back up blog

Of course, it was Valentine's yesterday. How could we have missed it. I almost put a question mark there - you know, after that last sentence - but it isn't a question so much as a knowing eye roll. An eye roll with enough cynicism to prove how, like you, like them, like everyone with a Twitter account, above it all I am, except I don't mind, not really. I quite like love, and I reckon we've got a hold on all the ways it shows up for us. We know love is romantic, but also platonic and familial and sexual and sometimes, I suppose, more of a fondness than a love, but love is as good a word I know for fondness. For caring about another person. Maybe it's as simple as love is... remembering to give a damn. I wrote two things on two separate postcards over the new year, and one of them was "Love Fiercely". The other was "More, whilst also enough", but we're not talking about that right now. We're talking about love. About remembering to give a

There’s a quote about how, if you keep moving forward step-by-step, one day you’ll look back and see that you’ve scaled a mountain. This February I am looking back, and it is from the highest height I never thought I would reach. At the beginning of 2016, I moved to London. I had undiagnosed depression in my bones, a book on the way, and nowhere to live. I stayed with friends for a few weeks, sharing beds and making do with couches and blankets and then, for four weeks of consistency, sub-letting my brother’s place where I distracted myself from feeling rootless by talking to the cat and swiping on Bumble. I knew I wasn’t okay. I’d been isolated for much of the previous eighteen months, travelling from Italy to Russia to Bali to India. All I had known is that I wanted to live as cheaply as possible and write a book. What I hadn’t understood is that a nomadic life with laptop in hand isn’t as good for the soul as the articles online has suggested. I wrote a book, and then I sold it, but

An incomplete list of some things I call my 2017 achievements: - saw my first ballet, from the really cheap seats all the way at the back. - cleansed, toned and moisturised every morning, and every night. - bought furniture. - threw a really very good Christmas party. - refused to save the candles for best. - called my mother. - called my father. - interviewed a celebrity. - deleted Facebook. - stopped nannying. - maintained a relationship with the girls I used to nanny - and their mama. - took a month off. - bought £300-worth of sex toys all in one go. - went viral online for falling over. - said out loud that I want a baby. - received a case of wine. - got offered a horse and cart at the entrance to Soho Farmhouse. - went swimming in the ladies pond on the Heath when we had the heatwave. - went home for Easter. - went ginger, and on purpose. - hosted an event about mental health. - did my first lit fest. - took a day trip to Oxford. - saw Titanic at the Royal Albert Hall with a live

To begin is to break your own heart. To choose means to  not choose  all those other things. Before you begin, the possibilities are endless. The way your one true love will look, how your first novel will sound on the page. Before you begin, everything is perfect, because before you begin it’s a world of imagination painted in only your best and most favourite colours. Beginning is a pull into the real world. The real world is hard. It is beautiful and surprising and sometimes, at noon on a Tuesday on the roof of an art gallery, you will drink a glass of wine and look at the view and wonder how you will ever leave this spot, this moment, because everything is as right as it could be. But the real world is also never enough money, and never enough time, and never enough talent, or recognition, or love, or contentedness. The real world is compromise. Compromise. I read somewhere that compromise is “halfway happy”, and that is what beginning is. Halfway happy. Not as good as not beginnin

The metre-and-a-half wide frame has hung empty above my bed since July. I paid a man to hang it. I'd harboured, to begin with, reservations about how my feminism and my employment of somebody else to execute the job dovetailed awkwardly, but after I hit myself in the face with a hammer one night, not understanding the difference between a nail at 45 degrees into a diving wall and a drill with a spiral anchor into a brick wall, I decided the most feminist act would be, in fact, to use my hard-earned feminist money to feministly delegate somebody better qualified to help me out - who yes, just so happened to be a man. I have never looked back.  The room needed something above the bed - that's why I got the frame and had it hung - but I couldn't rush to fill it. It needed to be right. I didn't want a generic Ikea print: they can satisfy the dead area behind the door in the living room because that is a neutral space. Bedrooms - bedrooms must be personal. Considered. It'

We went to see  The Death of Stalin  on Friday  night, reunited as we were after three weeks apart and many utterances that we'll never go that many nights without each other again. I lived in Russia, once. I lived many places before. Once. But it was Russia I thought about, for reasons obvious, as I sat next to an Italian who laughed louder than anyone else in the knee-to-knee, packed-in-tight cinema, and who, in the quiet bits, used a stage whisper of a voice to say,  "Baby, what? What did he say?"  It's a trait that is partly endearing and mostly embarrassing, and  that  reminds me of taking thirty-one Italian teenagers to see  The Lion King  at the Lyceum Theatre the summer I got my nose pierced, desperately trying to make them - the Italian teenagers - understand that talking that way, the whole way through, isn't how it is done in England, where even our standing ovations are polite.  The film made me think of those months in the snow, when I learned that to