Taylor Swift and I’ve one thing in frequent. No, it’s not $1.1 billion in the financial institution, sadly. But, like Taylor, I’ve lately misplaced my London Boy.
‘You’re so fortunate,’ a good friend tells me one wet morning. Confused, I ask why. ‘You get to go through a break-up just as Taylor Swift drops a new album,’ she says. Lucky? Unlike the pop megastar, who’s earned tens of millions making music out of her love life, I don’t have a private jet by which to sob. Or a lately single A-lister bestie like Sophie Turner to color the city crimson with. But, as I drown my sorrows listening to The Tortured Poets Department – one heart-wrenching ballad after one other – I begin to surprise: may I flip a disaster into a possibility?
I can actually retrace the singer’s footsteps in London, sporting a freshly trimmed Taylor-esque fringe. My rationale? I’m searching for the tortured poet inside me, in order that I too can flip my tears into art – and perhaps even find yourself with a Swift-sized cheque afterwards. That’ll educate London Boy.
I start at The Black Dog pub in Vauxhall: the scene of the crime in the now-infamous track by which Taylor croons: ‘And your location/You forgot to turn it off/And so I watch as you walk/Into some bar called The Black Dog.’ As I sip a Guinness, I ponder which desk Joe Alwyn may need been sitting at when Taylor tracked him down on Find My iPhone. At my desk for one, I begin considering my ex – then, instantly, I’ve an epiphany: I can make my London Boy jealous. There is a good-looking man working behind the bar. He compliments my fringe. Did he simply wink at me?
But my mission is l’artwork, so I must get writing. In my Gen Z ‘tortured poet’ get-up – a quick, preppy black skirt, Ralph Lauren shirt and cashmere jumper – I head to the National Portrait Gallery. What higher means for a heartbroken author to spend her morning than searching for inspiration from the Romantic poets? Stern work of Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge glare down at me (my skirt is relatively risqué by Victorian requirements) and Swift’s album Folklore echoes in my thoughts: ‘Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die,’ she sings on one monitor. Drama like that is well-canonised. Perhaps I ought to fling myself into the Thames?
