Relatability and the Unremarkable Story of One Day

Relfections on the Netflix adaptation of the David Nicholls novel.

As will sometimes be the case, I will be late to the party. Not like in my youth, when I was first to arrive, last to leave. But now I am older, and so much has changed, from the hours I keep to the frequency at which I groan when I get out of a chair, I will inevitably be more reflective, more ponderous, slower. I am now engaged in the mid-of-life. A fabled time, that phase after you have no money and lots of time, and before you have lots of money and time is running out. I am late to the party on the Netflix adaptation of David Nicholls’ best-selling novel, One Day (2009), but I am of an age, perhaps, where all of the elements of this first paragraph ring like church bells when confronted with the themes of Nicholls’ novel, and now this extremely well-executed, focussed, serial. One Day, you see, looks like it is about the endless possibilities of youth, the heartache and exuberance of the propulsion from kidhood to adultdom, but it isn’t. One Day is about sitting at the other end of that chapter of life and recognising its patterns in all their sad happiness.

One Day is about the simplicity of the unremarkable life, the passage of time through the loops of those lives, and it is also about the story of life. It is powerful because it is relatable, and it is relatable because it is a simple story simply told. Through the remarkableness of the two protagonists we recognise an unremarkable tale, and we see through that the remarkableness of all our lives - including both the one we view it from and the multiple ones we did not have.