You know you’re a grown-up when tea beats a skinny dip
THE ACTUAL ONE by Isy Suttie (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £14.99)
ON New Year’s Day on a freezing welsh beach, Isy Suttie decided to surprise her friends by suddenly stripping naked and pelting into the sea. The actress and comedian (best known for playing the gloriously geeky Dobby in TV sitcom Peep Show) was in her late 20s and struggling to process news that one of her friends was pregnant, another was buying his first home and the third was training for a marathon.
Single, flat- sharing and living on fry-ups, Suttie felt her friends were growing up without her.
But through the haze of her hangover she thought an act of spontaneous silliness would ‘restart the collective com-puter’. She thought they’d follow her.
But as she sprinted into the unforgiving Celtic Sea, Suttie realised she was alone. ‘every pore screamed out as I submerged myself up to my neck. I stubbornly faced the horizon for a few seconds then turned around to the shore, posi-tive their silence was due to their having nicked my clothes and scarpered to a hiding place behind some rocks.’
But it was worse than that. They weren’t even watching. Instead they were idly texting and sipping tea from a Thermos.
‘In the film version of this scene,’ she writes, ‘the woman emerges from the water on a deserted beach, awakened, sexy, rejuvenated, never more alive. In the real life version I’d never been more dead.
‘Back I trudged. My thighs were sporting the mottled rasp-berry-ripple look I’d last exhibited on the netball pitch at 15, my hair was stuck to my face in wet loops and my skin was becoming numb.
‘ Suddenly painfully aware that they could see everything, I turned around and attempted a sort of back-wards hop towards them, just showing my bum. Good old bums, the same on each sex; neutral — the Switzerland of the anatomy.’
written with the cheeky wit of a 21st- century Victoria wood, Suttie’s book tells how she spent the next few years frantically attempting to ‘ remain a twentysomething forever’.
It will strike a real chord with those of us who were born in the mid to late Seventies.
we grew up in an era when youth seemed easy to extend. we went to university on student grants and graduated debt-free with the opportunity to pursue our child-hood dreams. There was no social media forcing us to compare our progress and no social pressure for women to start thinking about babies until their 30s.
Friends was always on TV, reinforcing our idea that flat-sharing could go on indefinitely, and house prices weren’t so insane that you had to start saving for a mortgage with your first deposit from the tooth fairy. Suttie’s tale is a series of bittersweet adventures with boys and booze and nostalgic flashbacks to her childhood in Matlock, Derbyshire. She sets the pace for a catalogue of comically misjudged relations with the oppo-site sex at a Take That concert, where Howard Donald singles her out from the crowd.
‘As a very young teenager, to have a topless, sweaty man sing just for you is not an everyday occurrence. I was wild with embarrassment.’
She felt she had to do something to thank him and panicked. Rummaging in her pocket she found a pound coin her dad had given her for Toffos and hurled it towards Donald’s head. It hit him just above the right eye. ‘He didn’t look happy,’ she admits.
No happier than she would be, years later, when offered £20 to get off the stage during a stand-up comedy show in edinburgh. Later, she will give the boyfriend she believes to be The One a 5 ft penguin she constructed with £180 worth of chicken wire and papier mache and stuffed with DVDs.
She realises it’s over when, a few days later, his mother asks what she gave him for Christmas and he can only remember the DVDs.
‘what were they in?’ presses Suttie. ‘A case?’ he replies.
Battling her way through men sourced by her mother, Suttie endures a series of quirky liaisons. One guy speaks almost exclusively in rhyme, another is an Aussie who has a tattoo of a Fairy Liquid barcode on his arm.
THESE days, Suttie (now 37) is happily settled with fellow comedian elis James and their baby daughter, Beti. But there’s no need for single readers to dread a smug final chapter.
Her story ends two years after it begins, on the same beach follow-ing another break-up. Her friend Amy’s baby plays in the sand and she imagines a scene in which she and Amy strip and run into the sea together. But it doesn’t happen.
They go home for a roast like sensible adults, and drink G&Ts chilled with segments of lollies like students. Because we all have to grow up in the end, but there’s no need to do it all at once.