How to Fail. Elizabeth Day

is long and you can try things for a while and if they don’t work out, do something else’.

      But of course, it’s only when we’re older and have knocked about a bit that we can conclude there is no uncomplicatedly happy end point. There are a series of points – some happy, some sad, some simply quietly contented – and each one will be different from how we imagined it. Not better or worse; just different. And perhaps what surviving your twenties makes you realise is that life, after all, is texture.

      ‘I feel like I did it [my twenties], I committed to it,’ Phoebe Waller-Bridge said when I spoke to her about her own decade of transition. ‘I’d really like to have the skin from my twenties,’ she joked, ‘but I prefer my heart and my guts now.’

      That’s the thing. Because however much you might feel you’re failing at your twenties when you’re living through them, they are a necessary crucible. Your twenties are spices in a pestle and mortar that must be ground up by life in order to release your fullest flavour. By the end of them, you’ll have more heart and more guts – and you’ll know never to roast broccoli again.