From Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton:

p. 167

“Is this really all life is”

“Is what all life is?” Margaret asked soothingly, putting her arm around her.

“Fucking…Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon,” she replied.

For years, those words were stuck on the underside of my brain like a Post-it I couldn’t shake off. They hung there like a whispered conversation you overheard between your parents that you didn’t understand but you knew to be very important. I always wondered why those two specific things - Tottenham Court Road and Amazon - could cause so much sorrow.

“You’ll understand when you’re not twenty-one,” Hannah said when I asked.

I finally grasped the machinations and subtext of that phrase the year I turned twenty-five. When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening.”

And then transition to p. 188

“On the flight home, I daydreamed of Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon. I thought of Farly’s laugh and the sound of my flatmates getting ready for work in the morning and the smell of my mum’s perfume in her hair when I hug her. I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it.”