What is going on in your head if three times on a Thursday you are convinced it is Sunday? I mean it’s funny, but also not. That’s three times you did something reliant on it being a weekend - like park on a single line - realised it was in fact a working day or were corrected, and then did something else based on your unshakeable belief that it was the weekend hours later? I’ve been joking about this for years now - possibly since Covid - but I wonder why it started. And why it’s stayed.

When we were queuing outside supermarkets and sweating through masks and mostly staying home, the week started to wobble. Its edges softened as many of us worked from the corners of kitchens or bedrooms; the commute faded and everything changed. Inhabiting the same space seven days a week will do that.

Then I started a job that involved getting up at 3am which further confused my bodyclock. Quite often on a Monday I would think we were nestling in midweek; by midweek I had given up on properly identifying where in the calendar we were. Existing on five hours sleep a night, like a poundshop Margaret Thatcher, will do that.

So when I left that job and became a full-time freelancer and full-time mother, I was pretty sure the rigid lines of a school week would soon lick me into shape. Mondays are PE, Tuesdays are choir after school. Friday is Friyay. I regret to inform you that that has not happened. If you ask me what kit my daughter has to take to school on any given day I can tell you. But if you ask me what day of the week it is, it may take a few guesses. Being a single parent will do that.

Or will it?

Maybe the week just isn’t as rigid as it was for lots of us anymore. Maybe as you get older and busier, you just don’t prioritise that information anymore? You prioritise different stuff? Can you confidently tell me what day it is today without checking? Or does it feel like every other day? I’d love to know.

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On Monday (I know because I checked my phone diary, ha!) a man came to insulate and board my teeny crawl-space loft. And if that’s the most midlife sentence you’ve ever read by me, you haven’t been paying attention. It was soul-crushingly expensive but I live in a 200 year old cottage with ceilings so low I can touch them and where it’s currently 32 degrees upstairs - at night. It’s also inexplicably freezing in winter so I thought insulation would help. Look, I’m trying to be a grown-up. He was recommended by a friend and was very efficient at answering questions, getting back to me and booking it in. And that counts for a lot. (Yes, Mr Carpenter Guy who came and quoted for fixing my front door and now doesn’t reply to my messages, I’m looking at you!) So on Monday morning at 7.45am the Loft Man knocked at my Broken Door. “Wasn’t sure you’d be up!” he beamed at me. Me, who got up at 3am for 5 years. I save that ammo for later in case I need it. But Loft Man is super-organised. He gets parking permits from me and then they unload all their lofty bits outside the door. “You need to get that door looked at!” he cheerfully informs me. It’s 7.50am and I have issued far too many weak smiles.

The thing about employing a builder or a plumber is that you just don’t know if it’s going to be a cascading nightmare of shit or if you’re going to strike gold. But the next thing he does answers that. He reaches into a plastic bag and says: “Could you put our lunch in your fridge please?” I look down and see several plastic pots of wholegrain salad, leaves and beetroot, a chicken wrap, a strawberry smoothie and several plastic pots of chopped up pineapple and melon. I know I sound like a Patronising Arse but I can’t stop myself. “Wow, this is very healthy.”

In the last year, I have employed plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, carpenters - to try to raise this 200 year old house from its filthy slumber. And every one of them ate (delicious but) unhealthy food. One arrived eating a Snickers and a doughnut, while sucking on a bottle of Lucozade; another threw his empty Burger King wrapper in a plant pot then asked for a tea with three sugars. Whatever gets you through, right? But Loft Man has a different ethos. “I keep my guys healthy, I buy their lunch. I don’t want them eating any crap.” I look at the two other guys - they do indeed look healthy and happy. Makes sense. But Loft Man wants to tell me more. He whips out his mobile. “If you think I’m healthy, you should see my mate. He worked in the city for 20 years and he was so overweight and unfit - now look at him!” He shows me a photo from his Whatsapp of a cover of Men’s Health magazine with said mate tensing his biceps and triceps and lots of other muscles I don’t know the name of, and positively smouldering into the camera. I’m a shallow person, an absolute sucker for a handsome face, so I do consider asking how old Magazine Man is, but for once I catch myself in time because the tiny loft needs to be filled with a thick layer of fluff and then boarded and it’s already 26 damn degrees.

Of course you can’t tell if a tradesperson is going to be good by what they eat, but maybe you can by how they treat their employees? Anyway, the loft job was finished quickly one hour ahead of schedule and he threw two free LED lights in. So I’m happy. It’s still too hot upstairs though. Shit.

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Department store chandeliers were disconnected and lowered into bubble wrap and cardboard boxes, the glass beads tinkling in protest as they sank out of sight, like a ballerina into a stage trapdoor. A heavy pink marble mirror was scooped off the wall - revealing hideous screw holes - then sat sulking on the floor waiting for the removal men. I filled the gaps, just proud of the surface, like I had learned from a hardback manual in 2003, and waited for the filler to dry. Soon I will sand it and then I will repaint the wall in the same delicious deep green, dreamy blue or delicate pink. We will leave this house as we would wish to find it, I suppose.

I couldn’t watch the lights coming down because I have become ridiculously sentimental about the small things. It would be like watching the sails being lowered on a voyage that had been cut short. Yes, we are drifting towards another destination and that is precious and wonderful. But my goodness, leaving a house that you have poured all your suppressed love into in less than two years is surprisingly affecting. I lived in a sterile home for seven years - the walls had to be white and clear of shelves and photos. It was like rattling around in a bleached box with no anchor and no heart. We became ghosts there. So within three weeks of moving in to this house, the painting had begun. And it continued for the next eighteen months. My daughter scrawled “this house is for joy” on the windows with markers; the garden was dug up and turfed and paved and replanted, bouffant with hydrangeas; no wall was left to stare at me with a stern white face.

After the boxes were gone and the painting was mostly done, we relaxed into our new home – adjusting to the colour and the light and the space and the hope. Everything became easy; we learned a new language. Is this paint colour getting us down? Change it. Is this light not right for the room? Swap it. Is this piece of furniture blocking something? Move it. What magic was this. We slowly understood what a home could be. It’s the crusty corners of cottage pie; it’s porridge sticking to the pot like glue; it’s the hum of the washing-machine; it’s cartwheels on the grass and listening to music on the radio in the sunshine. It’s knowing that none of that has to end or be limited; that clouds will never gather again.

Here are the moments that I will pack up with me:

Sitting at the kitchen table at dusk - watching the pink, turquoise and gold lanterns threaded onto green twine at the end of the garden light up for barely fifteen minutes - five little lighthouses signalling to me that another day was done; that I was finally home; that this space would always be shhh shhh so calm and always, always ours.

Lying in bed and seeing everything at once: the cornflower blue walls bleeding into the pale pink hall then into the grey-green bathroom – the perfect alchemy of colour.

Walking into the kitchen in the morning with a worry about something and letting it tumble out of my brain as flouncy flower upon flouncy flower winked at me from the garden – the ridiculous hydrangeas, the devastating peonies, the prim camelias and the wild and heedless lavatera.

We sank into this house; it settled into our bones. We wrapped ourselves round each other needily and something quietly and slowly healed us – like good chicken soup or the love of your mother.

People talk about fixing a house up – but maybe, just maybe, a house can fix us.

January found me in flux. Tying up loose ends, sending farewell and thank you emails, making plans for the next phase of my life; pulling at the string of this career that started off accidentally and ballooned into something monstrous and wonderful and not what I had planned at all.

When I shared the news in November that I would be stepping down from THE best job I have ever had, the word “Aasmah” trended on X - albeit at number 29 - which made me laugh and my ego swell. I was gobsmacked that finally so many people knew how to spell my name; I felt I was accepted, one of you - something I battled with as a child and to a lesser degree in the first half of my career. It also underlined the unexpected emotional connection that I had with many of the people who listened. My four and a half years at Times Radio coincided not just with lockdown but some huge personal upheavals, so I opened myself up in a way I never have. Because I knew it was how I would survive it.

One day maybe I will share with you what happened, but let me put it this way - I used to be an obsessively private person. When I got married, I was working at BBC Radio 5 Live and I didn’t tell anyone at work. I didn’t want the attention, the constant questions about cakes and dresses and honeymoons. So I took two and a half weeks off and came back and no-one was any the wiser. It was bliss. I went through two rounds of IVF without anyone but my husband knowing, not even my mum. That was much harder. Fast forward 14 years and I was asking people for advice on X, baring my soul, because I needed help. The ice maiden had been torched. “My marriage is over; how do I keep doing a job that means I have to leave the house at 3.30am and look after a 5-year old?” I asked into the void. I was writing columns and pieces in The Sunday Times, Vogue and Good Housekeeping about the triple whammy of divorce, turning 50 and plunging into the menopause; about deciding to become a mother at 42 and striking lucky at 43. The 2007 version of myself would have been horrified; but I learned that opening yourself up a bit, sharing the doubt, the fear and the truly bone-scraping times is how we connect better with each other and sit better with ourselves.

Maybe that’s why I feel such a wrench leaving this job; why I wanted to give it 3 months to say a long goodbye. I didn’t really want to leave but it became unsustainable. A feminist since the age of 13, I never wanted anyone other than myself to dictate my job decisions; but the truth is that my daughter needs me in the early mornings, she wants my blurry face to be the first she sees, she wants to put her little paw into mine and stride down the street to school, giving me wedgies and tripping me up. It’s crazy to think that she was just 4 when I started the early shift. At the time I had a husband, someone who could physically be there to look after her when I closed the front door quietly at 3.30am, crept out into the blank night and sped towards the office at a time so incongruous and unnatural that I felt upside down most days. But after about 6 months I adapted to it. Then, things fell apart. Overnight, I ended our marriage - I can assure you there was no alternative - I stared into the face of something so awful I knew I couldn’t turn and walk back. Then it was just me and my daughter in the house. With no family nearby and no extra bedroom for someone to stay over and look after her, I realised I would have to quit the job of my dreams, just nine months in. There was nothing else for it. What a bloody mess.

And yet. I also knew I had to cling on to my financial independence; that was what would pull me through. After a bit of negotiating, it was agreed that for a few months I could co-present the Breakfast Show from a laptop on an ironing board in the corner of my bedroom; my daughter slept next door, 10 feet from my microphone as I interviewed the Health Secretary. It was insane, my heart hurt, my shoulders dipped - I hated the chaos of my life and that I couldn’t give my job the one hundred per cent attention I had always done; I couldn’t be professional, like my other colleagues who had husbands and wives and family who could pitch in and give them stability. But I had to swallow it.

Over the years, my situation peaked and troughed. I won an award in 2022; my daughter cried every night at bedtime; I was under contract to write a book that year; perimenopause arrived and my bones ached and my face burned as I sat typing into the night, knowing I had to be up at 3am; I launched my book and whizzed round the country to literary festivals; my relationship with my family was in ruins; I interviewed the Prime Minister at the Conservative Party Conference; doctors found a growth; my daughter told me she was lonely and our family was too small; the growth was removed and was OK; we moved house and school; we breathed more freely and decorated as we wanted; she struggled to fit in at a new school; we had a spare room finally so we got a babysitter; she didn’t get on with the babysitter; the election was called and my job went into overdrive; my daughter asked me why I chose a job that meant I never woke her up or took her to school and did I really love her; one of my interviews led the Ten O’Clock News; my daughter decided she actually loved the babysitter; I kept forgetting things at home; I lost two stones; I couldn’t ever remember what day it was. I was in constant crisis mode. And then one day it happened; and I knew I had been outrun.

It was October 2024 and I was just about to spend three days away from home in Birmingham at the Conservative Party Conference. This was another huge logistical and emotional challenge. I had to get my 80-year old mum to come down from Glasgow to look after my daughter. As I left, she gave me a small, hard kiss and whispered tearfully into my neck like a soap opera villain: “I love you mummy… but I hate your job.” The words killed me. A few days before, she had come home and told me that everyone in her class had had their flu nasal spray done, except her. “They told me you never sent the email.” I’ve never felt ‘mum guilt’ - I love working - but ‘single mum guilt’ is like bathing in poison every day.

I told my bosses I had decided to leave in January; they were wonderful about it. Reluctant but supportive. They tried to move things about and find other options but none quite worked. It’s definitely possible to single-parent and work in broadcasting - watch this space - but the 3am starts add a degree of craziness that really crush all your hope and energy. You neglect your children for a large and important part of the day; you’re tired or short-tempered when you’re with them; they don’t get to have normal evenings. And almost five years of abnormality is enough for a small child whose world has already been turned on its head. And yet I’m so glad I got to do it and stuck at it for 4 and a half years. Before, I was a night owl, never in bed before midnight; I was used to presenting Drive not Breakfast; I’m a defender not an attacker, a lover not a fighter etc. But it was brilliant. I learned new skills, interviewed people I thought I never would, was supported for the first time in my career by bosses who really believed in me. I never thought I would experience that. I will always expect that level of support in any job I do from now on.

A few last important things. When I posted that I was leaving, a sweet man on X said “Oh Aasmah, why are you always saying goodbye?” I’m honestly not. Almost five years at Times Radio; six years at Radio 4; eleven years at Radio 5 Live. If you do the maths, you’ll see that I will soon run out of road. There are so many things I still want to do while I can. People are often sceptical, incredulous. Why would you leave the best job you’ve ever had? Because sometimes you just run out of options; sometimes it’s best to leave a job on a high, when things are good, when you still enjoy it and you like the people you work with; sometimes there are even better things around the corner. (Also, whisper it, but as a listener and someone who would like to run a radio station one day, I have always thought that the same voices, the same shtick, for ten years can get stale; you need to shake it up a bit.)

Finally - it’s coming up to the four year mark of when things fell apart and I’ve been reflecting on what else got me through it all. The opportunities I was given at News UK/Times Radio were insane. The breakfast team at Times Radio saved me with their gallows humour, scurrilous gossip and juvenile running jokes that often made it on air. So much good stuff against a backdrop of absolute heartbreak, destroyed friendships and the desolation of trying to comfort a tearful child almost every night; of being mum and dad, breadwinner, cook, cleaner, house mover, decorator, school-finder, therapist, presenter, book writer, finder of lost socks and loser of minds. And then I realised what else it was. When friends were absent, you were there. When I needed advice, I asked you. When there was no empathy where I expected to find it, I found it online in tweets and emails and comments under my columns - and in handwritten letters.

Thank you. It was you. It was always you.

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