This is their life in 2004, in London Fields. They work hard. They go to the theater. They go to galleries. They go to the gigs of friends’ bands. They eat Vietnamese food in the restaurants on Mare Street and on Kingsland Road. They go to openings on Vyner Street on Thursdays, and they visit all the galleries and they drink the free beer and wine. They remember not to use plastic bags when they go to the corner shop, although sometimes they forget. They bike everywhere, everywhere, all the time. They rarely wear helmets. They watch films at the Rio in Dalston, and then go to Turkish restaurants and eat pide and drink Turkish beer and eat those pickles that make your saliva flow. They go to Columbia Road flower market and buy flowers in the very early morning on Sundays. (Sometimes, if Lissa is coming home early from a party, she buys cheap flowers for the whole house—armfuls of gladioli and irises. Sometimes, because she is beautiful, she is given them for free.)

They go to the city farm on Hackney Road with hangovers, and they eat fried breakfasts among the families and the screaming children, and they swear never to go there again on a Sunday morning until they have children of their own.

They worry. They worry about climate change—about the rate of the melt of the permafrost in Siberia. They worry about the kids who live in the high-rises, right behind the deli where they buy their coffee and their tabbouleh. They worry about the life chances of these kids. They worry about their own relative privilege. They worry about knife crime and gun crime, then they read pieces that suggest the violence is only ever gang-on-gang, and they feel relieved, then they feel guilty that they feel relieved. They worry about the guy who sits begging outside the liquor store, who only ever asks for twenty pence. They worry about the tide of gentrification that is creeping up from the City of London and lapping at the edges of their park. Sometimes they feel they should worry even more about these things, but at this moment in their lives they are happy, and so they do not.

They do not worry about nuclear war, or interest rates, or their fertility, or the welfare state, or aging parents, or student debt.

They are twenty-nine years old. None of them have children. In any other generation in the history of humankind this fact would be remarkable. It is hardly remarked upon at all.

They are aware that this park—London Fields—this grass on which they lie, has always been common land, a place for people to pasture their cows and sheep. This fact pleases them; they believe it goes some way to explaining the pull of this small patchy patch of green they like to feel they own. They feel like they own it because they do; it belongs to everyone.