveroo and was immediately ambushed by a parade of 2-for-1 offers. Another rude reminder that adulthood is apparently supposed to be a team sport.

Despite this, it did underpin one of the underrated perks of being single: Friday night belongs entirely to you.

The flat is quiet. The candles are lit. The only opinion that matters is your own. And after a week of meetings, Teams calls and negotiating with everyone else, there is something deeply satisfying about answering to absolutely nobody.

Perhaps that’s the greatest luxury of modern womanhood. Choosing what you want to do, when you want to do it – along with the choice to protect your peace every time.

And, occasionally, the choice to gamble it on a man you’ve never met.

Although I’d spent the last twenty minutes meticulously constructing the perfect Friday evening, in a moment of extraordinary self-sabotage, I voluntarily introduced the most emotionally unstable variable available to women in their thirties.

Hinge.

And so the usual ritual proceeded: No. No. Absolutely not.

And then I landed on Jamie.

His profile wasn’t remarkable, it was ... functional. Which, after fifteen consecutive men who either couldn’t spell, believed that posing with a sedated tiger was a flex, or had inexplicably uploaded a photograph of themselves brushing their teeth, felt strangely refreshing.

His opening photo was a mirror selfie in a white shirt and beige trousers, sleeves rolled with intention, and for reasons best known to him, sunglasses indoors. But after the string of visual despair that preceded him, I made the conscious decision not to interrogate this too closely.

The room behind him looked like a serviced apartment in Canary Wharf. Everything was immaculate, coordinated and suspiciously devoid of personality, giving the impression of someone temporarily occupying a very expensive life.

None of this made him particularly compelling. It simply made him less objectionable than the fifteen men I’d swiped past before him.

And this, is one of my many (many) issues with dating apps: the winner isn’t the most attractive person. It’s simply the first person who survives comparison with everyone else.

I matched with him. He messaged instantly - which told me everything I needed to know about his evening, his plans, and possibly his wider social infrastructure.

The opening message arrived with one immediate red flag: an absent question mark.

(I’m not saying punctuation predicts relationship success – I’m simply saying I noticed.)

My response, on the other hand, is polite, transparent, and notably unembellished. I could have inflated the weekend for effect, but fatigue had replaced performance.

He replied instantly (again). No plans on a Friday night – though the football reference signals openness to stimulation, provided it arrives pre-packaged and possibly with elements of hooliganism.

The conversation quickly drifts forward in time, bypassing the present entirely. Before this, Jamie had already found a way to casually mention that his family had a house in Marbella – a detail delivered with the effortless subtlety of someone accidentally leaving their Amex Centurion card on the table.

As above, we can see that before even suggesting a drink in London, he was inviting me into a hypothetical future involving Marbella, his sister and my future in-laws. All of this delivered with admirable confidence and the mildly alarming assertion that “we would of had fun” – which, for the avoidance of doubt, is not how the conditional tense works.

Enthusiasm at a very safe distance: all promise, none of the logistical inconvenience.

Rather than accepting my previous answer about how I was choosing to spend my weekend, Jamie then asked the same question again in a more optimistic font.

Can I be part of them? wasn’t curiosity as such, it was more a negotiation with an answer that hadn’t aligned particularly well with his preferred outcome.

Encouragingly, though, a question mark had now appeared. But just the one, where two would have felt grammatically complete. But, progress nonetheless.

My reply remained exactly as before: clear, practical and entirely consistent. Sunday morning. Coffee. Before my 11am gym class. There was nothing especially romantic about meeting in St Paul’s before most of London had located its first flat white, but romance wasn’t really the objective. It was logistics. Given we’d recently clarified that we live on opposite sides of London3, this was an offer made in good faith – designed to remove friction rather than create it.

In dating, as in project management, the easiest plan to execute is usually the one that actually happens.

The coffee date becomes unexpectedly divisive.

“Coffee in eight minutes” is an astonishing confession, but I held the line. The conversation thus far had done nothing except underpin the fact that Saturday night with Jamie was not a justification to abandon sobriety.

And still, no alternative was offered - only a self-deprecating concession embellished with three laughing emojis.

As many as three.

Then, what followed was a familiar manoeuvre: a passive retreat, carefully framed as flexibility. A man withdrawing while insisting he isn’t.

The conversation had become trapped in a circular debate about coffee, as though meeting sober in broad daylight represented an unusually high-risk activity.

So I removed the uncertainty.

It wasn’t really about coffee anymore, it was a question of confidence. Did he back himself enough to meet a woman from the internet with nothing but his own personality? Or did he need the familiar scaffolding of dim lighting, two pints and a Sauvignon Blanc to help the evening (and his chances of getting laid) along?

So, as you can probably guess, as I’m writing this on Sunday evening, I haven’t heard from Jamie again.

He simply dissolved back into the internet. Back into the endless carousel of profile prompts, unread messages and half-finished conversations.

That’s the peculiar thing about dating apps. Thousands of tiny interactions take place every day, only to vanish without ceremony. Nobody really leaves. They just stop appearing.

I spend a lot of time talking about Black Friday on Instagram. And you’d think it would be Bella’s favourite night of the week, but really, for reasons outlined above, Bella has always belonged to Thursday.

Because this, I think, is what Black Friday really is.

Not shopping, consumption.

Hundreds of people scrolling through other human beings, adding conversations to baskets they’ll never check out, looking for the quickest possible hit of novelty before moving on to the next.

Jamie wasn’t looking for me. He was looking for entertainment.

And, if you’ve followed me for a while (and at the risk of sounding deeply self-congratulatory) you’ll know I’m rather good at entertaining people. A number of you voluntarily tune in every week to watch me compare emotionally unavailable men to public transport, quantify the financial burden of being single and romanticise objectively inconvenient situations into Glamorous Suffering.

But there’s a difference between building an audience and becoming somebody else’s entertainment.

And I am nobody’s jester.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

I hope this email finds you well.

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It did not find me well. It actually found me audibly gasping in Pret, choking on a burnt black Americano whilst reading my rent would be going up “in line with inflation.”

A “reasonable and fair” 3.5% increase, applied to a number that already feels more like a ransom demand than a monthly rent payment.

The week had begun in a fairly mundane fashion: humid enough to be uncomfortable, grey enough to be depressing and punctuated by endless conversations about whether football was finally coming home after England beat Croatia in the World Cup.

The week threatened to become marginally more interesting when a university friend offered me a last-minute invitation to Royal Ascot on Ladies’ Day.

Declining was never really an option. Unfortunately, neither was cancelling the 9am client meeting already sitting in my calendar for the following morning.

The career, the social life, the memories, the hangover. Glamorous Suffering demands all four.

But the photographs only capture one.

Thursday afternoon, champagne in hand, I was standing in the Royal Enclosure in a black Staud dress, Chanel sunglasses and a borrowed Philip Treacy hat that suggested either old money or a recent bereavement.

Funeral chic, if you will.

Nobody would have guessed that less than twenty-four hours later I’d be standing in a Pret queue in Canary Wharf, sleep deprived, mildly dehydrated and frantically recalculating every financial decision I’d made since 2018.

That is the thing about modern womanhood. One day you’re drinking champagne discussing horses called “Kind of Blue,” the next you’re reviewing your direct debits and questioning why your monthly budget includes a dedicated line item for not getting murdered.1

The glamour is visible. The spreadsheet is not.

I exited Pret and took a lap of Canada Place in the hope that fresh air and movement might produce perspective. By the time I reached One Canada Square, surrounded by enough glass and capital to solve several of my problems, I had calmed down enough to remember two important things:

1) I still needed somewhere to live.

2) I wasn’t actually prepared to leave.

The flat had become more than just a flat, it was the first home that was entirely mine.

There were no size 11 trainers by the front door. No dirty boxers on the bathroom floor. No mysterious charging cables multiplying overnight.

No aspiring chef using the entire contents of the kitchen to produce a meal that could easily be achieved with one pan and significantly less confidence.

Just me and Battersea Power Station, which has quietly observed every questionable decision I've made in eighteen months and has yet to utter the words, "I told you so."

For the first time in my adult life, every object in the flat belonged exactly where I had put it. And this, it turns out, is a surprisingly difficult thing to give up.

Which is exactly the problem.

You can rehearse the speech, you can draft the ultimatum and you can spend hours convincing yourself you’re perfectly happy to move on. But the moment the other party realises you’d actually rather stay, you’re fighting a losing battle.

This was not a negotiation between equals. This was a hostage situation involving a direct debit and a river view - and a hostage rarely benefits from antagonising the captor.

So I took a deep breath, abandoned several emotionally satisfying but strategically unsound drafts, and prepared myself for one of life’s most unpleasant tasks:

Needing something from someone whilst trying not to let them know how much.

Subject: Please Sir, I’m poor. I don’t have a boyfriend.

Thank you for your email and your concern for my wellbeing. Unfortunately, your email did not find me well. It has found me single, outraged and horrified.

What your email acknowledges with admirable detail are inflationary pressures, rising costs and prevailing market conditions. I am, of course, familiar with this too – I just spent the morning participating in it.

Several moments ago, I paid £3.60 for a burnt black Americano in Canary Wharf.

Three pounds sixty. For twelve coffee beans and some hot water that tasted faintly of regret.

(Which I drank anyway.)

But what your email fails to mention is that I am single.

And as a single person, I experience the cost-of-living crisis in surround sound. There is no shared Netflix login. No dual-income buffer when British Gas produces a bill that appears to have been calculated on the assumption that I spend my evenings smelting iron in the living room.

No accompanying adult to say “we’ll figure it out” whilst I stand in front of the Power Station, wondering which of my organs would fetch the best price on the open market.

There is just me.

And the alternatives are bleak. Each and every friend or faint acquaintance of mine is shacked up with a partner or nesting with people they’ve lived with since the first lockdown and, at this point, seem legally inseparable. No one’s moving.

It’s either move back in with my parents – a decision that would almost certainly improve my savings rate whilst simultaneously destroying any remaining prospects of a love life – or roll the dice on SpareRoom.

In many ways, SpareRoom is just Hinge with less sexual tension and more laminate flooring. The only difference is that if it goes badly, you’re not ghosted - you’re sharing a fridge.

And at my grand old age, that isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a human rights violation.

There’s no one to halve the broadband bill with. No one to help carry the Big Shop home.

No one to talk me down when the fitted sheet refuses to fit and I start screaming into a pillow despite possessing a river view that should, by all accounts, have prevented this sort of behaviour.

I even have to do the bins.

The last known instance of modern chivalry.

Extinct.

Being single isn’t just a relationship status. It’s a financial bracket. A tax code, if you will. It’s logistics. It’s lifestyle. It’s cost. It’s buying the Le Creuset off the wedding registry and resenting it every time you see it on their Instagram. It’s Sunday-night loneliness after a £40 Chinese takeaway you can’t even finish.

(Why does no one talk about takeaways as another cruel design flaw of singledom? Priced for three, portioned for two and delivered with the quiet assumption someone else will be bringing the spring rolls.)

So no, this email does not find me well. It feels like a penalty for being unmarried, a surcharge on solitude – the Single Tax, disguised as 3.5% “inflation.”

Rgds,2

Me.

Then I closed my laptop and life continued.

I went to work, attended a birthday dinner, and spent an entirely unreasonable amount of time attempting to determine whether a seven-minute reply time was reassuringly keen or alarmingly available.

A few more emails were exchanged over the course of the weekend. Inflation was acknowledged. Market conditions were discussed, and eventually, we arrived at a compromise: the rent would still increase, just not quite as much.

So by Sunday evening, the matter is largely settled. The flat is still mine. The rent is still going up. The view is still spectacular.

The economics of being single, however, remain largely unchanged.

And that means I still have to do the bins.

But at least I can afford bin bags.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

2

For the uninitiated: the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the fewer vowels you’re obliged to type. ”Rgds” is colloquial amongst Senior Executives, and ”BR” is basically a knighthood. I’m not C-suite, but this felt like the right moment to pretend I am.

A light dusting of snow.

A strike on the Central line.

And temperatures exceeding 28 degrees.

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I returned from Los Angeles over the late May bank holiday, after ten hours in economy and the logistical triumph of transporting myself across the Atlantic alone. I’d strategically booked the Saturday afternoon flight, giving myself two full days to recover before work – only to land at Heathrow and find that London had marked the occasion by electing to steam its residents alive.

This is the sort of foresight that arrives uninvited somewhere in your thirties, but it was not always this way.

In my twenties, I treated annual leave as though it were a finite natural resource. I’d fly back from whichever corner of Europe was fuelling my bad decisions – Ibiza, Hvar, St Tropez and various Greek islands whose names I’ve lost but whose mistakes I recall vividly. There’d be an hour circling Luton, an unwelcome round of applause, a public argument at baggage reclaim… and then the office by 8am, running on four coffees and ready to discuss a multi-million-pound acquisition, despite having lost my passport twice in the past forty-eight hours.

The objective was simple: maximise fun, minimse annual leave.

In my thirties, however, something shifted.

I now make sensible decisions. I book the return flight on Saturday afternoon. I unpack. I Olaplex my hair. I apply a face mask. I shave my legs. I aggressively rehydrate. I mentally prepare for the return of emails. I go to bed at 9pm.

Because, I’ve learned, modern womanhood rarely means simply showing up. You must prepare, optimise, and attempt to anticipate every possible contingency.

But unfortunately, I found that whilst Olaplex can repair split ends, it remains largely ineffective against metropolitan collapse.

Because by Tuesday evening, when London reached thirty-four degrees, I found myself lying awake in my beautiful flat with a £20 Amazon fan blowing hot air around the room like a disappointed pensioner exhaling heavily.

The crux of Glamorous Suffering.

My flat photographs exceptionally well. It sits on the ninth floor, directly opposite Battersea Power Station, whose illuminated chimneys dominate the skyline like some great Art Deco monument to capitalism. The sunsets are spectacular. The rent is extortionate.

The concierge has seen me leave in some of my best outfits and return with some of my worst mistakes.

And people often ask what it’s like living there, how much I pay in rent and, in a very roundabout British way, whether I can really afford it.

(The answer is no.)

But curiously, nobody ever asks whether the building doubles as an industrial kiln between the months of May and September.

The answer lies in the windows.

I lived in my first high-rise building in university halls, and having previously associated windows with concepts such as “fresh air”, I was surprised to learn that ours only opened a few inches – which, I was told, was to prevent residents throwing themselves out of them.

But when London reached temperatures better suited to Satan’s conservatory on Tuesday, I was beginning to understand the demographic they were protecting.

At approximately 2:47am, in a state of heat-induced delirium, I found myself thinking about every man I’d ever dated who owned a Dyson Air Cooler.

There have been more than you’d think.

The lawyer. The trader. The management consultant. Men I’d once rejected for lacking a certain je ne sais quoi.

All of them were passionate about their Dyson Air Coolers. They occupied that curious intersection of stage in life and salary where a man becomes emotionally invested in his household appliances.

And as a woman who routinely wears knitwear indoors, I had always regarded this behaviour as faintly ridiculous.

However, as the clock approached 3 o’clock on Wednesday morning, and a calendar full of meetings requiring both cognitive function and mascara loomed ahead, they started to look suspiciously competent.

I pictured them sleeping soundly beside their new partners, nestled together beneath sheets so crisp they could have been stolen from The Savoy, in bedrooms cooled to the precise temperature of a wine fridge. Somewhere in the corner, a Dyson Air Cooler would be humming softly in the dark, like an expensive lullaby.

I, meanwhile, lay spread-eagled across the mattress like a Victorian tuberculosis patient preparing to dictate her final correspondence.

Perhaps I had been too quick to dismiss them. Perhaps basic communication skills, emotional depth and chivalry had been the wrong metrics all along.

Perhaps the answer had been air conditioning.

But Wednesday, at twenty-nine degrees, was marginally better. I was no longer contemplating a mass apology tour for various men I’d rejected since 2023 - and by Thursday, I was actually able to enjoy some of the sunshine.

Work (by which, I mean, me) had organised drinks at Coq d’Argent, a grass-covered rooftop overlooking the City. We sipped rosé under the looming silhouettes of the Cheesegrater and the Walkie Talkie – a setting that is either undeniably chic or wildly dystopian, depending on how much you enjoy drinking rosé whilst making prolonged eye contact with the buildings where you receive emails that absolutely do not find you well.

The evening ended with a singular luxury prawn – an incident I have since covered on Instagram with greater rigour than some journalists apply to international conflicts.

What I didn’t cover on Instagram is the conclusion it led me to: prawns, I have long suspected, are remarkably similar to the men I date.

On paper, they possess many desirable qualities. They’re lean, high in protein, and surprisingly versatile. They feature heavily in aspirational lifestyles and are best enjoyed in moderation…

But all it takes is one questionable specimen and suddenly you’re lying awake at 3am wondering where it all went wrong.

The fuckboys of the sea.

Friday was then spent working from home, in what can only be described as a very expensive greenhouse.

I was no longer thinking about former boyfriends (or almost boyfriends) and their Dyson Air Coolers. Instead, I found myself contemplating a question of profound moral significance: who decided that office workers deserved climate control, but renters did not?

How is it that every office in the City is maintained at a temperature suitable for the long-term preservation of dairy products, whilst people renting at the same cost of a small family holiday are left to cook in their own homes?

I struggle to see how this is legal.

Saturday then began the way the whole week had: too hot, too early. That very specific London light that arrives long before anyone has agreed to participate in the day, and by 04:30 the sun was pouring through the glass with the confidence of somebody who pays neither rent nor council tax.

There is simply no sleeping through it. Once the flat is up to temperature and I am up with it, I will, against my will, begin project managing my life. This often involves deep analysis of my pension contributions, reorganising the freezer drawer (briefly the coldest room in the flat), deep cleaning within an inch of its life and, on special occasions, a visual review involving a Zara dress purchased in 2015 that exists solely as a benchmark against which I measure both my weight and my self-worth.

By 09:00 the flat was spotless, the washing machine was on its third assignment of the morning and I had run out of things to optimise – so I did the only sensible thing available to a woman slowly cooking on the ninth floor, and left. I followed Chelsea Embankment towards Belgravia, past a Thames that glittered and the red-brick townhouses of Cheyne Walk, where black railings disappeared beneath climbing roses, topiary had been clipped into submission and wisteria cascaded down façades with the sort of confidence that only comes from knowing exactly where you belong.

Very SW1.

The walk was interrupted by a certain institution that runs on red light, shirtless men, overpriced protein shakes and a group people who choose to start their weekends with psychological destabilisation. And more to the point that week, one of the few rooms in London with industrial air conditioning.

I have never been so grateful to be publicly berated by an attractive woman with a microphone.

Sixty minutes later I returned to the kiln and began preparing myself for public consumption. Legs shaved. Eyebrows inspected. Outfit rejected. Outfit approved. Outfit rejected again. Hair addressed.

My hair is naturally very straight, which sounds low-maintenance, until you realise it has the structural integrity of steamed spinach. Velcro rollers are the only thing that give it shape – which meant that for two hours last Saturday, in a flat already running at thirty-odd degrees, I sat applying yet more heat to my own head, looking like a 1950s housewife preparing to greet guests with a cigarette, a gin and some deeply unsettling news.

This, I have decided, is one of modern womanhood’s less-discussed indignities: the pursuit of looking effortless requires extended periods of looking deranged.

And then, as it always does, it works. The rollers come out. The flat is forgotten. Two hours of private absurdity resolve into something the outside world reads as “well put together.” I checked the mirror, approved the result, and left thirty-four degrees behind me.

I made my way to Notting Hill on the District line (the only Underground line that behaves as if it has a garden) to meet friends, drink something cold and spend the afternoon deciding whether the place was chic or just expensive confusion.

Nobody I met that afternoon would have known the flat behind me was an oven – or that, several nights earlier, I’d seriously questioned whether access to premium air circulation belonged somewhere in my dating criteria.

That is the entire trick. This is my life. The view is spectacular, the sunsets are free, the suffering is glamorous – and strictly off-camera.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x

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Chelsea people tend to acknowledge they’re paying for the postcode, and Shoreditch people understand they’re buying into chaos. Notting Hill residents, however, talk about the area as though they’ve discovered something the rest of London is simply too unsophisticated to appreciate.

So last Saturday, I decided to give Notting Hill another chance. By 7pm, I was loudly and passionately dissecting the social, architectural and logistical failures of West London to anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby.

In fairness, the case against it had begun much earlier – somewhere around the second time the District Line changed its mind about which direction it was going. Getting there had taken the better part of an hour, the train creeping westward at the pace of someone pretending not to have seen your message: stopping constantly, changing direction without warning, generally unsure of its long-term intentions.

Which brings me to the thing nobody likes to admit about Notting Hill. It is simply inconvenient. Yes, it’s Zone 2. Yes, it’s technically central. So why does it feel like you’re leaving London to get there?

On paper, it has everything going for it. It leans on Hyde Park – the undisputed queen bee of London’s green spaces. Hyde Park is the one who arrives late, head to toe in fur, and never once checks the price. She knows everyone, and everyone knows her: impossibly well connected, moving seamlessly between politicians, aristocrats, tourists and influencers without ever seeming out of place. She sprawls across four hundred acres of Zone 1, flows effortlessly up to Kensington Palace, knocks on the front door and pops in for tea – just because she can. The unbothered confidence of £45 billion worth of square footage, simply left as grass.

But then, immediately, Notting Hill undermines itself.

Because if Hyde Park is London’s favourite socialite, Shepherd’s Bush is the one who tags along because their parents are friends. Perfectly nice, perfectly fine, and distinctively, almost aggressively, beige. She married her university boyfriend, has worked in audit since 2014, and prefers a Saturday night involving a glass of Merlot and her slow cooker. She says “Well, this has been lovely,” and is home, moisturised and in bed by half past nine, while Hyde Park and her friends are still ringing around for the Tramp guest list and debating whether Annabel’s has become too obvious.

And therein lies the dilemma. Notting Hill desperately wants to feel exceptional, and Shepherd’s Bush is a constant reminder that it’s only a few minutes away from somewhere resolutely ordinary.

And so, just as the District Line pulled into Holland Park, convinced I’d finally solved my ongoing conflict with Notting Hill, it mounted a very compelling defence. I stepped out into the sunshine, walked down a leafy road, and found my friends already outside The Mitre, which is exactly what people picture when they picture summer in London. Red-brick frontage, brass lanterns, tables spilling onto the pavement beneath enormous plane trees. Aperol Spritzes catching the light. Dozing dogs stationed perfectly at their owners’ feet, well-behaved children reading books and making no attempt to dominate the social landscape.

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There is something about an Aperol Spritz in the sunshine. Objectively, it is a deeply questionable beverage: bright orange, alarmingly artificial, and almost certainly not good for your internal organs. And yet, after twenty minutes in the sun on a warm Saturday afternoon, it was the only thing that mattered.

W11. Summer in London at its most persuasive: sunlight dappling the pavement, brass lanterns glowing softly, beautiful people in linen, and the distinct impression that nowhere else in the city could possibly compete.

For a moment, I stopped trying to solve Notting Hill and simply enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, my West London idyll was short-lived. I was issued marching orders and, against my will, manoeuvred towards The Elgin.

A short walk from Holland Park, The Elgin sits on Ladbroke Grove – a road that somehow manages to feel both quintessentially Notting Hill and slightly suspicious of the whole enterprise.

It was a stark contrast to the sun-drenched bliss I’d left behind. Despite the rest of London enjoying itself beneath cloudless skies, I had now apparently agreed to spend the remainder of the afternoon in atmospheric darkness, watching several millionaires kick a ball around.

I found myself seated amongst dark wood panelling, stained glass and grand Victorian proportions. Bottles gleamed behind an imposing mahogany bar beneath oversized pendant lights. It felt like the sort of place that had survived both world wars and several questionable interior design trends.

In another context, I imagine it would have been rather civilised.

This was not that context.

If The Mitre was the sort of pub where people discuss house prices and ski trips, The Elgin was a place where a man might choose to remove his shirt – despite overwhelming evidence that he should not.

The air was thick with testosterone. Fully grown men stood on benches, shouting tactical advice at screens with the collective belief that Arsenal’s midfield problems could be solved, if only somebody would let them have a go. They embraced strangers with a level of emotional vulnerability I have rarely witnessed in heterosexual dating.

And yet somehow, somehow, despite spending four hours marinating in male energy, I left with exactly the same number of husbands as I had arrived with.

Which feels like an appropriate moment to address the many people who have, in response to my increasingly Shakespearean monologues about the psychological distress associated with modern dating, helpfully advised me to “put myself out there.”

Because if spending a Saturday afternoon in a pub with a 90/10 male-to-female ratio, whilst drinking overpriced rosé and witnessing a collective emotional collapse over twenty-two men and a small leather sphere doesn’t count as being “out there", then I am going to need the criteria explained more clearly.

The final whistle blew. Arsenal had lost to Paris Saint-Germain, and several hundred men collectively entered the first stage of grief.

Keen to distance ourselves from the unfolding bereavement, we slipped back out and my attention shifted from the emotional consequences of organised sport to the identity crisis unfolding around me.

I stopped halfway down Westbourne Park Road, and asked my friends the question that had been brewing since Earl’s Court.

“Is Notting Hill actually nice?”

On paper, it should be my favourite part of London. Grand Victorian terraces, white stucco townhouses, an Alo Yoga where there should probably be a hardware shop. And, of course, the famous pastel houses.

Everything looks like it belongs on a postcard. And then you look slightly to the left.

A £5 million townhouse sits wrapped in scaffolding and a film of grime that could be neglect or could be part of the aesthetic – in Notting Hill you genuinely cannot tell, and I suspect neither can the owner. Beside it, a dystopian-looking council block. A Daylesford selling £14 soup, next to a chicken shop doing considerably more business.

A woman carrying a Birkin.

And a man doing ketamine.

It’s not ugly or unpleasant, it just has the visual identity of old money and the urban planning of someone who couldn’t decide what to wear and put everything on at once.

Everywhere else in London, money sands the edges off, but in Notting Hill, the money doesn’t seem to tidy anything up. It just moves in next to the mess and starts paying rent.

Mayfair is polished, Hampstead is leafy-smug, Shoreditch knows it’s scruffy. Notting Hill just... stands as a pastel townhouse with a wonky bin situation and a man selling questionable antiques out front.

But perhaps that’s the point. The things that reveal themselves immediately are rarely the ones we fall in love with – and Notting Hill reveals nothing.

It just sits there, beautiful and unresolved, daring you to commit.

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If you’ve made it this far, thank you for indulging what is essentially a lightly edited existential crisis. @littleblackmemoir is still tiny - so if you’ve enjoyed reading, sharing it with a friend (or several thousand strangers) would help enormously.

Bella x