There are mornings when I stand in our granary kitchen, or out in the courtyard garden, mug of creamy coffee warming my hands, I inhale and try to imagine who stood in this exact spot three hundred years ago. I exhale.

That’s how old my house is.

Three hundred years old. So most likely… nobody was standing here. It was probably just wilderness on the edge of a great limestone escarpment, until one day someone thought, “We could farm this.”

The walls of the house are cool and calming, but they do creak and speak. It never feels empty. It carries too much life for that.

When we first walked through the door ten years ago, there was an immediate warmth to it. A feeling of safety. Of home. Only after we had a moving date did I discover that one of my closest friends had grown up in our farmhouse. She lived here from the age of five to ten and still remembers exactly how it was laid out. Her kitchen was at the front of the house, and her bedroom is now my ensuite bathroom.

Our kitchen was once a granary barn, connected to the farmhouse only by a small ante room, which I believe used to be a garage. My friend remembers her dad parking his old Volvo there.

The twenty-one-foot barn, however, housed tractors and grain. She remembers standing at the landing window, waving to the farm workers in the yard below.

Transforming it in 2018 gave me something I’d only ever dreamed of. It was my dad who stood in that empty space and said, “Wouldn’t this make an incredible kitchen? The heart of the home.”

My friend’s dad who parked his Volvo in our ante room and my beautiful dad never met, yet somehow, they’re both part of the same story.

I love that.

The room I now use as my office and library was the kitchen when we first arrived. But my friend remembers it being a snug. It makes me think this old farmhouse has spent three centuries playing pass the parcel with its rooms. Every family has unwrapped it differently, imagining new possibilities within the same old walls. Is that what old houses do? Lend themselves to each family that passes through. One generation sees a kitchen. Another sees a library or a music room, a workshop or a nursery. The walls stay the same, but the dreams inside keep changing.

I love my library. A huge red reading chair sits in the corner, surrounded by heavy oak bookcases that line the walls where kitchen cupboards used to be. The tartan carpet softens every footstep, but I know there are quarry tiles beneath it. It’s the room where I write, mark books, create lessons, dream up stories and lose afternoons writing memoirs.

Once upon a time, someone stood in my library after an argument, wondering whether to apologise. Someone has listened for the sound of children running across the yard. Someone has waited for a husband to return from the fields before darkness settled across the village. Someone has celebrated a birth. Another I’m sure has mourned a death. I’m certain I can’t be the only one who has cursed the damp.

Time behaves differently inside an old house. Three hundred years is almost impossible to comprehend; it has survived fashions, monarchs, wars, pandemics, storms, tractors replacing horses and the slow disappearance of the working farms that once stitched Lincolnshire together. The fields surrounding it have grown smaller. Bungalows and Grand-Design new builds now stand where livestock once grazed. Then you rest your hand against a wall built from rough quarry stone and remember that countless other hands have done the same. The walls of my home aren’t elegant, they crumble constantly (quite literally); they were never meant to impress anyone. They were built to endure.

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There is a cellar beneath us, cool and damp even in midsummer, with its own fireplace tucked into the stone as though someone once believed every corner deserved warmth. Every room above carries a fireplace too, reminders that this house was once heated by flames and not gas. Climb into the loft and another story reveals itself. A great hollow scar slices through the centre where an original chimney stack once rose from cellar to roof. It is impossible to ignore, a cavernous scar that leaves the rafters looking oddly unfinished.

When we bought this house, I thought we were simply buying somewhere to live. We wanted more space, a garden and an exciting home where our children could grow up and one day bring their own children back. (We’re not there yet.)

Instead, what we bought was an ongoing strongly worded conversation.

The windows and cills all needed replacing. The pointing between the stones has surrendered to weather and time. Damp has crept down forgotten chimney breasts forcing us to close some rooms off from daily life. Every improvement uncovered another layer of work waiting beneath it, another decision to be made by someone long before we arrived, another compromise, another repair, another story. Old houses are wonderfully resistant to the illusion of completion. So, we have become, as others have in the past, custodians of our home.

Even though we own Village Farm, I don’t think it belongs to us. In fact, I don’t think anyone can truly own a place like this.

Three hundred years has surely taught the house not to believe in ownership. It has already outlived every family who has ever called it theirs. Deeds have changed hands. Names have disappeared from parish records. Children have grown old. It has been deserted and left derelict. Empires have risen and fallen. The house simply remained, waiting for the next key to turn in its door.

We speak so confidently about my house, my land, my garden. Yet history and age have a curious way of dismantling ownership and I’m sure will smile gently at our certainty. Long after we’re gone, someone else will stand or sit exactly where I’m sitting now to type these words, believing, for a little while, that these walls belong to them too.

Clearly history is what gives a place its soul.

Yet life, as life often does, has corrected me… again.

For years I believed that what I felt inside Village Farm, the sense of peace and security, came from its age. Three centuries would surely leave its mark. That’s what lingers in the stone, what settles beneath uneven floors and inside thick walls.

Then I began thinking about another house. Not one built in the eighteenth century, but one built little more than a lifetime ago. The house where my parents have lived for thirty years. The house where my children, and my brother’s and sister’s children, grew up. It’s where Dad died and where my brave mum is now preparing, painfully, to leave.

Carramore House.

It isn’t ancient. It was built around the turn of the twentieth century, a relative youngster compared to Village Farm. Its ceilings soar where ours stoop with low beams. Its doorways invite you in rather than asking you to duck. It hasn’t watched dozens of monarchs come and go, survived centuries of Lincolnshire winters, or stood stubbornly while storms erased neighbouring villages and castles from the landscape.

People don’t stop outside Carramore because of its age as they walk the Viking Way. If they pause at all, it’s because of its whitewashed face, the wisteria curling around the doorway each spring, or the quiet grace with which it sits in the rolling landscape. It is beautiful and loved. Some might even say, ordinary.

Yet...

I don’t know another house that carries more life or love or another house that is more extraordinary.

My parents moved to Carramore when I was seventeen. At first, it was simply another house: a bungalow attached for Grandie, a large garden where Dad could indulge his lifelong love of growing things, and plenty of space for young adults to roam and, eventually, grandchildren. We thought we were choosing a house where my parents would grow older. We had no idea we were choosing the backdrop to almost every family story we would tell for the next thirty years.

My memories of Carramore aren’t organised into special occasions. They have accumulated in the ordinary rhythm of family life.

Autumn meant Grandad’s allotment. Little hands disappeared into the rich, dark soil, searching for potatoes that emerged like buried treasure, impossibly large and still fragrant with the damp earth that had hidden them.

The orchard gave us apples that somehow tasted sweeter because we’d picked them ourselves. They were often crushed into bottles of cloudy cider and, like the plum trees, became the source of family folklore. To this day we still laugh about the summer the sweetest toothed grandchild cheerfully ate plum after plum, only to discover that each contained a wriggling worm.

The greenhouse was never just a greenhouse. It was Dad’s kingdom. Tomatoes stood proudly in neat rows while cucumbers, melons and grapes hung heavily from their vines, but what really grew there were conversations. Somehow, the ones that mattered always found their way beneath that glass.

It was in the potting shed next to the greenhouse that I told Dad I was pregnant with my first child. I can still see his face. He wrapped me in a hug before stepping back, his eyes glistening. I remember the quiet wave of relief that washed over me. He was happy. Excited, even.

“You always do things the wrong way round,” he said with a smile, every bit the old-fashioned father.

I laughed. A habit I still struggle to undo in life’s most intense moments.

“I didn’t realise there was a specific order when it came to love.”

For a moment he simply looked at me. Then he smiled again.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to love it.” I told him.

He nodded gently and hugged me again, more tightly.

“There’s no better answer,” he whispered.

The potting shed fell quiet. Neither of us spoke for a while. We simply stood there, smiling through tears. Seed trays lined the benches, waiting patiently for spring, while somewhere a watering can dripped onto the concrete floor. Outside, the garden had settled into its winter sleep, but inside Dad was already preparing for another growing season. Looking back, it feels fitting that we had that conversation in a room devoted entirely to hope.

With hindsight, I now know what Dad was really asking. Not whether I loved my baby or my husband. He already knew that. He was wondering whether I’d be all right. Whether I’d be secure. Whether life might prove harder than I’d hoped. Whether the little girl he’d spent a lifetime protecting was ready to become a mother. My answer wasn’t really about the baby either. It was about the kind of parent I hoped to become.

Love first.

The rest, somehow, would find its place.

Of course, not every greenhouse memory was so profound.

Once, during an ambitious water fight, a handful of the grandchildren decided Dad’s carefully nurtured, slightly softening tomatoes made excellent ammunition. The ensuing telling-off has also become family folklore and is retold with increasing dramatic licence every time we’re together. By the following morning, peace had returned. Dad was back inspecting what was left of his plants, hose in hand, unable to stay cross for long.

Even now, the scent of warm tomato leaves is enough to take me back.

To him.

To Carramore.

The magpies came every morning as faithfully as the sunrise. We all counted them. The willow stretched over the swimming pool until one extraordinary day it finally surrendered to gravity, crashing into the water as though even trees eventually become tired of holding themselves upright. I know that feeling.

Summer holidays blurred into endless afternoons of dripping towels, wet footprints across patios, barbecues that always produced too much food, random guests, dogs (at least five) weaving between laughing children, and adults convinced they were keeping a watchful eye while losing themselves in conversation and wine. If you stayed until evening, which most people did, there was usually ice cream in the freezer.

Mostly Magnums.

Dad had a habit of appearing with them at exactly the right moment, as though he possessed an internal compass for happiness. He was a Magnum magnet.

None of us announced that memories were being made. No one paused to appreciate how ordinary, and extraordinary, it all was. We were simply living, and that, I have come to believe, is how larfulness gathers: the invisible presence that settles inside a place after years of ordinary living, until the walls begin to remember the people who have loved there. It is not something a house is built with; it is something a house earns.

Carramore House has certainly earned larfulness.

It doesn’t arrive through grand occasions or dramatic moments. It accumulates through repetition: one Sunday lunch after another; one bonfire (how Dad loved a bonfire); five o’clock Christmas mornings with wrapping paper strewn across the lounge, while Bucks Fizz and coffee went round; scraped knees and wasp stings; weddings with three tenors, muddy wellington boots abandoned by the back door after a dog walk in the Great Woods or down the dell; grandchildren measuring themselves against the same wall by the laundry room until, one day, they realised they were looking Nanna in the eye, and before long, Grandad too.

Love settles inside a house, so silently that you rarely notice it happening. Then one day you return after being away for a while, climb the familiar stairs, hear the creak you’ve heard a thousand times before, and realise the place seems to recognise you as instinctively as you recognise it. Houses absorb us in the same way old wooden tables absorb polish over decades, layer upon layer, until something invisible has been created that no architect could ever draw. A house is designed on paper, but a home is drawn by those who live in it.

Mum is living inside that feeling of larfulness now. She’s in the strange, uncertain space that comes before leaving a home. The sale inches forwards, then backwards. Some days she’s moving. Some days she isn’t. Every phone call seems capable of changing the future. It’s a season of thresholding. Standing between one version of life and another.

The practical part of moving house is, in theory, straightforward. There are skips to hire, boxes to find, cupboards to empty and decades of possessions to sort and label; keep, donate or throw away. There are endless phone calls, forms to complete, solicitors to chase, estate agents to negotiate with and the peculiar frustration of watching your future depend on paperwork inching back and forth between strangers’ desks. It is time-consuming, expensive and relentlessly stressful.

And yet, that is the easy part.

The emotional part of moving is anything but.

Yes, Carramore is where Mum and Dad spent thirty of their fifty-four years of marriage. It is where they welcomed sons and daughters-in-law into the family, where grandchildren arrived one by one, where birthdays, Christmases and anniversaries were celebrated, where horse chestnut trees were planted, horses were kept and gardens tended. But it is also where Dad became ill, where Mum cared for him with extraordinary devotion, and where, finally... he died.

Somehow, even writing those words feels impossible.

We know we aren’t leaving him behind when Mum moves. His ashes are with us. His stories have long since escaped the walls of Carramore and live in all our homes. He arrives whenever someone mentions dessert or family holidays. He appears in the way my children laugh, in the expressions we catch ourselves using because he used them first, and in the countless habits we’ve inherited without ever intending to. He isn’t contained by bricks and mortar.

We know that.

Grief, however, rarely listens to reason.

Sometimes it convinces us that leaving a place means leaving a person too, because the walls have become fluent in their voice and every room has learnt the rhythm of their footsteps.

Living at Village Farm has helped me understand something I don’t think I could have understood anywhere else. Its extraordinary age invited me to wonder about the families who stood here before us, whose laughter drifted through these rooms, whose grief these walls absorbed and whose fingerprints have long since disappeared from the stone.

One day we will become those people.

Now, as my mum slowly and tentatively prepares to leave Carramore, the home she and Dad filled with almost thirty years of ordinary life, can I finally see that all those years we were giving Carramore its soul. We were writing ourselves into its walls.

As young adults we filled it with noisy parties and impossible dreams. Then, almost without noticing, we became parents ourselves. Sunday lunches grew longer. Eight grandchildren arrived. Dad manicured his herbaceous borders while little hands helped deadhead and pull out the weeds. Summer meant trampolines, Frisbees and French cricket on the lawn. Bonfires glowed against autumn skies. Christmas mornings began before dawn.

None of it felt remarkable.

It was simply our life.

Until, one day, it became our history.

That, I think, is what Village Farm has been trying to teach me.

Not that old houses are special because they have survived.

They are special because generations of ordinary people filled them with extraordinary love.

History doesn’t give a house its soul. Love does. Age simply gives love longer to settle. Carramore never needed three hundred years. Thirty was enough.

One day Mum will close Carramore’s front door for the last time and leave behind the house that held thirty years of her life. She’ll carry boxes to another house, arrange familiar photographs on unfamiliar shelves and slowly learn the creaks, the light and the rhythms of somewhere new. And because she’s my mum, she’ll do what she’s always done. She’ll find the courage and carry on. Just as her mum did. Just as Dad’s mum did. Before the last box has been unpacked, she’ll already have begun making another house a home.

But Carramore won’t lose its larfulness the day she leaves. It will go on holding every conversation around the kitchen and dining table, every Easter egg hunt, every morning cuddle, every outdoor cat that wandered through its doors, every lawnmower ride, every final drink taken before the swing of the gate, and every version of our family that grew within its walls.

Carramore has earned them.

So, thank you, Carramore, for sheltering four generations of my family and many more besides. For giving Dad the dignity of spending his final weeks where he most wanted to be, surrounded by the people he loved and the view he never grew tired of. And thank you for giving my children a childhood richer than they could ever have known while they were living it.

The Words That Waited

I’ve spent the past two or three days sorting out my office. I finally cleared my desk, reorganised my shelves and treated myself to a new laptop (you should have seen my old one) and printer. I’m one of those people who still likes to print things out. Words feel different to me on paper. More permanent. More truthful.

The reason for all this is that I’m halfway through an essay about our 300-year-old house. Like the house itself, it has grown far bigger than I expected. Every paragraph opens another door, and every doorway asks for a little more research.

While transferring everything onto my new laptop, I found myself rummaging through old notebooks instead of focusing on the project in front of me. It became a little time capsule of Claire. A rabbit warren of all my crazy ideas, abandoned paths and forgotten dreams.

Every notebook (and there are at least fifty A4 pads) is stuffed with deserted beginnings, half-finished essays, poems that wandered off before reaching the final line and characters still patiently waiting where I left them years ago, frozen mid-conversation like actors wondering why the director shouted “Cut!” and never came back.

Does every writer have cupboards like this? Or is mine more of a literary compost heap?

Amongst the pages I found the opening chapter of a novel I’d completely forgotten about. A poem I wrestled with, trying to make sense of a situation that felt enormous at the time. An essay with nothing but the title Lost.

There were Post-it notes clinging to notebooks like burdock burrs after an autumn walk, ideas scribbled in margins, phrases on envelopes and receipts, and sentences that drifted halfway through a thought.

At the time, I’m sure the younger Claire believed she’d simply failed to finish them. She needed more discipline. More routine. More faith that the words would eventually find their shape.

Looking back now, I’m not so sure. I wonder if those words weren’t ready yet. Or if the world wasn’t ready to hear them. More likely, I hadn’t quite lived enough life to write the ending they deserved. Some words arrive quickly. Others insist on growing old with us before they’ll reveal what they were trying to say.

I’ve moved house a couple of times since I wrote some of them. That alone was more than two decades ago. There have been degrees, career changes, arguments, reconciliations, heartbreak, laughter, funerals and fresh beginnings. Dogs have left us. New ones have bounded into our lives. Family has grown, and family has gone.

Life carried on.

The words waited.

Over the last few days, during my rummaging, I kept meeting the younger Claire, halfway through unfinished sentences and I’ve found myself wondering how hard she worked to find the right words. How carefully she chose them. How determined she was to explain herself without upsetting the apple cart, while still saying exactly what she meant.

Some things haven’t changed.

I still find writing cathartic. I still circle ideas before hitting the mark. I still begin pieces that seem determined not to end. When I was younger, I genuinely believed that meant I had failed. That I wasn’t very good with words. That writing belonged to other people. That I should stop trying and find something else to quiet whatever it was inside me that kept reaching for a notebook.

The truth is that I carried that belief for a very long time.

At primary school, I wasn’t simply told I was stupid once. I was made to stand in front of my class, and sometimes the whole school, while teachers reminded me again and again.

Children don’t argue with adults. They believe them.

So I did.

Looking back, I realise I spent years trying to write myself out of a story someone else had written about me.

Confidence has never been something I’ve carried in abundance. I suspect many women of my generation know exactly what I mean. We learnt to question ourselves long before we learnt to trust ourselves.

Yet the older I became, the more the words arrived.

By thirty I’d written two novels. By forty I’d earned a degree in Literature and Creative Writing and found myself teaching others to believe in the power of words.

The irony has never been lost on me.

Now I’m nearly fifty, and I realise something my younger self never could.

The words had been waiting all along.

They were simply waiting for me to become the woman brave enough to believe they were worth writing.

Which is why I’m not worried that the essay about our old house isn’t finished yet. It’s still asking more questions than it’s answering.

That’s alright.

One day it might end up on the shelf beside fifty other notebooks, waiting its turn.

Writers don’t waste words. We compost them. And every so often, something we buried years ago becomes the richest soil for whatever grows next.

Claire X

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A fun game of tag, started by and thanks to Miss Evelyn over at The Lectorium.

The rules and how to create your article are below.

1. These are dwellings and interior design choices that would indeed result in yours truly gladly taking up residence in them should the opportunity have ever presented itself.

2. Insert these rules at the beginning of the tag.

3. Thank and link back to the person who tagged you.

4. Take screenshots and insert them into the article and write your reasons why you choose these dwellings.

5. Tag five others to also complete this tag.

6. Link back to this inaugural post for a Master List of everyones completed tag responses will be in the works once this article goes live.

7. Have fun!

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1. Lyme Park as Pemberley (Pride & Prejudice, 1995)

There are few houses that have captured readers' imaginations quite like Pemberley. It isn't simply magnificent, it's quietly confident. Surrounded by ancient parkland, filled with books and blessed with views that seem to stretch forever, it's a house that rewards curiosity rather than showing off. Like its owner, it improves the longer you spend in its company. I'd happily spend my mornings walking the grounds with Red or swimming in the lake, and spend my afternoons getting lost in the library and my evenings trying to persuade Mrs Reynolds to tell me every story she knows about the place. Mr Darcy is entirely optional... although dismissing him after all that would be almost as foolish as Lydia running off with Wickham.

2. East Riddlesden Hall as Wuthering Heights (Wuthering Heights, 2009)

This is history with muddy boots. East Riddlesden Hall has all the timber beams, worn stone floors and weathered character I'd hope to find in a Yorkshire farmhouse. It feels wonderfully authentic, as though generations have simply lived, loved, quarrelled and endured within its walls. Standing there, it's easy to imagine Catherine Earnshaw tearing through the house like the "wild, wicked slip" Nelly Dean so memorably describes, with Heathcliff never far behind, brooding his way across the moors. I'd happily take the roaring fires, mullioned windows and that untamed Yorkshire landscape that seems to seep into every room. Heathcliff himself, however, is an absolutely disastrous man to share a postcode with.

3. Hatfield House as Manderley (Rebecca, 2020)

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... and who could blame me? Hatfield House is breathtaking, elegant and just mysterious enough to make you wonder whether someone is quietly watching from the end of a long corridor. It's also only a short drive from my mum's house, so I've been lucky enough to wander its magnificent rooms and gardens several times. Every visit feels a little different, but the atmosphere never changes. Every room seems to hold its breath, every staircase invites you to linger, and every doorway hints at a story that refuses to stay in the past. I'd happily fill Manderley with dogs racing through the gardens, long candlelit dinners, books stacked on every table and friends who stay far too late. I'd even welcome the armfuls of flowers, although I'd draw the line at Mrs Danvers' devotion to Rebecca's blood-red rhododendrons... and Mrs Danvers herself, if I'm being completely honest. I'd much rather let Manderley remember me than spend my days living in someone else's shadow.

4. Burghley House (Victor Frankenstein, 2015)

I'm slightly biased because Burghley is practically on my doorstep here in Lincolnshire. I've wandered its magnificent rooms and gardens more than once, and it never disappoints. Having appeared as the Frankenstein family estate in Victor Frankenstein (2015), it has all the ingredients for a gloriously Gothic adventure: grand staircases, cavernous rooms and enough atmosphere to make you glance over your shoulder after dark. I'd happily move in tomorrow, although I'd insist on one house rule from the outset: absolutely no midnight experiments, no collecting body parts and no shouting "It's alive!" during a thunderstorm. A good cup of tea and a novel seem a much safer use of the place.

5. Lindisfarne Castle and Bamburgh Castle as Dunsinane (Macbeth, Roman Polanski, 1971)

This is undoubtedly my least sensible choice, but as you all know, I do have a soft spot for Macbeth. Shakespeare's Scotland isn't exactly the place for a quiet retirement or a restful night's sleep. Between regicide, guilt-induced sleepwalking and those endlessly perplexing prophecies, life seems just a little too eventful. Even so, there's something irresistible about those dramatic northern landscapes. Wind sweeping in from the sea, castles standing against impossible skies and a setting that feels as though it belongs as much to myth as to history. I'd happily brave the Weird Sisters for scenery like that. I'd just leave the murderous ambition to Macbeth, politely decline any dinner invitations from him... and keep a wary eye on Birnam Wood.

I hope you enjoyed - feel free to play along in the comments.

My tags for the game will come through on chat.

Love Claire. X

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There is a particular kind of wisdom that never interrupts.

It doesn’t offer advice across the dinner table. It doesn’t tell you to look on the bright side. It doesn’t try to fix what cannot be fixed. It arrives, lays itself beside you and stays until the worst has passed.

For the last ten years, the wisest member of our family has never spoken a single word.

He’s asleep beside me as I write this. His once fox-red muzzle is beginning to soften into silver, his paws twitching occasionally as though he’s chasing Cyril the squirrel away from our cherry tree. Every so often he sighs, puffing out his cheeks before slowly drawing the air back in again, as though he has made peace with something the rest of us are still trying to understand.

I watch him more these days.

Time has started to leave its own small vestiges upon him.

Not enough for anyone else to notice. Just the gentlest whitening of his face. A walk that’s a fraction slower than it used to be. A run that takes a little longer to recover from. The way he now chooses comfort over chaos, shade over sunshine, rest over racing, the cool floor over our bed.

Age does not arrive with fanfare.

It prefers whispers.

Watching him grow older has made me realise something I hadn’t expected. For years I thought I’d been teaching Red how to live in our world: sit, stay, down, wait, paw, leave, let’s go, here, kiss. The shared vocabulary of dogs and humans trying to understand one another.

But along the way, our roles reversed.

Without ever intending to, Red began teaching me.

Not through obedience, but through enthusiasm. Not through discipline, but through trust. Not through words, but through the extraordinary consistency with which he greeted each ordinary day as though the whole world had been invented again overnight.

I had stopped doing that.

I had become caught up in the machinery of adulthood. The responsibilities, the expectations, the endless list of things that needed doing. I became less practised at noticing what mattered.

Scientists will happily explain why dogs bond with humans. They’ll talk about oxytocin and evolution, scent recognition and pack behaviour. They’ll tell us how dogs read our faces, detect hormonal changes and respond to shifts in our breathing long before we notice them ourselves.

I wholeheartedly believe all of that, but I also believe it misses something. None of it quite explains how one creature, covered in ginger fur and carrying a cuddly toy bought just for him, can become the emotional centre of an entire family. It doesn’t explain how Red can remind us of something we once knew instinctively: that joy was never meant to be rationed, postponed or earned. That play was never something we were supposed to leave behind with childhood.

That is the secret of a wildheart. Someone who never entirely outgrows the urge to climb the gate, follow the meandering path instead of the direct one, or stop mid-walk because a butterfly, a scent or a patch of sunlight has suddenly become the most important thing in the world.

Red has spent ten years proving that delight is not childish. It is alive.

His is real wisdom.

Now I know that the wisest soul I’ve ever lived with has spent his whole life trying to teach us the one thing adulthood persuades us to abandon: How to greet an ordinary morning as though it were a miracle.

Before there was Red, there was our Jake.

A black Labrador with the kindest eyes I’ve ever known and a heart so wild and woven into the fabric of our family that I genuinely couldn’t imagine our lives without him. He was only six when leukaemia took him.

Six!

An age that still feels impossibly young for a dog whose life seemed to have only just begun.

His death arrived with the kind of swiftness that leaves no time to prepare your heart. One week we were planning walks and marathon training, the next we were saying goodbye. I remember feeling not only grief but something stranger, an irrational guilt that refused to loosen its grip. We’d just moved into our three-hundred-year-old farmhouse, boxes still stacked against wonky walls, the smell of fresh paint mingling with old timber, and somewhere in the bewilderment of loss I found myself wondering whether we’d asked too much of him. Whether the upheaval, the unfamiliar rooms, the leaving behind of one home for another had hastened the end. Grief is rarely logical.

For weeks afterwards, none of us wanted to walk through the front door. The house we’d fallen in love with suddenly felt cavernous and unfamiliar. Beautiful, yes, but hollow. We hadn’t realised how much of what we’d called home had never been bricks or beams at all. It had been the sound of four paws padding across old wooden floors, a thick black tail thumping against the kitchen cupboards, the joyful collision of a Labrador launching himself at whoever had just come home. The certainty that, however hard the day had been, someone would always be waiting with a smile and a kiss.

A house can hold memories.

But it takes a heartbeat to make it home.

Our heartbeat had gone quiet.

We weren’t looking for another Jake. That would have been impossible, and perhaps a little unfair. We were simply trying to imagine laughter, silliness and excitement returning to rooms that had fallen silent.

Then, one afternoon at my parents’ house, while absent-mindedly scrolling through Gumtree, we found an advert for a litter of four fox-red Labradors.

I showed my phone to Dad.

He didn’t hesitate.

“Go and get him.”

Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out the deposit and pressed it into my palm, as though the decision had already been made.

That was Dad all over.

He’d loved dogs for ever. He spoke to them as though they were old friends who happened to communicate in a different language. While the rest of us were still discussing the practicalities, Dad had already pictured another pair of paws padding through his house and our farmhouse. Another companion. Another member of the family.

A few days later, we were driving to Norfolk.

Life has a habit of nudging us forwards while we’re still looking back.

There were two girls and two boys, hurtling around a sun-drenched garden while their mother kept one watchful eye on the chaos. They weren’t the sleepy, picture-perfect puppies I’d imagined. They hurled themselves through flowerbeds, wrestled with complete conviction and greeted every fallen leaf as though it were the most exciting discovery in canine history. It struck me, years later, that Labradors never really wake up. They continue the day’s adventure from wherever they happened to fall asleep.

By the time we arrived, both girls had already been spoken for. So had one of the boys. The remaining puppy seemed blissfully unconcerned by this rather significant detail. There was no choosing, no weighing up temperaments or wondering which one might suit our family best. There was just one fox-red Labrador charging towards us on paws far too large for the rest of him, delighted beyond measure that strangers had appeared in his garden.

Adults are often suspicious of enthusiasm. Puppies never are.

Between puppy breath, July sunshine and the uncomplicated joy with which he greeted five strangers, something shifted inside me. A small fateflicker passed through an ordinary afternoon, unnoticed in the moment but changing the shape of everything that followed. We left that garden having signed the paperwork and paid the deposit, knowing we would return a week later, to bring him home.

Puppyhood arrived like a small ginger tornado.

Within days, our ancient farmhouse had become an archaeological dig of chewed shoes, missing socks and mysterious puddles. The garden, already resembling the Battle of the Somme thanks to ongoing building work, was, in Red’s opinion, perfect. Mud wasn’t something to avoid. It was something to celebrate. He bounded through trenches with the joy of an explorer discovering a new continent, barked enthusiastically at a digger a thousand times his size and emerged each evening looking less like a Labrador and more like a creature sculpted from Lincolnshire clay.

Inside wasn’t much calmer. Leather seemed to possess an irresistible flavour. Boots disappeared with alarming regularity, followed by an expensive purse and a pair of sunglasses that became the unfortunate victims of what I can only assume was an intense scientific investigation into whether humans really needed them. Yet the extraordinary thing about Red wasn’t the trail of destruction. It was how deeply he felt it afterwards. Before we’d spoken a single word, he’d already know. An intake of breath. A glance across the room. The tiniest change in our expression or behaviour was enough. His ears would flatten, his amber eyes would widen with genuine remorse and, like a small ginger Dobby convinced he’d committed an unforgivable crime, he’d remove himself from the room and stand facing the wall at the end of the garden, punishing himself long before we ever could. We never sent him there. He merely couldn’t bear the thought that he’d disappointed us.

Jake, however, had been cut from entirely different Labrador cloth.

He once ate an entire chocolate birthday cake and looked up hopefully, waiting to see if there might be another. He was an escapologist, gate-crashing our neighbour’s barbecues on numerous occasions, stealing sausages straight from the grill and guests’ plates with the confidence of someone who genuinely believed he had been invited. He launched himself into septic tanks, disappeared through open gates and returned home muddy, triumphant and entirely unconcerned by any consequences.

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Jake possessed no self-preservation whatsoever. He lived with the glorious certainty that life was for enjoying and rules were merely suggestions. Why worry about tomorrow when there might be sausages or Bertie-Bots-Every-Flavour-Beans today?

Red was a completely different soul. He seemed to possess an impossibly tender conscience. His misdemeanours were spectacular, but his remorse was even greater. Before long we’d find ourselves crouching beside him, scratching behind those velvet ears and apologising for making him feel sad.

This was, without doubt, the first lesson Red taught us: love doesn’t always look the same. Some creatures bring chaos and laughter. Others bring comfort and connection. Both have left their paw prints on our hearts.

Red was a typical puppy. There were accidents; our carpets genuinely suffered. Stair gates were scaled with the determination of a mountaineer. One memorable afternoon ended with four perfectly spaced puppy poos decorating the bathroom floor after he’d accidentally imprisoned himself inside. Raising a Labrador puppy is rather like living with an exuberant toddler wearing permanent muddy wellington boots. Exhausting, expensive and almost impossible to stay cross with for long. Red wasn’t testing our patience. He was embracing life with a level of curiosity and enthusiasm most of us abandon around our late twenties.

Between childhood and middle age, many of us become far too sensible. We stop splashing through puddles. We stop dancing in the kitchen whilst we cook, singing at the top of our lungs in the car, or saying yes to an unplanned adventure. We become experts at efficiency, at getting things done, at knowing what needs to happen next.

I think we make ourselves smaller doing this.

We put joy on hold until the house is tidy, the emails are answered and everyone else is taken care of. We convince ourselves there will be more time later.

Watching Shirley Valentine recently, I believe that she and Red would have understood each other perfectly. One ran away to Greece; the other charged headlong into cornfields. Both seemed to know something the rest of us are in danger of forgetting.

When did we stop delighting in being alive?

To become leadless is not to be reckless or careless. It is freedom from fear. It is to trust enough to follow what calls us, to notice the unexpected and let joy interrupt the plans we make.

Red has spent his whole life doing this. A true wildheart, he has never forgotten the simple art of being fully present: the joy of a familiar path, the excitement of a new scent, the belief that an ordinary morning might still contain something wonderful. He wakes up every morning gloriously unburdened by the weight of being “appropriate”. He has no idea that adults are obligated to be sensible, restrained or productive before they are allowed to be happy.

That is exactly why he is my teacher.

The greatest thing Red has taught me is that the world is constantly communicating with us and we have become very good at not listening.

He always knows when a storm is coming.

Long before the first rumble of thunder reaches our ears, Red knows. His head lifts. His ears move. His whole body becomes alert, not with panic. He’s not scared; he is paying attention. It is as though he is listening to a conversation taking place somewhere beyond our hearing. The air shifts. The light changes. Something invisible moves across the landscape, and he knows.

Humans are good at pretending we cannot feel the weather moving in. We ignore the tension in a room. We dismiss the heaviness in someone’s voice. We carry on long after our instincts have already whispered that something isn’t right.

Red doesn’t do that.

If there are raised voices in the house, he doesn’t take sides. He doesn’t attempt to solve the problem. He unassumingly gets up, looks at us with an expression that states, really? You’re all doing this again? and walks away to a quieter room. Under the piano maybe or under my desk.

He refuses to participate in unnecessary storms.

His superpower and wisdom are knowing when to walk away.

The older my children became, the more I began to understand another lesson Red had been teaching us: How to let go.

There was a time when our farmhouse was full of noise. The kind of noise that only comes with children growing up. Doors opening and closing. Footsteps running across old floors. Music pumping from bathrooms and bedrooms and drifting downstairs. Pianos and drums rumbling through the walls. Friends arriving. Laughter filling the rooms. Shoes abandoned in hallways. Coats left over chairs. Bodies in beds. The constant movement of children becoming.

The farmhouse held it all: the chaos, the music, the friendships, the growing pains, the beautiful mess of young lives unfolding within its walls. It was never still, and I never wanted it to be.

Then, slowly, as all children must, they grew up and began to leave.

Rooms have become quieter. The house changed shape. The echoes grew longer. As humans, we often struggle with this part of love. I know I do deeply. We hold on. Oh, my goodness we worry. We measure distance as loss. We wonder if someone leaving means something has been taken away.

Red never did.

He never stood at the door wondering whether the person walking away would come back. He never carried the anxiety of the future. He loved completely while they were there, and when they returned, whether it had been five minutes or five weeks, he greeted them as though their absence had never mattered.

This is another vital characteristic of being leadless. To love without trying to hold someone still. To trust that a connection strong enough does not need a tether. Red has never needed to know where his people are going. Only that they are his people and that they will return.

Another beautiful friendship Red formed was with my dad.

Like I said earlier, Dad had always loved dogs. Not in the casual way some people like animals, but in the way that suggests a quiet recognition between souls. He spoke to the dogs at times more than he spoke to us. He never seemed embarrassed by it. He understood that conversation did not always require words.

Dogs seemed to understand him perfectly. They would always sit by him, rest their heads upon his knee. Trust him.

Jake had loved Dad’s generosity and enthusiasm and Red inherited that same bond. Despite all the rules we had carefully established about treats and healthy eating, Red and Dad developed their own arrangement involving peanuts and Magnums. Dad ate the chocolate and Red got the ice-cream.

An agreement understood without negotiation.

Looking back, those small moments feel almost impossibly precious. A man. A Labrador. A summer afternoon. A melting ice cream slowly disappearing between two friends who never needed to explain what they meant to each other.

When Dad became ill, Red seemed to understand the change in all of us. He became more watchful. Less interested in chasing life and more interested in simply being near it.

After weekends spent at the hospital, I would walk through the front door exhausted, carrying the weight of conversations I never wanted to have and realities I wasn’t ready to accept. Red would greet me as he always had, with the joy of a Labrador seeing his person return.

But then something changed.

As soon as I sat down, he would climb onto me and settle there. Not beside me. On me. His entire body pressed against mine, refusing to move until I eventually insisted that I needed to go to bed. Even then, he would follow me upstairs and continue his vigil, lying beside me as though his job was simply to make sure I was not carrying everything alone.

He never asked what was wrong.

He never needed an explanation.

He knew the weather had turned, and he instinctively stayed close.

Red is ten now. The farmhouse has changed. The children have grown. The people and creatures who have filled these rooms have left their marks, some still here, some carried only in memory. That is the strange thing about love. It does not stay the same; it grows, stretches, morphs. A kind of crescence; the slow and natural growing of something beautiful before we even realise it has taken root.

Tomorrow morning, he will wake believing the day deserves his full attention. He will lift his nose to the air, check the garden for squirrels and greet the world as though it has never existed before.

I am finally learning to do the same.

To become leadless.

Following the path ahead, knowing that everything we love leaves something of itself behind. There will always be a soulsigh when seasons end, when people leave, when moments become memories, but that ache is proof of something so wonderful.

That we were there.

That we loved.

That we were fully alive.

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For me, my heartharbour will always be 2019, although I could only recognise it once I had sailed far enough away from it.

Looking back, I think it was our halcyon year. A season of such happiness that I didn’t realise I was living in it until it became a memory. The year my heart returns to whenever life feels heavy.

I just didn’t know it then.

I believe we only recognise our heartharbours once we’ve drifted far enough from their shores.

2019 was extraordinary but ordinary in the same breath. Gloriously, beautifully ordinary. The sort of year that slips past almost unnoticed because nothing remarkable seems to happen, until one day you realise everything remarkable already had.

The five of us; my wee family, my star-kept lover and my three growing bairns, booked holidays without hesitation. Family dinners happened because that was simply what families did. Sleepy figures still wandered downstairs each morning, hair tousled, barely awake, school bags and P.E. kits waiting by the door. Looking back, I can almost hear time humming beneath those poached eggs and blueberry smoothies, although none of us noticed it then. Mum and Dad were only ever a phone call away asking if we fancied the theatre, the zoo, or that so-and-so was having a party and we were all invited. We talked endlessly about places we’d visit one day. Greece again. Scotland again. Somewhere we’d never been before. It never crossed my mind that childhood was already slipping gently through our fingers, or that one day getting all five of us around the same table would become the greatest adventure of all. The future felt dependable then. It waited patiently for us. None of us realised we were already sailing towards a different coastline.

Then, almost without warning, the tide turned.

2020 arrived, carrying the whole world with it.

Nothing truly devastating happened to our own little family, thank goodness. There was the uncertainty, the homeschooling, the isolation from grandparents, friends and neighbours, but technology and bubbles softened the edges of it all. Looking back, those first months of lockdown felt strangely idyllic. We baked banana bread like everyone else, walked endless miles with our Red, became fiercely competitive over games of Cluedo, rediscovered croquet and badminton on warm afternoons, gutted bathrooms we’d been meaning to tackle for years, and ended our days with popcorn and family films. Our lives became smaller, but in many ways our time together became richer.

One film we watched on repeat was Saving Mr. Banks, so much so that whole scenes became family shorthand. It settled into our home alongside a few others as one of those rainy afternoon films that everyone would happily watch again. We never seemed to tire of it.

In 2020, the children had reached that age where asking for more independence would have been the natural next step. Friends, parties, driving lessons, first jobs, lives slowly unfolding beyond our front door. Instead, the world pressed pause. Their late teenage years folded back into family life for a little longer and, in a way, I treasure that. We were given time that no one could have planned for. Time around the dinner table. Time on family walks. Time that felt borrowed.

We did, devastatingly, lose friends during those years. Friends we weren’t permitted to visit. Funerals we couldn’t attend. Families we couldn’t properly comfort. Grief became something experienced at arm’s length, making loss feel strangely unfinished.

Yet this isn’t really a story about the pandemic.

Covid wasn’t the storm.

It was the outgoing tide.

It carried us away from a harbour we hadn’t realised we were leaving.

Life resumed, as tides always do.

Only it wasn’t the same life.

Children became adults. One by one they stepped aboard lives of their own, exactly as they should. Our family of five, once gathered so effortlessly around the kitchen table, became something requiring diaries, train journeys and careful planning. Nothing was lost through love. It was simply the natural rhythm of children growing up. Even so, I found myself missing the beautiful but messy inconvenience of everyone under one roof.

Then Dad became ill.

At first, none of us realised how serious it was. Like the tide creeping surreptitiously over sand, it arrived so gradually that it was easy to believe the shoreline hadn’t really moved. Hospital appointments became more frequent. Weekends disappeared into clinics, scans and deeper investigations. One inconclusive result led to another, each offering just enough reassurance to keep hope afloat.

Our conversations changed almost without us noticing.

“How did Dad seem to you?”

“He really struggled to say that word.”

“He seems so quiet.”

“I can’t believe he went to bed so early. That’s not like him.”

Hope didn’t vanish all at once. It simply adjusted itself, little by little, appointment by appointment, conversation by conversation, until, five years later, one April morning in 2025, he was gone.

Dad became memories.

Only then did I realise that I’d lost Saving Mr. Banks, too.

When she’s home, my daughter has suggested we watch it, thinking it might feel comforting, nostalgic, a way of returning to those lockdown evenings when the five of us were all together. But I can’t. I know what’s coming now. Not just in the film, but in my own life. P. L. Travers couldn’t save her father, and neither could I. A story that once felt warm and familiar now asks me to sit through a grief I wasn’t carrying the first time we watched it.

It’s extraordinary how memory works. Sometimes it doesn’t attach itself to the biggest events. Sometimes it wraps itself around a film, a song, or the smell of banana bread cooling on the kitchen side, and years later you find you can’t separate one from the other.

Somewhere along the voyage, carefree certainty gave way to house sales and probate paperwork and worries that arrive uninvited at three o’clock in the morning.

Growing older, I’ve discovered, isn’t really measured now in birthdays. It’s measured by the people who are no longer waiting for you when you return home.

Life becomes quieter in ways you never expect. One by one, the voices that shaped your days grow fainter, until all that remains is a question that visits more often than I’d like to admit.

What happens now?

I try to keep my eyes on the horizon because no one reaches a new shore by staring at the wake behind them. Even so, my heart still sails back to our halcyon year from time to time.

I don’t remember the things I once believed were important. I don’t remember what was in the news, although like so many of us I became hopelessly addicted to it afterwards, or the little anxieties that probably occupied my mind back then.

I remember Crete.

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I remember the sea. It was impossibly blue, so clear it looked as though we’d wandered into another age entirely. An ancient Greek world of whitewashed walls, sleepy tavernas, olive groves and endless skies, where the days were measured by sunshine, secret coves and spontaneous football matches on the beach at dusk rather than by clocks and schedules.

I remember feeling fitter, healthier and more at peace than I have ever felt. I wasn’t chasing balance. I was simply living it.

Greek music drifted through warm evening air as all five of us danced without caring who was watching. We struck up conversations with strangers because none of us had yet learnt to ration our openness. The children wandered happily through bustling markets, ice-cream in hand, returning with little trinkets that still sit in their childhood bedrooms, tiny souvenirs that have somehow outlasted childhood itself.

One day we drove across the island to Spinalonga after I had read The Island by Victoria Hislop. I remember standing on that tiny fortress, thinking about the lives of the people with leprosy who had once been banished there, separated from everything and everyone they loved. On the journey back, Alsatians bounded into the crystal waters of the Aegean Sea, swimming with an effortless joy that somehow sits alongside the memory of Spinalonga in my mind. Even now, I can’t think of one without the other.

Every evening began the same way. A game of Cheat or Blackjack before dinner, familiar cries of, “You’re a cheat!”, laughter spilling across the table, and that effortless companionship that comes when everyone you love is gathered in one place. I can still picture the children teasing each other, laughing until they couldn’t breathe and being gloriously themselves, before university, careers and adulthood began calling them elsewhere, before friendships became more complicated, appearances mattered more than adventures, and home slowly stopped being the centre of their world.

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Most of all, I remember the illusion that time was abundant, never imagining I was already standing inside a memory. The wonderful, effortless ease of knowing everyone I loved would still be there tomorrow. We’d wake beneath the same roof, wander down for breakfast together, spend another day by the pool or beside that astonishing sea, and do it all again the following day.

It never crossed my mind that one day I would miss something so beautifully ordinary.

Isn’t memory wonderfully selective. It edits away the arguments, the tiredness and the ordinary frustrations. Like I’ve said before, it always keeps the feeling. The warmth of the evening sun, the laughter, the certainty and the belonging.

I think that’s why we all have a heartharbour.

It might be a time, or a place, a photograph, a holiday, a family kitchen, or an ordinary season of life that only reveals its extraordinary nature once we’ve sailed beyond it.

Not because life was perfect there.

It wasn’t.

No life ever is.

But because, for a while, everyone we loved was safely inside it.

I’ve often wondered why my heart returns to 2019 so often. I’ve come to realise it isn’t nostalgia. It’s gratitude. Gratitude for a version of life I never realised I was living while it was happening.

The strange thing about heartharbours is that we can never sail back into them.

The children will never be those ages again.

Dad will never answer the telephone.

Time keeps moving, the tides keep changing and every voyage leaves us a little different from when we first cast off.

Yet the harbour never truly disappears. It remains charted somewhere inside us.

These days, I’m under no illusion that what I’m living through now is another halcyon season.

It isn’t.

This has been the hardest stretch of water I’ve ever navigated, and writing has become one of the oars that keeps me moving forward. Grief has changed the tides beneath my feet. Some days it feels as though all I’m doing is bailing water and trying to keep the boat afloat.

Yet I’ve come to believe that heartharbours aren’t accidents. They are built, without us noticing, every time we choose to keep living.

They are in the greenhouse, where tiny seeds continue to believe in spring regardless of the weather. Dad never saw it flourish, yet it has become one of the places where I keep choosing tomorrow. I find it in muddy running shoes by the back door, in wild swims, in armfuls of unruly flowers gathered from the garden, in unexpected conversations, unopened maps and all the stories that are still waiting for me to live before I can write them.

One day, I hope I’ll turn around and realise that somewhere amongst the grief, the uncertainty and the beginning again, another heartharbour is taking shape.

Maybe that’s the nature of halcyon years. We never recognise them while we’re living them.

Because the tides never stop turning.

And neither do we.

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Stories are a little like gardens. One often leads to another. If this essay found a place in your heart, you may enjoy Star-kept Lovers, where I tell the story of the man who has shared every voyage since we first met beneath a sky full of stars.

I’ve always loved the stars.

Not because I know much about astronomy. I don’t. I can find The Plough, but I couldn’t confidently point out Orion or Cassiopeia without my faithful Night Sky app and an embarrassingly long pause.

What I love are the stories.

The idea that, for thousands of years, people have looked up at the same scattered points of light and woven them into something meaningful. Individual stars, separated by impossible distances, becoming bears, hunters, queens and farming equipment because somebody imagined they belonged together.

I’ve always loved the idea of astrology too.

The thought that our lives begin beneath a particular sky has always fascinated me. Not because I believe our futures are fixed, far from it, but because the stars themselves are never still. They shift; they disappear behind clouds and return. Our lives do the same. We aren’t bound by the sky we were born under, only invited to begin there. Our lives resemble constellations more than horoscopes: not one spectacular moment, but thousands of ordinary moments, gradually joined together until they become a story.

When I first met my husband, I was eighteen and he was twenty-three. We met in a bar in Chamonix called Wild Wallabies. The name alone should probably have warned me. He apparently first noticed me attempting to ride the bucking bronco.

Attempting...

I lasted only a few seconds before being unceremoniously thrown off, taking most of my dignity with me. What I didn’t know was that he’d been watching from across the room, playing pool with his friends; what he didn’t know was that I’d noticed him long before I climbed onto that infernal bucking bronco. Funny, isn’t it, how two people can remember the same evening from opposite sides of a room?

As soon as I was ejected from the saddle, he wandered over, asked if I’d play doubles with him and offered to buy me a beer. Looking back, I often think about how ordinary that evening seemed. Boy meets girl, and nobody in that noisy bar, least of all us, knew they were watching the first page of a story that would still be unfurling thirty years later.

Life contains moments like that. I call them fateflickers. Moments that barely shimmer as they happen before dividing everything into before and after.

That night, he told me he was going to marry me. He now denies it completely. Memory, it seems, is far kinder to twenty-three-year-old men than the men themselves. Unfortunately for him, I’ve spent my career teaching English. I know good evidence when I hear it.

Besides, he has form.

Many years later, at a R.A.F ball, we entered a raffle with hundreds of tickets. Before the compère had even reached into the drum, my husband stood up and announced, quite matter-of-factly, “We’ve won, Claire.” A few moments later, our number was called! He was already halfway to the stage before anyone else had realised what was happening.

He’s strange like that. Quietly certain about things he has no earthly business being certain about.

The mountains around Chamonix seemed mammoth back then. The world felt impossibly large, as though adventure waited beyond every snow-covered ridge. By day, he disappeared onto the slopes with his snowboard mates while I clung to rock faces, climbing mountains rather than sliding down them. Every evening we’d find each other again in Wild Wallabies, each carrying a day’s worth of stories: snow, rock, near misses, pool and laughter. I beat him far more often than his ego considered reasonable.

He drank beer.

I drank rum.

A little too much rum.

We were wonderfully untamed back then. The sort of young adults who believed life, and destiny, were things to trust rather than carefully plan. If that’s reckless, so be it.

He came from a world very different to mine. His childhood had been shaped by fracture, mine by tradition. He called me his Uptown Girl, usually with just enough affection disguised as sarcasm to suggest my upbringing fascinated him far more than it impressed him. Yet beneath all those differences, there was a strange feeling we’d met before. Not in any literal sense, just the quiet recognition that sometimes arrives when another soul feels oddly familiar.

Neither of us had come to Chamonix looking to be sensible. We had both been bruised before, carrying stories we didn’t usually hand to complete strangers. Yet somewhere between the beer and the rum, beneath a sky stitched with stars, walking streets so cold they should have frozen every sensible thought, the first quiet crescence of us took root. We started handing those stories to each other.

The mistakes.

The regrets.

The parts of ourselves we weren’t especially proud of.

I remember him talking honestly about the twists and turns that had brought him there, and although I can’t remember exactly what I said in return, I remember the relief of meeting someone who wasn’t pretending to have everything figured out. There was no performance, no carefully edited version, just two young people who already knew honesty was far more attractive than perfection. By the time we left the bar, the temperature had dropped well below freezing. I was wearing nothing but jeans and a jumper, yet I wasn’t cold. Rum has remarkable insulating qualities. Or just maybe some moments simply burn hotter than the weather surrounding them.

As we walked beneath that impossible Alpine sky, I remember looking up and slowly spinning beneath the stars, the whole universe wheeling above my head. There was scarcely enough night left to hold the stars.

Then he kissed me.

For one dizzying moment, I couldn’t have told you whether it was the rum, the altitude or the kiss that tipped the world off its axis. I only knew that it had.

I cannot tell you what he said after the kiss!

There will always be some secrets, and some memories aren’t interested in transcripts anyway. Memory is interested in feeling.

That feeling of certainty raced through me, that, despite every reason we probably shouldn’t work, neither of us wanted to walk away in that moment. Our reckless confidence that whatever came next, we’d find a way through it. I thought love would arrive with the brilliance of a shooting star: bright, breathtaking and unmistakable. It took me nearly thirty years to realise the real miracle was never the stars above the Alps. It was our constellation, clandestinely forming above us long before either of us knew where it would lead.

The heavens had one final surprise for us that March we met.

A comet: Hyakutake.

We met just as one of the brightest comets of the twentieth century swept past Earth. It hung above the Alps, impossibly luminous against the fading night. Its Japanese name translates as one hundred mountain peaks. Often reality tells the better story than fiction.

During that magical time, we roambled across the Alps. I was a bit of a hitchhiker then, happily scattering myself between ski resorts with little more than a backpack and a vague plan. Somewhere along a mountain road we pulled over, climbed out of the car and stood, hushstruck, beneath the comet. It was there that he confessed the only book he’d ever read was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

As someone who already carried Shakespeare, the Brontës and a head full of stories wherever I went, I remember rolling my eyes in theatrical despair. How could anybody reach the age of twenty-three having read just one book? I’ve since learnt that while I searched the heavens for poetry, he was perfectly content with a world where the answer to life, the universe and everything was simply 42.

He became a systems architect.

I became an English teacher.

Scientists tell us Hyakutake, the comet that became the first point of reference in our constellation, won’t return for another seventy thousand years.

I rather like that thought.

A few years later, on the other side of the world, we found ourselves doing the same thing.

Looking up.

Before Australia came Asia.

One stop was Langkawi.

By day we chased waterfalls, sailed catamarans and wandered wherever curiosity led us. By night we sat on moonlit beaches, drinking rum, swatting Jurassic-sized insects with limited success and smothering ourselves in Tiger Balm, the universal perfume of backpackers being eaten alive.

One afternoon we climbed to Telaga Tujuh, the Seven Wells Waterfall. Legend says seven celestial nymphs descended after dark to bathe in its pools, vanishing the moment they sensed human footsteps. The locals spoke of it matter-of-factly, as though the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary had always been a little thinner there. I’ve always collected stories more eagerly than souvenirs, so naturally I brought home both the legend and the photograph.

Looking back, I realise our marriage has done the same, gathering stories that remind us of who we were when they found us.

Australia made us feel smaller still.

We drifted from boat to boat, sailing south from Cairns towards the Whitsundays, sleeping on deck beneath Southern Hemisphere skies so vast they seemed to begin where Earth ended. Days were measured by tides, coral reefs and the tail end of tropical storms. There was nowhere to be except exactly where we already were.

For over a fortnight we sailed the Great Barrier Reef aboard a fifty-two-foot concrete ketch called Severance.

Even now, that name makes me smile.

Hardly the vessel you’d choose if reassurance ranked highly on your list of priorities. Then there were the posters plastered around backpacker hostels, warning us not to disappear over the horizon with persuasive strangers beneath the wonderfully comforting slogan:

At sea, no one can hear you scream.

Not exactly the words you want rattling around your head as you cast off with Calico Jack.

Our skipper was an elderly gentleman trying to sail Severance to Brisbane for his son, who was in hospital. He needed someone capable of lowering an anchor that appeared to weigh almost as much as a family car. In those days my husband looked the sort who could moor the Titanic, which was unfortunate because Titanic was the last film we’d watched before setting sail.

Before long, my poor man was hauling anchors, fixing the skipper’s mistakes and catching our dinner, while I clung to the galley sink, chopping salad and trying not to donate any fingers to the fish. We learned ropes, watches and tides as we went.

There were moments when I wondered if we’d ever see land again. We anchored beside story-soaked Aboriginal islands where children hurled themselves from rocks into impossibly clear water while the Elders made it gently, but unmistakably, clear that we were visitors.

It was exhilarating.

Humbling.

The world felt ancient.

And we were wonderfully small within it.

Yet every night, when darkness settled across the ocean, something inside me settled too.

Wrapped in strong arms, with nothing above us but stars and nothing beneath us but the Coral Sea, I felt safer than I had any right to. Looking back, it seems extraordinary that such a precarious place should become one of my safest memories. Above us, unfamiliar constellations wheeled across the Southern Hemisphere. Different stars. The same feeling. We counted shooting stars until sleep claimed us. Seventeen, I think. I don’t remember what we ate, whether music was playing, or even if it was playing at all. Memory edits without asking permission. It sweeps away practical details to make room for what mattered most.

When we finally reached dry land, we briefly debated whether to desert our skipper before he made it to Brisbane. There was absolutely no prospect of me getting back on that boat.

Instead, we headed for the cinema. I needed to remain steady for a time on something that didn’t move.

Shakespeare in Love or Armageddon.

Armageddon won.

Not because my husband had suddenly discovered his inner romantic. As if. He was far more interested in asteroids, spacecraft and whether any of the science was remotely plausible than Shakespeare. I was simply happy to sit beside him while Aerosmith promised we wouldn’t Miss a Thing. Looking back, it wasn’t the asteroid that stayed with me, but the relief when The Freedom crew finally made it home. After a fortnight aboard Severance, I understood that feeling rather well.

Once again, even indoors, I found myself looking up at the stars.

Another star in our constellation.

Of course, constellations aren’t made from two or three stars. They’re traced from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of points of light. So it is with a life together. Ours isn’t stitched together by facts so much as moments and feelings. Tiny, ordinary moments that, with enough distance, begin to reveal a pattern.

Our constellation kept growing.

Rocket launches at Christmas and kitchen tables.

Total eclipses and breakups.

House moves and harvest moons.

Aurorae painting pink the skies above dark dog walks.

Birthdays and blue moons.

Extraordinary adventures.

Ordinary days, quietly becoming extraordinary.

I couldn’t possibly tell you about every star. Memory wouldn’t let me. It has already chosen the ones it wants me to keep.

When people ask how long we’ve been together, I usually give them a guesstimate.

Over three decades.

It sounds impressive when I say it aloud, as though long marriages simply arrive because enough years have passed.

They don’t.

They accumulate.

A look exchanged across a room because one of the children has just said something unintentionally hilarious. A secret smile. Knowing which version of “I’m fine” is actually fine, and which one needs a cup of tea and a quiet five minutes. He reminds me where I left my glasses. I remind him what day it is and where he left his keys and wallet. I’m a social butterfly. He insists he doesn’t really like people. “I like you,” he says. “And Red.” I’m still not entirely convinced I come first. We’ll ask each other what we’ve got left in the tank. It’s never fifty-fifty. Some days it’s eighty-twenty. Others it’s thirty-seventy. Whoever has more simply says, “I’ll cover you.”

Whole conversations now happen in raised eyebrows, unfinished sentences and references nobody else could possibly understand. The grown children occasionally look at us as though we’ve slipped into another dimension before begging us not to speak like that in front of their friends because, apparently, “people will think you’re weird.”

They’re probably right.

That’s marriage.

Not fifty-fifty. Just whatever it takes to make a whole.

Romance changes too.

At eighteen, I imagined it would always be moonlight and shooting stars, stolen kisses and pillow talk. At forty-eight, romance looks like nasal strips and two cooling mats laid side by side on our pillows; one for his overenthusiastic thyroid, one for my spectacularly uncooperative perimenopause. Nobody writes sonnets about hormonal temperature regulation. Perhaps they should. Perhaps I should!

Then life, as it inevitably does, introduced weather.

Not the kind that rolls across the Lincolnshire Wolds. The other kind. Parents become ill. Children grow up. Money occupies conversations it was never invited into. Grief arrives carrying paperwork that was never yours to begin with. Plans are rewritten. There are seasons determined to outstay their welcome. Sometimes we’ve become so busy studying the weather that we’ve forgotten to look up.

Yet constellations never really disappear. The stars remain exactly where they were. It is only our view of them that becomes obscured.

Looking back, I realise love was never really the shooting stars. It wasn’t the Alps or the comet, or the moonlit beaches. Those memories are still breathtaking, but they were never the whole sky.

I no longer notice where he begins any more than I notice where the sky ends and the horizon starts. The boundary is still there, I suppose, but after long enough your eyes stop looking for it. You simply live inside it. His joys alter the weather inside me. My grief echoes through him. We carry each other’s histories so instinctively now that remembering has become a shared occupation.

When I think about my wonderful dad, I cannot do it without hearing my husband trying not to cry before I’d even finished telling him what had happened. I remember saying, through my own tears, “Don’t cry. Joe’s standing right beside you.” It wasn’t that I didn’t want him to cry. Somehow, from two hundred miles away, I was trying to hold everybody together with nothing but my voice. My parents in London. My family in Lincolnshire. An invisible thread stretched so tightly, yet somehow it held.

That’s what thirty years gives you. Not certainty. Not perfection. Just the quiet crescence of two lives becoming one landscape.

One day, when the weather softens, we’ll build the firepit we’ve talked about for years. We’ll carry the telescope into the garden. I’ll insist that’s a shooting star. He’ll patiently tell me it’s a satellite. I’ll ignore him. We’ll drink hot chocolate with cream beneath a sidereal sky, still arguing gently about astronomy, the relevance of Shakespeare and whether the universe is governed by stories or mathematics.

Still joining the dots.

My good friend has a habit of saying this.

It has become part of the philosophy of our friendship. “Carpe diem, Claire.” Book the trip. Swim the lake. Eat the cake. Say yes to it all.

Sometimes it feels like gentle encouragement; other times it’s simply the excuse one of us needs to suggest another adventure.

For years, we both smiled, agreed with our philosophy and carried on.

Only recently have I realised she wasn’t really talking about holidays and experiences at all.

She was talking about stories. Our stories.

Let me explain.

As children, our parents read us stories before we were old enough to read them ourselves. We learnt, almost by accident, that books could open doors to worlds we’d never seen, that ordinary wardrobes might conceal extraordinary places and that somewhere beyond our own lives there were castles, forests, pirates, dragons and adventures waiting to be discovered.

Then we grew into teenagers and, if you were anything like me, films became another language entirely. I could recite whole scenes from The Goonies, Girls Just Want to Have Fun, Dirty Dancing and The Karate Kid with alarming accuracy. We borrowed their dialogue, copied their heroes and quietly carried their worlds into our own.

Eventually something rather lovely happens. We begin travelling to the places those stories first introduced us to. My parents adored Heartbeat, so one family holiday we found ourselves wandering around Goathland, forever known to us as Aidensfield (I wonder if that’s where my sister found the name for her middle child). These days I can’t think about that programme without immediately seeing that one photograph: my dad standing outside the Aidensfield Arms with my mum, my sister and me tucked safely inside his arms. I don’t remember episodes. I remember us.

I’ve never made it to Astoria, Oregon, although it has sat on our family’s life list for years because my children fell in love with The Goonies just as completely as I once did. Okinawa is there too, thanks to The Karate Kid. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I realised the destinations had become almost secondary. What I really treasure are the stories that quietly attached themselves to them. I have photographs of all three of my children attempting Miyagi’s famous crane kick on the arm of our sofa, each utterly convinced they were Daniel LaRusso. One day, long after they’ve scattered into lives and homes of their own, I’ll watch The Goonies again and I won’t really be watching the film at all. I’ll be remembering my children. I’ll hear them shouting the lines before the actors do, singing the songs louder than the television, “Nothing’s gonna ever keep you down
You’re the best around” and I’ll see those ridiculous karate poses balanced precariously on the arm of the sofa. The film will simply be the key that unlocks the memory.

That’s what stories have been doing all along. They refuse to stay where they’re put. They escape the page. They climb down from the cinema screen. They attach themselves to the people we love until we can no longer separate one from the other. They become photographs, family jokes, favourite places, annual pilgrimages and memories that quietly shape who we become. Then, almost without noticing, we realise we are no longer simply collecting stories.

We are living them. We are becoming the story.

Is that what my friend means?

“We’ve got to live now.”

Perhaps that is why Scotland has always called to me in a way that few other places have. Not simply because it is beautiful, although it is. Plenty of places are beautiful. To me Scotland feels as though every hill can whisper, every loch has a legend, every ruined castle has a ghost, every glen remembers a battle and every standing stone predates memory itself. The landscape doesn’t merely contain stories; it seems to expect them. You arrive believing you’re following someone else’s story, only to discover Scotland has quietly begun writing one for you.

For years I assumed my fascination was simply literary. As an English teacher, how could I not be drawn towards Macbeth, Mary Queen of Scots, the Jacobites, Braveheart, Highlander, folklore, poetry and myth? Somewhere along the way, fiction had quietly become geography. Taleography had crept into my life so gently that I hadn’t noticed when books became maps and stories became destinations. I think it had been happening for much longer than I realised.

I’ve taught Macbeth to hundreds of students over the years, and every single class has somehow revealed something I’d never noticed before. That’s the wonderful thing about great stories; they refuse to stay still. They grow as we grow. Shakespeare wrote the play four hundred years ago, yet every September a new group of teenagers quietly persuades me to read it differently.

Other stories have attached themselves to people rather than places.

Wuthering Heights will never simply be Emily Brontë’s novel to me. It will always be my sister. We spent entire afternoons acting it out together, arguing over who would get to be Cathy and who would be relegated to narrating as Nelly Dean. She usually won. Even now, I can’t think of the Yorkshire moors without thinking of her.

It works the other way too. Some stories quietly close doors rather than opening them. I never really gave The Da Vinci Code a fair chance. I stumbled at the opening, put it down and never picked it up again. Now, whenever anyone mentions it, I still feel an irrational little shudder, made slightly worse by knowing parts of the film were shot in Lincoln Cathedral, just a few miles from where I live. Isn’t it strange how quickly stories can colour the places around us, whether we embrace them or quietly keep our distance?

For me, that is the magic of taleography. Stories don’t simply persuade us to visit places. They shape the way we feel about them long before we ever arrive.

So, this spring just gone, my husband and I headed north and packed remarkably little more than a rough destination. We had booked two places to stay, arranged a couple of nights with dear friends who had recently chosen Elgin for the next chapter of their lives and left everything else deliciously undecided. Looking back, I described the holiday as having no itinerary at all.

That wasn’t true.

We simply weren’t following Google Maps.

We were following stories.

Before we’d even crossed into Scotland, Robin Hood had already diverted us to Hadrian’s Wall. Ever since I first watched Kevin Costner scramble down the rocky slope and disappear beneath the branches of the Sycamore Gap tree, I had wanted to stand beneath it myself.

When that magnificent sycamore was deliberately felled, I felt exactly as much of the country seemed to feel: a curious mixture of sadness, disbelief and utter bafflement. What did anyone imagine they had gained by trying to destroy something that had spent centuries quietly giving people joy? It seemed such an extraordinary act of vandalism against something that had asked for nothing and offered so much.

By the time we arrived, the tree itself had gone.

And yet...

It hadn’t.

Our little inn had embraced it entirely. The staff wore T-shirts embroidered with Remember the Gap. The bar served a beer named after it. Complete strangers spoke about it as though they were discussing an old friend. The tree had become more than timber long before someone arrived with a chainsaw. It had become part of the landscape’s memory.

Standing there, I realised something rather unexpected. I wasn’t looking at an empty space. I was looking at an absence so full of stories that my imagination instinctively replaced the branches. I could almost see them stretching across the dip in the landscape, just as surely as everyone else standing there seemed to be able to.

Perhaps that’s what happens when a place becomes woven into enough lives.

The tree had gone.

The story hadn’t.

That evening, after dinner, we had curled up to watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Rather appropriately, I fell asleep shortly after the famous scene beneath the sycamore, wondering later whether perhaps some places are best experienced beneath open skies than on television screens.

The following morning, we crossed into Scotland through Gretna Green, wandered around the old blacksmith’s forge, briefly considered renewing our vows and climbed back into the car. I asked whether he wanted the quickest route to Loch Ness or the scenic one.

His answer came without hesitation.

“Are we in a rush?”

I have discovered there are some questions that quietly become philosophies too.

So, we turned towards Loch Lomond instead, wandered north through Glencoe beneath skies that seemed incapable of settling on a single mood and happily surrendered the day to whatever caught our attention.

Before we reached the glen, my friend Mark had insisted we listen to his wonderfully bonkers fairy tale, Dance of the Goblin Pipers. It turned out to be exactly the right soundtrack. Somewhere between folklore, mist and mountain silence, Scotland has an extraordinary ability to make even the most improbable stories feel as though they might be true if only you looked away for a moment.

Glencoe itself carries stories far older and far sadder than fairy tales though. Stories that refuse to stay in the past. Shakespeare gave us witches on lonely moors, but the glen remembers something altogether more haunting. Before I visited, I knew it mostly as one of the most dramatic landscapes in Scotland, all brooding mountains, shifting skies and the sort of scenery that makes you feel you ought to be wearing a cloak. What I’ve learnt since then is that, in 1692, the MacDonalds Clan welcomed government soldiers into their homes, fed them, shared their fires and gave them beds, only for those same guests to turn on them before dawn. The Scots call it murder under trust, which might be one of the most chilling phrases I have ever heard. Suddenly the glen felt different to me: beautiful still, breathtaking even, but carrying the kind of silence that only places with dark memories seem able to hold. In Scotland, history is told like folklore and folklore is remembered like history.

Perhaps that is what I love most about Scotland. It never asks you to separate fact from fiction. Macbeth, Braveheart, Highlander, the Loch Ness Monster, monks, kings, standing stones, clan histories and bedtime stories all seem equally at home in the landscape.

The following morning, we wandered through the ruins of Urquhart Castle before making our way down to the shores of Loch Ness. We stood there, hushstruck, as the morning mist slowly lifted from the water, scanning its inky surface with the quiet optimism of people who know perfectly well they are unlikely to spot a prehistoric monster, yet secretly hope to all the same. Some stories are simply too enchanting not to believe in for a little while.

From there, we followed the River Ness into Inverness itself, where the wooded islands introduced us to a giant log sporting what looked remarkably like a tartan beret and a wonderfully expressive face. Naturally, we christened him “Log Ness” and laughed with the sort of unrestrained delight reserved for people who know they are being completely ridiculous and couldn’t care less.

Later, we found ourselves among the ancient standing stones of Clava Cairns, four thousand years of human stories quietly weathering the Highland sky. I couldn’t help wondering how many generations had stood exactly where we were standing, looking towards the same hills, carrying their own hopes, fears and unanswered questions. Cawdor Castle, however, would have to wait for another visit. Macbeth, it seemed, wasn’t quite ready to reveal himself. Perhaps every good story knows when to leave a chapter still unread.

By then I had begun to suspect that taleography wasn’t simply drawing me towards stories.

It was inviting me to become one.

After decades spent teaching literature, collecting other people’s words and following stories across maps, I have finally found myself writing one too. Not because I imagine my life extraordinary, but because I have come to understand that every ordinary life becomes extraordinary to the people who remember it.

I’d say memoir isn’t about looking backwards at all. I’d say it’s simply another way of saying, “We’ve got to live now.” Because today’s ordinary moments have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s favourite stories.

Eventually we arrived in Elgin, where our migrating friends have chosen for the next chapter of their lives. We spent two glorious evenings drinking wine and Glen Moray whisky. We walked breathtaking beaches, climbing the sand dunes at Lossiemouth like overgrown children. At which point my crazy friend laughed at me and said the words that have become the motto of our friendship: “We’ve got to live now.” We explored the ruins of Duffus Castle, wandered the coastal path from Hopeman to Primrose Bay and, in a moment of optimistic balance after perhaps one dram too many, searched for enlightenment at Pluscarden Abbey.

They were the sort of days where nobody looks at the time.

Somewhere between laughter, living now and another whisky, it struck me that our conversations had changed somewhat. Twenty years ago, we would have talked about babies, sleepless nights, balls and dresses, house renovation and impossible mortgages. Now we found ourselves discussing ageing parents, children stepping into adulthood, retirement, health, downsizing, writing, dreams we still hoped to fulfil and the peculiar awareness that time, once seemingly endless, had become something infinitely more precious.

Our children, after all, are living through what I have come to think of as The Great Scattering. One chapter closes almost imperceptibly before another begins. They leave for universities, military careers and cities. We spend decades gathering them close only to realise that loving them well eventually means encouraging them to leave.

Meanwhile, we begin our own scattering too. Friends choose Scotland. Parents choose smaller homes. Some of us finally choose the blank page we’d been talking about for years. Somehow, in middle age, everybody seems to be setting off on different stories.

A few short weeks after we returned home from Scotland, life reminded us just how fragile every new chapter really is. Our friend suffered a major heart attack at just forty-eight years old. Miraculously, he survived and continues to recover while doctors search for answers. On that very same day I herniated a disc in my neck, turning my own life upside down for months, and together we learnt that another mutual friend had died.

None of us saw any of it coming.

I’ve thought about that strange convergence of events more times than I care to admit, not because I believe the universe was sending messages, but because it stripped away one of life’s greatest illusions.

We imagine there will always be another spring, another holiday, another conversation, another scenic route.

Usually there is.

Until, one day, there isn’t.

That’s when I finally understood what my friend had been trying to tell me all these years.

“We’ve got to live now.”

Not extravagantly or recklessly.

Simply now.

Take the scenic route. Visit the castle because Shakespeare once borrowed its name. Stand beside a tree that no longer exists because stories can outlive wood.

Climb the sand dunes. Drink the whisky and listen to the stories that went into making it. Have the hard conversation that gets postponed until life becomes less busy. It won’t.

Since returning home, my thoughts have wandered north more often than seems entirely reasonable. There are still castles waiting, stories I haven’t followed, beaches I long to revisit and friends sitting around a table in Elgin who have quietly become part of my own story.

My heart soulsighs for those Scottish stories now. The ancient ones I travelled north to find and the new ones that quietly followed me home. I thought I was following centuries of history, folklore and fiction. I hadn’t realised they would lead me towards something altogether more precious. Scotland reminded me that I was still becoming part of my own story.

One day, this essay too will be just a story.

“We’ve got to live now.”

If this essay resonated with you, you might also enjoy my earlier essay, Faultline, which explores another moment when life quietly divided into before and after.

This birthday, I received so many beautiful cards.

Each carried a different inscription. Some contained a brief note signed with tons of love. Others held longer, heartfelt messages. The kind that makes you stop what you’re doing and read them twice. Sometimes thrice.

Some will inevitably end up balanced on windowsills and mantelpieces long after the cake has been eaten and the candles blown out. They are the ones that contain a message that makes us feel truly seen.

I’ve always been a stationery person.

As a child, WHSmith was my equivalent of Disneyland. I could spend hours either in the book section or standing in front of shelves of notebooks, searching for different coloured inks or a pad small enough to fit in my pocket.

While other children spent their pocket money on sweets, I was trying to decide whether I needed another notebook.

I always did.

I loved pens. The smell of freshly printed paper. Stickers. Bookmark tassels. Packs of highlighters and coloured gel pens that promised to transform my handwriting into something elegant and mysterious. I spent far too long examining diaries, address books and Filofaxes.

Especially Filofaxes.

If you grew up in the 1980s, you’ll understand.

A Filofax wasn’t just a diary. It was a lifestyle. A declaration of intent. Proof that you were the sort of person who had important things to write down and somewhere sensible to keep them.

I desperately wanted one.

Unfortunately, my budget was more “single biro and a soap shaped rubber” than luxury personal organiser.

So, I would stand there in WHSmith turning the pages, admiring the little tabs and see-through pockets as though I were browsing houses I couldn’t afford.

The first and only Filofax I ever owned was bought for me by my gorgeous husband because he knew how long I’d wanted one. I was in my early twenties by then. There was just something magical about them. The little tabs. The crisp pages. The infills. The possibility that if I owned the right Filofax, I might finally become the sort of organised person who remembered birthdays, completed tasks on time and generally had her life together.

Dear Substacker, I did not.

Still, that never stopped me looking.

These days everyone seems to organise themselves on their phones. I suspect half the children I teach have never owned an address book and would regard a Filofax with the same anthropological curiosity normally reserved for Stonehenge. But I loved anything that could help me organise my life, inform me, or give shape to the thoughts rattling around inside my head.

And believe me, there were a lot of thoughts to organise.

I was never particularly good at expressing myself aloud when I was younger.

I think I was an awkward child who spent far more time living in my imagination than in the real world. I would potterdrift through entire afternoons. Setting out with one clear task in mind, that is, to make rose petal perfume, of course, only to find myself following Dad around the garden collecting pebbles, building stories in the treehouse, naming imaginary animals, and wandering down entirely different paths while remaining convinced I was being productive. I was forever collecting pebbles, feathers, leaves, even snails! Little treasures with no obvious value beyond the fact they had somehow captured my attention.

Then there were my stories.

When I was about nine, my parents bought me a typewriter that became one of my most treasured possessions. It was gloriously 1980s, grey and pink, perfectly matched to my bedroom, and I adored it. Had I also owned a Filofax, I would have considered myself unstoppable.

In my imagination, I wasn’t just a child with a typewriter. I was the leading lady in The Secret of My Success. The sort of sophisticated young woman who strode purposefully through New York with a Filofax tucked under one arm, important meetings to attend, colour-coded plans to execute and, naturally, Michael J. Fox waiting to fall hopelessly in love with me.

In reality, I was nine years old, wearing NHS glasses, covered in grass stains, collecting feathers and snails, and attempting to manufacture perfume from rose petals in the garden.

Thankfully, reality never seemed to spoil the fantasy.

I wish I knew where that typewriter was now.

I would often wake at five o’clock in the morning with stories still tumbling out of my dreams, convinced that if I didn’t write them down immediately, they would disappear forever.

So, I’d creep out of bed and start typing.

The problem was that my beloved typewriter sounded less like a literary tool and more like industrial roadworks. I used to stuff towels under my bedroom door in a largely unsuccessful attempt to muffle the clattering keys before they woke the entire household.

Still, I kept writing.

Story after story after story.

Unsurprisingly, like the pebbles and feathers, I kept the stories too. I still have them. Looking back, I think I was doing then what I still do now. Collecting words. Keeping them safe.

Words seem to matter to me so very much. Not just the words in books. The words people leave behind. The words tucked inside birthday cards. The messages sent at exactly the right moment. The notes that arrive unexpectedly and somehow say: “I know it’s been hard and I’m right here.” Or: “I was thinking about you and wanted you to know.” Genuine real words that have come from the heart and are not just a generic, “Dear Claire… Lots of love”.

A few years ago, someone told me they thought buying cards was a waste of money. I remember feeling oddly bereft. Not because cards aren’t expensive. That goes without saying. My Nanna had spent years proving that love could be delivered very economically indeed. She recycled hers with admirable enthusiasm. When I was away at boarding school, a Christmas card featuring a robin on a red postbox might reappear in the middle of May – the greeting side sliced off – so it was more like a postcard. A birthday card decorated with flowers could arrive months after my birthday for no reason whatsoever except that she thought it was pretty. Love, in her view, didn’t need fresh stationery.

No, what unsettled me was the feeling that perhaps we weren’t really talking about cards at all. We were talking about the small rituals of remembering one another. The tiny ways we say, I thought of you. That conversation has always stayed with me. Some people leave your life without explanation. Not through argument or catastrophe. They simply drift away, taking their reasons with them. The relationship becomes one of those unanswered letters that never quite reaches its destination.

I still find myself wondering about it sometimes. I suppose some people would rather bury a relationship than have the difficult conversation that might save it. But I feel there is little point standing at a closed gate waiting for someone to explain why they shut it. As my Nanna would always say, “There’s nawt as queer as folk, Claire.”

What the conversation did give me, however, was an unexpected insight. When she said buying cards was a waste of money, I realised we weren’t really talking about cards.

We were talking about love.

I’ve become fascinated by the idea that people express love in completely different languages. I’m, without doubt, a ‘Words of Affirmation’ person. You could buy me diamonds and I’d probably lose them.

In fact, I have.

More than once.

Thankfully, my husband is incredibly forgiving!

But tell me I look beautiful, and I’ll wear the same outfit over and over to remember that feeling. Write me a heartfelt note and I’ll keep it for twenty years. Possibly longer. In fact, I have an entire box filled with old cards and letters that I cannot bring myself to throw away.

I call it wordkeeping.

The practice of saving words because somewhere inside them lives a fragment of the person who wrote them. Tiny paper fossils. Evidence that someone paused in the middle of their own busy life and thought of you.

I still have my Nanna’s cards with her immaculate handwriting marching neatly across the page. I still have the blue aerogrammes my cousin posted to me from all over the world while on detachment. Notes from Mum. Notes from Dad. Notes from my brother (spider-writing). My sister (lefty, but beautiful). Cards from old friends and new ones.

Thank goodness for boarding school and my relentless campaign to make everybody write to me. While other children waited hopefully for the post, I received five or six letters a week. It made me look positively popular when the mail arrived.

Again, dear Midlifers, I was not.

But I kept every one.

In fact, once I started collecting words, I seem to have become incapable of throwing any of them away.

I even kept the children’s letters to Father Christmas. Hilarious reading now. I recall my daughter, at the age of eight, asking to be able to reach the monkey bars at school, to have long hair and to be thirteen. A gift only the real Santa could magic. My youngest, at six, requested a diamond seal and a million pounds. Ambitious, but refreshingly straightforward.

Priceless.

Looking at those notes now, I don’t find myself wondering whether Father Christmas delivered. I find myself remembering the children who wrote them. The little girl desperate to be taller. She is not! The little boy who believed a diamond seal and a million pounds were entirely reasonable requests. Without doubt!

I just want to kiss their little dimpled, chocolate-covered faces all over again.

I still read them all occasionally, studying the handwriting. The loops and flourishes. The hurried scribbles. The words crossed out and rewritten. The way a person’s personality somehow leaks onto a page. The strange and beautiful experience of scriptide: the way a person’s presence washes back to shore through words they once wrote; a tide of memory carried through handwriting, letters, cards and notes. Perhaps only elderbloom can teach us this. That there comes a season when we stop measuring life by what we accumulate and begin recognising what has quietly shaped us all along.

For me, memory is not stored only in photographs. It lives in handwriting and folded paper. In the colour of ink. In the shape of my mum’s capital E when she signs her name and my dad’s exaggerated M.

My sister, on the other hand, speaks an entirely different language of love. Her language is ‘Quality Time’. She may (will) forget to send a card. I can almost guarantee it. She may forget the date altogether. Or simply be so busy living life (as she should) that dates slip quietly past. But when I see her, I will have her complete attention. Long walks through woods talking. Hours sitting in a pub over wine and nibbles talking. Lying awake side-by-side talking. If my world fell apart, she’d be in the car before I’d finished explaining why.

My mum’s language of love is ‘Acts of Service’. She won’t necessarily write you a three-page letter telling you she loves you. She’ll peel the potatoes. Clean the kitchen. Iron the laundry. Fold the laundry. Yuck. Which, frankly, is love in its purest and most mysterious form because I hate folding laundry.

My husband’s love language is (surprise!) ‘Physical Touch’. Which, according to Leanne Morgan, appears to be the love language of most husbands! Meanwhile, I’m standing there waving a birthday card saying, “Yes, but did you write me a paragraph?”

Here lies the problem.

Maybe we spend so much of our lives looking for love in our own language that we miss it when it arrives speaking someone else’s.

Love, it seems, is remarkably creative.

Sometimes it arrives in a bouquet (no lilies please - nobody’s died). Sometimes it arrives as a lasagne. Sometimes it arrives in a hug that’s slightly too tight and lasts slightly too long. Sometimes it arrives as someone on your doorstep with a bottle of wine and time.

Sometimes it arrives in words.

Beautiful ordinary words.

The kind that sits on a mantelpiece long after a birthday has passed.

The kind that reminds us we are known and seen.

The kind worth wordkeeping.

If you, dear reader, are a wordkeeper too, perhaps you’ll understand exactly what I mean. Written words become, in time, little paper proof that we were loved.

Betweening at Solstice

The Last Photograph Before the Longest Day

As the year leans into its longest breath, 
where light gathers
along hedgerows,
rests on moss-covered stone, and
lingers in the lush evening air
as though reluctant to leave,

I inhale deeply too. 

I am transient somehow.
Finding myself suspended in time.

As somewhere beyond the horizon,
I know the light is already loosening its grip,
giving itself back to 
darkness.

I have always found something 
heartbreaking about that.

The brightest day of the year arrives 
cradling an ending.

Many celebrate, as they should.
The solstice.

But I have stood on this
threshold for many years, 
carrying this ache.

One hand is full of birthdays.
The other full of ghosts.

I was a child who counted the candles.
I am now the woman who counts the years.

Their names I still carry and always will, 
like smooth stones in my pocket.

Tonight, the blackbird still sings
from the hawthorn.

The light stretches itself
across the fields.

Somewhere, someone is laughing.
Somewhere, someone is missed.

And yet both these things are true.

The longest day
contains the first hint of night.

The deepest grief
still somehow makes room for joy.

So I stand here, not choosing either.

I am just betweening.

Grateful for the light.
Grateful for the shadows.  
Grateful for the past and the present.   

Grateful that love lingers in both.

By Claire Kinton ©

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The older I get, the more sympathetic I am becoming towards witches.

This is not a sentence I expected to write. Believe me, I had a fear and a recurring dream about the Wicked Witch of the West for decades.

As a child, like all of us, I knew who the villains were. The witch. She wanted to eat Hansel and Gretel. The Queen wanted Snow White’s beauty. Maleficent wanted Sleeping Beauty dead out of petty vengeance for being excluded from the baby’s christening.

Simple.

The witches were evil.

Then I grew up.

Now I find myself asking some awkward questions. Why was the witch in Hansel and Gretel living alone in the woods? What happened to the stepmother before she became a stepmother? Why was the Queen so terrified of ageing? Why, in stories throughout history, have women so often carried the blame for everything? Eve. Pandora. Lady Macbeth. The Weird Sisters. The Stepmother. The Godmother. The Queen.

Repeatedly, the warning arrives wearing a skirt.

As children, we read fairytales from the perspective of the young. We are Hansel and Gretel. Snow White. Aurora. Little Red Riding Hood. We are the innocent. The vulnerable. The lost.

Yet age has a curious habit of shifting our perspective.

One day you realise you are no longer identifying with the princess or the child. You are identifying with the woman standing outside the castle walls.

Is this midlife?

Take Maleficent. Long before Hollywood attempted to redeem her, she was simply the dark fairy who arrived uninvited. As a child, that seemed entirely reasonable. She was not invited to the christening, so she cursed a baby.

Case closed.

As an adult, I find myself pausing at the invitation list!

There is something painfully familiar about a woman being excluded and then condemned for not responding gracefully. History is full of women who were welcome while they were useful, beautiful, fertile, accommodating or silent. Once they became inconvenient, difficult or outspoken, they found themselves standing outside the celebration looking in.

Of course, Maleficent’s response is monstrous. But the grief beneath it feels oddly recognisable. Rejection and humiliation. The sting of being deliberately overlooked.

Fairytales, it seems, are full of women whose greatest crime was refusing to disappear quietly.

Perhaps that is why so many women begin to understand these characters in midlife. There comes a point when you stop apologising for taking up space. You stop smoothing every rough edge to make other people comfortable. You stop volunteering to disappear. Society often celebrates this confidence in young men and finds it considerably less charming in older women.

Fairytales rarely begin with magic. They begin with bereavement, famine, abandonment and fear. A mother dies. A father remarries. A family cannot afford to eat. A child is sent into the woods. Looking back, it is astonishing that we ever classified these stories as suitable bedtime entertainment or that indeed the children ever slept. Modern parents agonise over whether Peppa Pig models healthy friendships while generations of children cheerfully drifted off to sleep listening to stories involving attempted murder, child abandonment, cannibalism and curses.

Hansel and Gretel begins with parents discussing which child should be sacrificed first, to solve a cost-of-living crisis.

Snow White features an assassination attempt and a poisoned apple.

Sleeping Beauty opens with an infant receiving a death sentence.

Disney added birds and songs. The original storytellers offered trauma.

The witch may be terrifying, but she is never the first tragedy in the story. She merely arrives after the tragedy has already happened.

Hansel and Gretel frightened me most of all. The gingerbread house. The giant oven. The bones. The witch’s hunger. Now I find myself noticing something else. The adults in this story were all starving, desperate and terrified. Why did the parents abandon those children? Why was it the stepmother who insisted they leave? As a child, I never wondered who she was.

Now I do.

Maybe she had once watched younger brothers and sisters slowly starve through a brutal winter. Perhaps she knew exactly what hunger looked like because she had already buried people she loved because of it. Maybe she married a grieving widower not out of wicked ambition but because, in a world where a woman alone was vulnerable, marriage offered survival, security and shelter. Being a lone woman was dangerous. She inherited two frightened children and a cupboard that grew emptier every day.

None of this excuses her. Hansel and Gretel should never have been abandoned.

But adulthood has taught me that desperation has a biography. Every wound has an origin story. Every bitterness was once a disappointment. Every hard edge was shaped by something that pressed against it for too long.

Children are interested in monsters.

Age makes us curious about the forest that made them.

The path rarely begins in darkness. More often it begins with grief, loneliness, fear or a winter that seemed determined never to end. People rarely become monstrous all at once. They become frightened first.

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The witch living in a house made from sweets is fantasy. Poverty is real. So, I claim that hunger was always the real villain.

The same thing happens when I revisit Snow White. The story is not really about a beautiful, red but poisoned apple. It is about beauty and ageing.

The Queen is not simply vain. She is terrified.

Every morning she stands before a mirror that informs her that her value is depreciating. Sounds ridiculous, I know. Until we notice that modern women receive exactly the same message. Entire industries exist to persuade women that ageing is a problem requiring immediate intervention. Wrinkles must be softened. Grey hair concealed. Necks tightened. Eyelids lifted. Faces frozen in time. Botox appointments booked. We are told to age naturally and fight ageing simultaneously.

Men apparently become distinguished.

Women are congratulated for ‘still looking good for their age’.

Somewhere between anti-ageing creams, celebrity transformations and magazine headlines about women “letting themselves go”, the Queen stops feeling like a fairytale villain and starts looking like an exaggerated version of a fear many women quietly carry.

The fear of becoming invisible.

The fear of walking into a room and no longer being seen.

The fear that youth was the ticket and someone has quietly torn it up.

We see it everywhere. The husband who leaves his fifty-year-old wife for a woman half her age and is congratulated for rediscovering himself. The actress who ages naturally and finds herself discussed as though she has committed an act of negligence. The magazine covers that praise women for “defying age” as though ageing itself were a moral failure.

Women receive contradictory instructions from the moment they reach adulthood. Stay youthful, but do not try too hard. Grow older gracefully, but not visibly. Accept yourself, but improve yourself. Be confident, but not threatening.

No wonder the Queen keeps returning to the mirror.

Of course, her actions are monstrous. But the fear beneath them is recognisably human.

Perhaps this is why witches continue to fascinate us. Historically, women who lived outside society’s expectations were viewed with suspicion. I have visited Salem. I have taught Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’. Again and again the same pattern emerges. Older women. Widows. Women who owned property. Women who inherited land. Women who lived alone. Healers, the women who knew things. Women who could not easily be controlled.

The witch was a remarkably useful invention.

She explained bad harvests, disease, misfortune and death. Most importantly, she explained away women who threatened established power. Label her dangerous and her independence becomes evidence. Label her a witch and her property can be reclaimed. Label her a witch and her voice can be dismissed. Label her a witch and patriarchy survives another day.

The line between wise woman and witch has never been particularly stable.

James I’s Daemonology offered intricate instructions for identifying witches, leading to tests so cruel and impossible that confession became inevitable. The accused were trapped before the questioning even began.

These women were considered dangerous, powerful and capable. Women who could not easily be controlled. Which leaves me asking the same question.

Why have women so often carried the blame?

Eve bites the apple.

Pandora opens the box.

The witches tempt Macbeth.

Lady Macbeth manipulates Macbeth.

The Queen poisons Snow White.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

The catastrophe arrives wearing mascara.

That inheritance still lingers. Not just in stories. In us. Today.

Somewhere deep in our nervous systems lives an ancient instruction. Be agreeable and grateful. Be small and not too powerful. Do not become too visible but do not become too much.

For centuries sons inherited land, businesses, titles and power. Daughters inherited expectations. Be helpful and accommodating. Be grateful and smile when given less and call it generosity. Women have often been expected to find value in sentiment while men received value in substance. The jewellery box. The family recipes. The photographs. The responsibility for remembering birthdays, preserving family history and carrying memory forward.

Precious things, certainly.

But often alongside an unspoken expectation that gratitude should outweigh arithmetic.

It is difficult not to notice that the stories we inherit frequently mirror the inheritances themselves. Yet there is another reason I find myself drawn to witches now.

Adulthood has taught me that people rarely arrive in the woods as villains. More often they arrive there wounded. Grieving and rejected. Lonely, hungry, frightened.

I understand the appeal of the edges now.

Not the dramatic edges of fairytales, but the quieter ones. A greenhouse full of seedlings. A dog asleep by my feet. Family close. A life that is not particularly fashionable but feels deeply rooted. There is a kind of hedgewitch contentment in living slightly outside the centre of things. Not exiled. Not excluded. Simply unconvinced that the centre is where all the magic lives.

Wonderlust, it appears, is not the desire to escape life but the desire to be hushstruck by it. The blackbird in the hedge. The scent of rain before it arrives. The first rose opening. Mint and basil mixed into my salad. The sudden appearance of lumenda after a long season of weariness; that unexpected return of energy, hope and purpose when you thought the winter might never end.

I am less interested in villains these days and more interested in wounds.

What happened to them before the story began? Who excluded them? Who ignored them? Who taught them they were valuable only while they were young, beautiful, obedient or useful?

As an adult, I am less certain that the older women in these fairytales are evil.

Experience has not blurred my sense of right and wrong. It has simply made me more curious. The gift of growing older is not that we stop believing in fairytales. It is that we finally see them from a different perspective. Age knows that very few people begin their lives as villains. Most arrive in the woods carrying grief, rejection, disappointment and wounds nobody else can see.

As children, we fear the witch.

As adults, we begin to wonder what happened to the witch.

As midlife women, we occasionally catch our own reflection in the lake and realise, with some surprise, that we have been standing at the edge of the forest for quite some time.

Not lost or cursed. Certainly not waiting to be rescued!

Simply changed.

We are women who have survived. We have weathered winters and know things now. We are women who no longer need permission.

The old stories warned us about becoming the witch.

What they forgot to mention is that sometimes she is the wisest woman in the tale. Brierbound no doubt but rooted rather than trapped. Standing at the threshold of the woods with mud on her boots, hope in her pocket and lumenda in her heart, understanding that the magic was never in the castle to begin with.

The old stories were completely wrong about happily ever after.

Real life, with all its losses, disappointments, injustices and tiny peagriefs, carries on.

But we are no longer waiting to be rescued.

Instead,

We have become the witch.

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I wrote both of my books, Dead Game and Waiting Game, while meandering and going nowhere.

Their chapters arrived while feeding newborns in the small hours, pushing prams along country lanes, walking dogs through woods, running trails while training for marathons and taking the long way home.

I was not at a desk or staring at a screen. It was not through discipline or productivity or carefully colour-coded plans with post it notes leading to the next plot twist. The words arrived while I was moving. Or more accurately, while I was wandering.

For years I thought this was simply how my mind worked.

Only recently have I begun to suspect there might be something more to it.

Somewhere along the way, I started to notice that walking in nature does something to the mind. There is a state I sometimes drift into that lives somewhere between wakefulness and dreaming. It is beyond daydreaming.

When I was a child, I could find it at will.

Lying in bed at dawn, I could hover somewhere between asleep and awake. My body was in bed, but my mind was untethered.

I could continue dreams while semiconscious. Guide them and manipulate them. Move from room to room in the house. Visit my sister’s bedroom. My parents’. I remember trying to wake them. It never worked.

I could hold conversations. Though never with anyone fully awake. They were distant conversations, yet somehow real. Sometimes I would sit with my Nanna, who had passed away, holding her hand as naturally as if she were still beside me. We didn’t speak. There was no need.

Before you decide I have entirely lost my mind, let me assure you I am making no claims about the supernatural.

Only this: Young children seem to possess a natural ability to step sideways into imagination. They wander effortlessly between reality and possibility. Cardboard boxes become a castle. A stick becomes a sword. A bedroom becomes an entire universe.

You get the picture.

When I wrote Saving Boys from Neverland, I was writing about this very thing. The importance of imagination and the tragedy of growing up too quickly. But most importantly, the quiet danger of a world that values productivity more highly than wonder. Academics above arts. Outcomes above curiosity. Answers above questions.

Somewhere along the way, many of us stop wandering. We stop daydreaming or even being bored. We stop allowing our minds the empty spaces they need to create something new.

I cannot enter that childhood state so easily now. Life is too loud. I have lessons to teach. Young adults to worry about.

Paperwork!

Families to navigate. Parents to grieve. Slipped discs to negotiate.

Yet every now and then, while walking, I find myself approaching Farwake’s edges once more.

I call it farwaking.

My body keeps moving. One foot in front of the other. They know what they are doing. Yet the mind wanders freely through; memory, imagination and possibility. The past, present and future can all occupy the same space.

Ideas arrive uninvited. Stories unfold. Problems can be solved.

Poems emerge. An essay appears. A novel chapter begins speaking before I have found a pen. The mind meanders just as the body does. Some of my best ideas have arrived while I was supposedly doing nothing at all.

Years ago, I attended a meditation group that met in a garden. Nothing elaborate. Birdsong. Leaves moving in the breeze. The distant hum of ordinary life.

I remember sitting there, lotus-posed, eyes gently closed, lost in the inner spiral of my mind, as scenes from Waiting Game appeared with alarming clarity.

Characters would speak.

Conversations unfolded.

Entire chapters unfurled fully formed.

I would leave those sessions desperate to get home, charging across the Wolds before the words disappeared. As a serious writer, I eventually learned to keep a notebook and pen in the car for such emergencies.

That meditation experience felt strangely familiar. It was the same sensation I remembered from childhood and the same feeling I encounter while walking. It is as though there exists a place beyond striving where creativity waits patiently for us to slow down enough to hear it.

Perhaps that is why I have always loved taking the scenic route. A horse standing motionless in a field can occupy me for twenty minutes. Not because the horse is doing anything remarkable. Quite the opposite. The horse simply is. Meanwhile my mind has wandered through childhood memories, riding bareback on the wild beaches of Ireland, future adventures on the plains of Montana, old conversations, stories not yet written and questions I haven’t yet found the courage to ask. Though, if I’m honest, I’m getting bolder as I get older.

A gate left slightly ajar is even worse. I never see a gate without wondering where it leads. Some people may just see a gate. The wildheart in me sees adventure. Where does it lead? Who lives down there? Is there a stream? Questions are so much more interesting than the answers because they keep the gate open.

There is a fragment of me forever tempted by the path disappearing into trees.

The road not taken.

The possibility that something wonderful might be waiting just around the next bend.

Some of my most important thinking has happened on the flatlands of Lincolnshire. Corn fields and footpaths. Hedgerows bursting with blackberries and church spires rising unexpectedly from the horizon. I used to walk for miles with holes in my trainers (they were desperate times). I lost a trainer once in the mud and walked home with one shoe on. The spires guiding me. One after another. Sometimes I would stop and count them.

Seven.

Eight.

Maybe more.

They scattered across the landscape like compass points.

I remember wondering: Which one is mine?

I never really meant the church. I meant the direction. The calling. The place I belonged. The person I was becoming.

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Years later, when my dad was dying, my sister and I also walked. I think we would have run and walked and talked forever, but when Dad was dying walking became essential.

No, essential doesn’t even come close to explaining it.

We needed to escape.

We needed movement.

We needed somewhere for all that fear to go.

People talk about grief as though it is something that just simply arrives after death and you’ll get through it. In my experience it arrived far earlier. It pulls up a chair at the breakfast table. It comes on walks with you. It waits in hospital corridors and the bastard rides all the way home up the A1 with you in the passenger seat.

I must have said goodbye to my dad a thousand times over that eighteen months.

There is no handbook. Even the doctors, nurses, and carers, as wonderful as they were, didn’t know what to do. None of us knew how to save Dad. Nor did we know how to save Mum from what was coming.

It went on for months.

More than a year.

So, my sister and I walked.

Sometimes together and sometimes alone and if we were alone, we would be on the phone to one another.

We walked while making panicked phone calls. We walked through tears and through silence. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we simply listened to one another breathe at the end of the phone.

We pounded pavements and dells, fell in flooded dykes and listened to music while calling surgeries. We booked medical appointments and blood tests whilst being bitten by horseflies.

The strange thing is that I remember very little of what we said. Most of the time we went round and round in circles, never able to come to any resolution, of course.

And perhaps that is where it happened: the drifting.

A kind of farwaking.

Not escape exactly. Not absence. Something stranger than that. As though the mind, unable to fix anything practical, quietly stepped sideways into a softer version of reality where it was possible to breathe again.

We would still be walking. Still talking. Still trying to hold everything together.

But another part of us had already slipped away into hedgerows and sky.

I remember butterflies and blackbirds erupting from hedgerows. I remember a skylark hanging above a field as though gravity had temporarily forgotten about it. I remember thinking how extraordinary it was that the world could remain so heartbreakingly beautiful while ours was falling apart.

Nothing ever really prepares you for a parent dying so slowly. We had no idea what we were doing. We winged it all the way.

Sitting still was mostly impossible. But it was the one thing a bedside requires you to do.

Sit.

The walking carried us when words and answers could not.

Grief, I’ve come to believe, has a way of thistling us. Not immediately. Not while it is breaking us apart.

Later.

When we realise we survived. When we discover we can still laugh. Still wonder. Still be moved by beauty. We became stronger without becoming hard because those walks saved us. The impossible greenness of grass after rain and the smell of nettles in the morning air verdantised us. We returned to Mum and Dad more ourselves, able to efficiently move from one obligation to the next. We were physically tired, yes, but somehow spiritually calmer and greener.

This autumn, if my neck allows it, I will walk part of the Camino de Santiago with a dear friend. People often assume pilgrimage is about religion. For some, it undoubtedly is. For me, I am not entirely sure what it is about.

Depending on the day, I might describe myself as a spiritual humanist, a hopeful agnostic, a hedge-witch with pebbles in her pockets, who talks to plants, greets robins and occasionally suspects the universe is trying to tell her something.

What I do know is this: I want to walk and my friend wants to walk too.

Not answers. Not solutions. Just space.

Space to think. Space to breathe.

Space for grief. Space for gratitude.

Perhaps that is what pilgrimage has always offered. Not certainty. Just space.

A part of me suspects I am walking towards Spain.

Another part suspects I am walking towards a version of myself I have misplaced.

I do not think the Camino will tell me who I am. But it may help me hear myself more clearly. I hope there will be conversations and silences where all you can hear is birdsong, footsteps and laughter. I hope there will not be too many blisters but a lot of long horizons. I hope there will be moments of becoming completely hushstruck, when standing on a ridge at dawn or watching light spill across a valley. I hope there will be the feeling, however brief, that I am part of something larger than myself.

Maybe somewhere between the walking and the wondering, I will rediscover that farwaking state I knew so well as a child. The one where the world feels larger. More possible and alive. Where the world feels like somewhere I can become lost long enough to discover something unexpected.

Even now, I suspect the most important journeys are not the ones that take us somewhere new. They are the ones that bring us back to ourselves. Perhaps that is what meandering has always been.

A way of finding our way home.

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My mum said, “Blue and green should never be seen without a colour in between” often when I was growing up. It sat alongside all the other family wisdom, traditions and superstitions that drifted down through the generations. Don’t walk under ladders. Beware lone magpies. Don’t sit too close to the television. Accept that some things had always been done a certain way and were best left unquestioned. Unlike most of these warnings, however, this one never made any sense to me.

The sky is blue.

The grass is green.

Nobody seemed to have informed nature that these colours were supposed to clash.

As a child, I spent an unreasonable amount of time arguing with the saying. The more I looked around, the more evidence I found against it. Blue irises pushing through green leaves. Forget-me-nots in spring hedgerows. Summer skies hanging over green fields.

The world seemed perfectly happy with the arrangement.

Years later, I discovered there were various theories about where the saying came from. Some claimed it was an old Victorian fashion rule. Others insisted it was a sailor’s superstition. My uncle, who had spent some of his life at sea, swore it was bad luck to paint a boat’s hull green because it would disappear against the waves if it ever capsized.

I have no idea whether any of this is true.

What I do know is that my older sister took the saying deeply seriously.

I did not.

In fact, my sister took the saying so seriously that she developed a complete aversion to green.

Which is unfortunate, given that she married an Irishman and now lives in The Emerald Isle itself.

At one point, someone gifted her a stunning emerald ring.

She nearly cried.

She certainly never wore it.

I, on the other hand, appear to have rebelliously gone in the opposite direction.

Out of the three houses my husband and I have owned, each has contained an element of blue and green. However, the needy farmhouse we are now custodians of has almost certainly begun turning a verdant green.

I didn’t notice it immediately.

These things happen gradually.

One plant appears on a windowsill. Then another. A cutting arrived from a friend. A fern followed me home from the garden centre. Before long, I was no longer the keeper of a needy farmhouse but the caretaker of chlorophyll as well.

My hallway is blue and green. My mum has never commented, *phew*.

My sofas are green.

Even today my nails are green. With fresh soil beneath my fingernails from a very recent visit to the potting shed.

My kitchen currently contains two giant trees.

Not tree-like plants.

Actual trees.

They arrived, ten years ago, as modest focal points, perched neatly on occasional tables. Years later, my twisted fig resembles an overenthusiastic Labrador made entirely of leaves, constantly thirsty, taking up far more space than originally intended and growing increasingly magnificent with age. Meanwhile my rubber plant equally occupies the opposite corner of the kitchen like a particularly well-behaved lodger, who will on occasion head outside into the garden to sunbathe.

Neither can remain on a table now. They live in large tubs on the floor and rise comfortably above both mine and my husband’s hobbit heads.

I sometimes suspect they think they own the place.

The barn-conversion kitchen is flooded with sunlight for most of the day and the plants seem to adore it. Ivy spills across windowsills upstairs. Ferns unfurl themselves in quiet corners. Peace lilies stage regular protests in the music room whenever they feel neglected, thirsty or subjected to one of my husband’s extended drumming sessions. A Japanese plant, whose name I can never remember, was once pink but has apparently decided to go green.

The situation is not helped by the fact that plants now arrive by Royal Mail. Snake plants seem capable of finding their way to my front door with alarming regularity. I am never entirely sure whether I ordered them or whether they simply sensed a suitable habitat and slithered through the postal system of their own accord. Most people receive bills and birthday cards. I receive chlorophyll.

Visitors occasionally look around my increasingly greenified home and ask whether I am planning to open a garden centre.

The answer is no.

What has happened is something rather different.

Looking back, I suspect the verdantising began as an act of quiet rebellion. Not against the saying “blue and green should never be seen” itself. More against the stubborn notion that things should be done a certain way simply because they always had been. Mine is a family rich in tradition, folklore and firmly held opinions. Some charming. Some baffling. A few so old-fashioned they would not have felt entirely out of place in an episode of Downton. As a child, and if I’m honest, more as an adult, I had an awkward habit of questioning them.

If blue and green were not supposed to be seen together, why had nobody informed the planet?

The more I looked around, the more the natural world seemed a rebel like me, happily ignoring the rules. I found this deeply reassuring.

Perhaps that is why, somewhere over the years, without ever consciously deciding to do so, I appear to have verdantised my life.

My oldest resident is a money plant. Sadly, it has never made me rich.

Before she passed away, my babysitter gave the original money plant to my mum when I must have been about seven years old. Who knows how old the plant was even then? My mum still has it sitting on her bedroom windowsill.

When my husband and I bought our first house twenty-four years ago, Mum gave me a cutting. From there, ‘the triffid’ grew. My mum-in-law was the one who nicknamed it that, and the name stuck. Since then, I have spent years handing out offspring from the original plant to friends and family, which feels appropriate somehow. A botanical family tree stretching across decades and households.

When I stop and think about that, it feels extraordinary. I sometimes think this money plant knows more about my life than most people do. A part of that plant has witnessed almost my entire life. Schools. Exams. First kisses. Marriage. Mumhood. Loss. Career changes. New homes. Old homes. The people who arrived and the people who left. Through all of it, the money plant simply carried on. Another leaf. Another root. Growing steadily towards the light.

Recently, I stumbled across a study that made me smile. Researchers in Taiwan introduced large leafy plants into one classroom and left another unchanged. The students surrounded by greenery reported feeling more comfortable, more positive and more at ease in their environment. Students were absent less often and even misbehaved less.

As a teacher, none of this surprised me in the slightest.

In fact, it felt suspiciously like evidence for something I already believed.

Over the years, education has developed its own versions of “blue and green should never be seen.” One of the current ideas is that classrooms should be stripped back and kept as minimalist as possible to avoid distracting children.

I understand the reasoning.

I simply don’t entirely believe it.

Perhaps this is my awkward habit of questioning rules again.

One of my colleagues has transformed her classroom into something resembling a small conservatory. Mine has never quite reached those levels of verdancy, but I have always preferred teaching in rooms with plants. They soften a space. They make it feel inhabited rather than merely occupied.

My dad would have understood this instinctively. He loved gardening and spent countless happy hours outdoors among his plants. Long before researchers began measuring stress levels and wellbeing, gardeners already knew something science is only now catching up with.

Plants are medicine for the soul.

They focus us.

They slow us down.

They root us in the present moment.

Perhaps that is why we fill our homes with them. Why hospitals increasingly introduce gardens for inpatients. Why forest schools continue to grow in popularity. Why so many of us feel better after a walk among trees than we do after an afternoon under fluorescent city lights.

If we cannot always take children outdoors, perhaps we should be bringing more of the outdoors in. It strikes me as rather odd that we instinctively surround ourselves with plants in our homes, yet so expect children to spend their days learning in classrooms stripped of the very things that help many of us feel calm, comfortable and alive.

Perhaps that’s why I love green so much now. Not because it is fashionable. Not because it matches the furniture and certainly not because some Victorian somewhere decided it should or shouldn’t be seen beside blue. But because green has come to represent something entirely different to me.

Growth.

Resilience.

Renewal.

The quiet persistence and defiance of life continuing to grow through the cracks.

So, if I occasionally find myself surrounded by too many houseplants, green sofas and an indoor forest that appears to be staging a slow but determined takeover of my needy farmhouse: I feel that’s no bad thing.

We spend so much of the first half of our lives learning how to conform.

Learning the rules.

Learning our place.

Learning to become who we are expected to be.

And then, if we’re lucky, we spend the second half slowly making our way back to the wilderness.

Back to what is real.

Back to ourselves.

That must be why my house keeps filling with living things. Each leaf feels like a small act of rebellion against custom. A reminder to breathe. To put down deep roots. To keep growing towards the light. There is something wonderfully freeing about finally ignoring and letting go the rules and traditions that never made much sense in the first place.

That is what I hope for the next generation too. Not that they ignore rules. But that they learn to question them. Not that they dismiss wisdom. But that they learn to tell the difference between wisdom and convention. Between truth and tradition. Between customs that help us flourish and those that merely ask us to know our place. I look at my daughter and suspect she will do this far better than I ever did. The world she is growing into demands it. Perhaps that is how every generation changes direction and twists and reaches a little further towards the light.

Blue and green should never be seen?

Tell that to the English ivy overtaking my bedroom windowsill.

Tell that to my teal hallway and the oversized green-and-gold floral painting that presides over it.

Tell that to Elphaba!

The older I get, the greener and more defiant I seem to become.

And for the first time in my life, I rather like a backdrop of blue and being verdantly green.

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When I was a child in the 1980s, there was a large gold mirror hanging halfway down our staircase. A magic mirror. For years, I was convinced there was a monster behind it… watching. Not physically behind it. But there was a watcher of sorts. An observer. Big Brother quietly keeping score of what I was up to.

I never told anyone this because, even as a child, I suspected it sounded ridiculous. Yet in fairness to my younger self, I had been given quite a lot of evidence that unseen observers existed. Father Christmas was making lists. God was watching from the heavens. The face in Snow White’s mirror seemed to have an alarming amount of information. Even the Boogie Man knew when you were creeping out of bed to go for a wee! Teachers spoke to parents. Neighbours knew everybody’s business. All adults appeared to possess information they had no business knowing.

As a child of the eighties, I was largely expected to be seen and not heard, so, no questioning any of the above was ever allowed. Looking back, I realise what happens when you fill a child with stories about being watched and then hand them a vivid imagination. The result is not moral guidance.

It is seriously low-level paranoia and stealthiness.

For years I assumed I was a judged child. A child who tried desperately hard to be good. A virtuous Brownie. The sort of child who emptied the dishwasher at five o’clock in the morning (may have broken a few mugs in the process), laid the breakfast table without being asked (taking all cream off the gold-top) and she always remembered to polish her school shoes every Sunday evening.

Yet somehow, I remained convinced that I was one minor transgression away from disaster. Sooner or later, I would be discovered by Queen Grimhilde, exposed by the face in the mirror, carried off by the Wicked Witch of the West’s flying monkeys or publicly denounced by Father Christmas himself. The best I could realistically hope for was a sack of coal and a strongly worded letter about my attitude and sneaky activities.

I thought I would eventually outgrow the feeling of paranoia.

I never have.

What strikes me now is that many of us never really do.

The characters simply change, but the habit remains.

We stop worrying about God watching from the clouds and start worrying about bosses, colleagues, neighbours and strangers whose opinions carry far less authority but somehow occupy just as much space in our heads. We stop worrying about teachers and start worrying about social expectations. We stop fearing the face in the mirror and start fearing algorithms, imagined critics and invisible audiences who seem to be quietly keeping score of our lives.

The strange thing is that, despite all the worrying and paranoia, imagination was in fact doing something incredibly useful. The stories that frightened me were also teaching me. Fairy tales, myths, nursery rhymes, even Father Christmas’s infamous list of good and bad behaviour gave us a way of exploring right and wrong before we fully understood either. We imagined ourselves as heroes, villains, explorers and outcasts. We tested boundaries vicariously and safely, inside stories long before we tested them in real life.

Of course, we still misbehaved. We were out and about climbing where we shouldn’t, throwing secret parties that ended up being not so secret. We told lies when it suited us and ignored perfectly sensible adult advice. Yet most of us were still learning within a framework of stories that encouraged us to imagine consequences beyond ourselves. Imagination wasn’t simply entertainment. It was rehearsal for becoming morally human.

I often wonder if something has shifted. Today, so much of young people’s attention is occupied elsewhere. As children, we spent long Sunday afternoons inventing worlds, solving imaginary problems and wondering who we might become. Increasingly, children now are presented with answers before they have had time to sit with the questions. Long before social media arrived, many of us had already internalised an audience and learned to perform. Then the internet did arrive and rewarded us for that performance. Suddenly everybody really was being watched.

At first, we volunteered our lives willingly. We posted photographs, shared opinions, told strangers what we’d had for lunch and updated statuses. Then the watching became less visible. Algorithms learned what we clicked. Advertisers learned what we desired. Phones knew where we travelled. Social media absorbed what made us angry. Governments learned who we supported and why. Artificial intelligence began learning how we think.

The magic mirror got smarter.

Unlike the one on my staircase, this one was seriously paying attention.

The technology itself worries me less than what it is doing to our imaginations.

These days I find myself thinking about the children I teach. Not because they are being watched. That ship has already sailed. The watching is here and there’s nothing we can do about it other than embrace it. What concerns me more is what some of my students see when they think about the future. Ask some children what they want from life and they stare at you baffled, as though you have asked the most ridiculous question imaginable.

“AI will do everything.”

“There won’t be any jobs.”

“The government will just have to pay everyone Universal Credit.”

“What’s the point imagining if it’s already been thought of?”

It’s not all of them, of course. But enough to make you pause… and swallow hard.

At their age, I was trying to decide whether I wanted to become a journalist or an air stewardess. Neither ambition was particularly practical, but practicality was never the point. I wanted airport departure boards and passport stamps. I wanted distant countries, unfamiliar languages and conversations with strangers. I wanted stories and poetry. I wanted to stand in the middle of places I couldn’t yet find on a map. I wanted to understand how other people lived and what made them tick. I wanted to travel through continents, report from somewhere important, write books, teach abroad and collect experiences like souvenirs. The future felt enormous. It stretched beyond the horizon in every direction.

Many of those dreams never happened exactly as I imagined them but some of them did.

But that’s not the point either.

The point is that I imagined them. Imagination is how we begin walking!

It’s vital.

It unlocks art and music, poetry and theatre. It allows us to predict, solve, empathise and invent. Imagination lifts us to higher realms to see beyond this world as it is.

What worries me about some of the young people I teach is not a lack of intelligence, creativity or potential. They possess those qualities in abundance.

It is the shrinking of imagination that concerns me most.

Many have grown up beneath a gaze that never switches off. Every photograph can be shared. Every opinion can be challenged. Every mistake can be preserved. These children worry about whether there will be jobs for them. Whether they can afford homes. Whether artificial intelligence will make them obsolete before they’ve even begun. They don’t even know what subjects to study because they all seem passé. They are more self-conscious, more anxious and more aware of how they are perceived than any generation before them.

How could they not be?

This generation’s imagination competes with an endless stream of information. Every spare moment is filled. Every question can be answered. Every uncertainty can be resolved with a simple search. At the end of the day, it’s too tiring to let their minds wander or imagine.

My old mirror simply reflected my fears that someone might be watching.

Their mirror responds.

It answers them.

No imagination needed.

Ask the magic mirror a question and it provides an answer. Ask for advice and it offers a plan. Ask it to write your essay and, believe me, I’ve read enough of them to know, it can do that too. Problem solving disappears, ruminating is blotted out and the idea that there’s a monster behind a mirror is demolished.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall.
Who is the fairest of them all?”

Queen Grimhilde’s mirror answered questions.

Now, we carry exactly that in our pockets.

It knows what we like. What we fear. Where we go. What we buy. What we think. Soon it may know what we are likely to do before we do.

My childhood mirror scared me.

Their mirror answers everything.

Fear never stopped me imagining, but certainty might.

Year after year I watch remarkable young people move through school carrying extraordinary potential. They are funny, insightful, creative and capable of far more than they realise.

Yet I find myself returning to the same question.

What happens when generations of children stop imagining a future worth walking towards?

The problem isn’t that the mirror watches us. The problem is that we have started asking it to imagine for us. That is the part that troubles me. A child who imagines monsters behind a mirror is still imagining. A child who imagines distant countries, future adventures and impossible dreams is still imagining. Imagination allows us to see beyond the world as it is. It is where stories begin. It is where inventions begin. It is where empathy begins. It is where every future begins. So what happens when we stop exercising it?

I am not interested in whether the mirror is watching. I am more interested in whether we as people are living. Life is not happening inside the algorithm or engagement statistics or carefully curated versions of ourselves. It is happening in conversations that wander unexpectedly. In books that change our minds. In family dinners that last longer than planned. In muddy boots, first kisses, second breakfasts, gardens, friendships and impossible dreams.

Life is not happening inside the mirror. It is happening where imagination has room to breathe.

The real danger was never the monster behind the mirror.

The real danger is forgetting how to look beyond it.

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Ex… hale.

One of the things I pride myself on as a writer is that readers rarely know where I am taking them. Quite often, I don’t either. People arrive expecting an essay about Peter Pan and somehow find themselves contemplating “our boys”. They arrive expecting tectonic plates and end up staring wistfully at the horizon wondering where all the years went.

I adore a little mischief.

No. I relish it.

So today, my fellow meandering midlifers, I invite you into a familiar room. There will be books and movies. Probably tea and crumpets. Almost certainly a garden. If all goes to plan, by the end of this essay we will have quietly slipped out a secret side door neither of us noticed when we came in.

Today, that door happens to lead through to a compost heap.

Stay with me.

I live in Lincolnshire. The farming county of England, big skies and small communities. Around here, people often refer to it as “The Shire”. My husband and I have spent twenty-four years being affectionately described by our London relatives as the Hobbits. We are not especially tall. I enjoy books, gardens and long walks. My husband enjoys food: second breakfasts, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner and supper, along with quiet days at home. Frankly, I’ve heard worse descriptions and am content to be referred to as such.

The thing I’ve always loved about Hobbits is that they would be considered wildly unsuccessful by modern standards. They do not optimise, hustle, build personal brands or start podcasts explaining how to become a better Hobbit. They garden and walk, but not too far. They never venture beyond the bridge, only there and back again to see how far it is. They potter. They write letters and tell stories. They occasionally throw parties. They daydream. Eat and most certainly, nap.

Tolkien understood something many of us have forgotten.

Before there are quests and ringwraiths and impossible journeys, there was The Shire.

The Shire matters.

In fact, it is the very thing worth saving.

I suspect that is because The Shire is just another word for home. Not necessarily a place, but a feeling. A well-thumbed book. My favourite mug. My thriving greenhouse. The garden gate that’s always left open. The compost heap. The people who know my stories before I tell them. The things that steady us when the world feels noisy.

Most stories teach us to leave home. Very few teach us how to appreciate it.

For the past five weeks I have been living a decidedly Shire-like existence. At least that’s how it has looked from the outside. I have wandered from room to room, stared out of windows, watched birds, redesigned rooms I cannot afford to redecorate and planned family holidays I cannot afford to take.

My Slovakian-Croatian road trip via Lake Bled is looking particularly intoxicating and my family Japanese adventure is now so detailed that I know where we would stop for coffee on day three despite having neither the budget nor the physical capacity to get there. I have researched flights, solved imaginary car hire problems, selected Airbnbs and planned restaurant visits. Live octopus is not currently on the menu.

I have also become deeply invested in the activities of a robin who appears to be contributing more to my garden than I am.

I have watered plants that did not need watering until their leaves yellowed and who may now be deeply regretting their association with me. Love and boredom are a lethal combination.

I have also stood in the middle of the kitchen with absolutely no idea why I went in there.

Being off work injured but not sick is surprisingly boring.

Nobody tells you that recovery involves so much wandering. I drift from room to room as though searching for a misplaced purpose. A little like Miss Havisham. Only with a neck brace and considerably fewer cobwebs.

Debatable.

From the outside, May has looked remarkably unproductive. And therein lies the problem.

I think we have become so obsessed with visible productivity that we mistake dormancy for failure. If something isn’t earning, publishing, launching, teaching, achieving, working or improving, we assume it isn’t doing anything at all.

Nature would disagree.

Bilbo Baggins spent a great deal of time pottering around Bag End before anyone accused him of wasting his potential. These days he would probably be encouraged to optimise his morning routine, join the 5am Club, monetise his gardening hobby and start a podcast.

Instead, he pottered. He gardened. He waited. He dreamed of adventure.

The story had not yet begun.

But that didn’t mean nothing was happening.

Daniel LaRusso spent much of The Karate Kid waxing cars, painting fences and sanding floors. He thought he was wasting his time. Only Miyagi understood what was really taking place.

Preparation rarely looks impressive while it is happening.

Which brings me back to compost.

My compost heap is not beautiful. Nobody photographs it. It is a monument to things that are past their best: tea bags, vegetable peelings, dead flowers and the occasional mystery item that neither my husband nor I can identify. Everything organic that has reached the end of its useful life gets thrown onto the pile.

Then we leave it alone.

Months pass.

Any transformation is invisible. From the outside, it looks like decay. Rot. Waste. Failure.

Nothing happening.

Yet every gardener knows that the compost heap is where the magic happens. With patience, it will become something rich and fertile, capable of growing entirely new things.

Lately, I have begun to wonder whether midlife is a little like compost. The past few years have contained their fair share of losses, worries and unexpected plot twists. Grief. Pain. Disillusionment. Hope. Plans abandoned. Plans rewritten.

At times it has felt as though life has stalled.

In fact, I think it did.

Yet beneath the surface of all this apparent rot, something else was happening.

Healing. Thinking. Reading. Noticing. Stories. Ideas. The compost heap patiently doing its work.

Outside my window, the fields have been teaching the same lesson. For months they looked empty. Bare earth. Nothing to see.

Then spring arrived.

The rape fields exploded into yellow. The linseed turned blue.

Life emerged from ground that had seemed dormant only weeks before.

Nature never mistakes dormancy for failure.

Only humans do.

The rabbits in Watership Down spend much of their story moving through uncertainty. No map. No guarantees. Just a stubborn belief that there is something worth moving towards.

Midlife can feel a little like that.

Less sprinting confidently towards a goal and more hopping cautiously through unfamiliar territory, hoping you are heading in roughly the right direction. We celebrate rewards: harvests, promotions, achievements, finished books, published essays and exam results. We celebrate quests. The adventure. The departure. The triumphant return.

We rarely celebrate The Shire. Home. Quiet. Peace. A good book. A cup of tea. A greenhouse full of seedlings. A robin keeping watch. A husband contemplating his next breakfast. A life that may not look especially impressive from the outside but feels deeply meaningful from within.

So much of life happens underground. Roots grow in darkness. Seeds split open out of sight. Compost works in secret. Perhaps creativity does too. Healing certainly does. Perhaps five weeks trapped in The Shire has shown me that home is not the place where life stops happening. It is where life unfolds. Among books and bird song. Mugs of tea and compost heaps. Conversations and garden fences. The ordinary rituals that seem so small while we are living them and precious when we look back.

Life does not have to look dramatic to be meaningful. Pottering is not the opposite of progress. Dormancy is not the same thing as failure. Some of the most important transformations happen long before anyone can see them. Not every season is a harvest. Some seasons are for growing roots.

Substack, if we’re not careful, can sometimes begin to feel like the rest of the internet: louder, faster, bigger, more productive. But I suspect what many of us midlifers are really searching for is something quieter. A place to think. To notice. To rest. We need a few more essays that don’t end with a nervous breakdown or an existential crisis.

I have always been told that I have a calming presence, and I rather hope this little corner of the internet feels like a place where people can arrive exactly as they are. A place where they can sit for a while. Read. Drink a metaphorical cup of tea and remember that not every season is a harvest.

Tomorrow morning, I will probably make a cup of tea, see what the robin is up to, turn over the compost heap and check on my tomatoes.

It doesn’t sound much like an adventure, but perhaps that’s the point. The story may begin with a quest, but it is The Shire that gives it meaning. And if we’re very lucky, it is where we eventually find our way back home.

I own a very old copy of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

A first edition.

The rose worn cloth cover has softened with age; it almost looks flesh-like now. The pages are crinkled, foxed and deep cream, carrying that scent old books acquire when they have survived long enough to outlive the hands that first held them. Delicate tissue paper still protects some of the Arthur Rackham illustrations, making the fairy images beneath appear ghostly.

It is beautiful.

1906 is printed on the inside cover. This book has survived Edwardian England, two world wars, generations of children, an all boys’ boarding school, my grandparents’ generation, my parents’ generation and now mine. It is not pristine, but my goodness has it lived.

Someone called Howard Seigh scrawled his name in pencil inside the front page, claiming it briefly for his own before time carried him elsewhere. Illustrations are missing. The spine is faded. The pages loosen slightly when opened. Somewhere inside sits the faded stamp of the boys’ boarding school library where my grandparents once worked as headmaster and headmistress many years ago.

It feels more alive to me because of all that. Not simply because of the story it contains, but because of the people it has survived. This is not merely an old book to me or a literary relic. It is an unfinished conversation. An afterlife of inherited ghosts and vanished boys living quietly on my bookshelf.

I have always wondered about the boys who turned these pages before me.

Which of them sat beneath dormitory lamps reading about Peter flying over London whilst missing home with an ache too enormous to name aloud? Being a boarder myself, I know that ache. Boys carrying expectations too heavy for their age. Boys navigating discipline, loneliness, ambition, love, fear and the enormous pressure of becoming someone. Which boys became fathers, farmers, teachers, soldiers or old men?

Which never had the chance?

Fingers have touched the same paper across generations without ever meeting. Thoughts and dreams pass invisibly between strangers separated by decades, even centuries. Childhood itself is pressed neatly between pages like something fragile we are all trying unsuccessfully to preserve.

Perhaps that is why Peter Pan has followed me so persistently throughout my life.

Not merely as a story, but as a shadow moving quietly beneath all other things. The gardens and wilderness I disappear into as refuge, to ground me and awaken my imagination. The mothers standing at windows waiting for children to return home. The fierce tenderness of loving boys in a world that can feel painfully hard for them to navigate. The dog faithfully following beside us; loyal, watchful and knowing. The lost boys trying bravely to become heroes before their time, battling pirates, darkness and inevitability of growing older. The impossible longing to remain untouched by time, grief and responsibility for just a little longer.

People often mistake Peter Pan for whimsy. It never felt whimsical to me. Even as a child, I sensed the melancholy living inside it. The terror of time sitting quietly beneath every page. The ticking crocodile chasing after all of us.

Children leave.
Mothers wait.
Windows remain open.
Some boys simply disappear.

My cousin died at twenty-four.

A soldier.

Impossibly young now when I look back at him from the distance of my own forty-seven years.

There is a particular disorientation that comes with ageing beyond the people you once loved. Time continues carrying you forwards whilst they remain suspended permanently where you last emotionally left them.

He would be my age now. Nearly forty-eight.

That thought no longer arrives as the sharp agony of early grief, but as something stranger and deeper. As though somewhere inside my mind he still exists simultaneously as both memory and a possibility.

A lost boy.

When I wrote my novel Dead Game more than twenty years ago, I realise now that Peter Pan was already moving quietly beneath the surface of it. At the time it felt instinctive rather than intellectual but looking back I can see that both Peter and my cousin occupied the same emotional space inside me; adventurous, bold, fragile and vulnerable and inherently timeless.

My cathartic novel Dead Game now sits quietly beside my ancient copy of Peter Pan in my library; a story written in the wake of grief by somebody trying to make sense of loss before she fully understood that was what she was doing, desperate somehow to keep him alive, desperate for him to still be okay… somewhere.

Another surviving artefact from another version of my life.

Another ghost among the shelves.

Barrie dedicated Peter Pan to “Sylvia and Arthur Llewelyn Davies and their boys (my boys).”

That line undoes me every time I see it, because beneath all the fantasy and folklore, perhaps Peter Pan was never about refusing to grow up at all. Perhaps it was about the unbearable ache of loving boys whilst knowing the world will eventually ask them to harden, leave, fight, strive, disappear into manhood or, for some, vanish from us altogether.

Barrie understood what mothers know instinctively: we carry our boys long after the world stops calling them children.

People often quote that famous line “To die would be an awfully big adventure” romantically, forgetting how devastating it is. I think Barrie understood something most of us spend our lives resisting: human beings find it almost impossible to peacefully accept impermanence.

I know I do.

I have preserved baby clothes in the loft. Kept my father’s voice notes even though the memory on my phone says no. Pressed flowers into fairy books for old friends. Filled my home with sepia photographs of ancestors I never met. Framed Roman sunsets beside my bed. Saved birthday cards and notes from my Nanna. Kept Jake’s collar long after it was needed. Even as I write this, I am storing away memories of a dear friend who has just died from breast cancer. She was one of the kindest women I have ever known. Our daughters spent years together at drama school. We drove the same car. I still cannot quite believe she has gone. We spend our lives creating tiny defences against disappearance.

Dead or alive.

Sometimes I think that is all memory really is: love refusing to loosen its grip entirely on what time is slowly taking away.

More and more lately, I find myself thinking about my boys. Well, they are young men now. I think about my sister’s boys and my cousins and all my friends’ boys and even the boys I teach. They are not the lost boys preserved inside literature and memory; they are real boys growing up around us now.

Boys trying to become good men in a world that often feels simultaneously demanding of them and suspicious of them. Boys absorbing pressure about success, masculinity, strength and failure long before they fully know who they are becoming.

The boys I know and love are gentle and kind. Yes, they are chaotic, messy and endlessly funny at times, but they are also affectionate, emotionally open and deeply loving. They hug tightly. They speak honestly. They feel things intensely.

They are not monsters.

Not all Andrew Tates or cautionary tales.

Most are simply young human beings trying to find their place in a noisy, complicated and competitive world that often seems uncertain about what it wants from them. I think Barrie understood that too somehow; the terrible fragility hiding beneath boyhood bravado.

Theodore Roosevelt once wrote that “the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” I have always loved that passage because it honours striving rather than perfection. Dust. Sweat. Failure. Courage.

To become fully human requires vulnerability from all of us.

Including our boys.

Especially our boys.

Perhaps that is why stories like Peter Pan endure, because beneath the fantasy and adventure, they remind us how tender and difficult becoming human really is. How bravely boys and young men step out into a world that will ask things of them long before they feel ready.

Perhaps that is also why certain stories and songs continue ruining us emotionally across generations.

Les Misérables, Bring Him Home: “He’s like the son I might have known…”

Dead Poets Society. Boys standing on desks trying desperately to become themselves before the world hardens them.

Stand By Me.
“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?”

That one gets me every time!

Again and again we return to stories about boys standing on the threshold of innocence and adulthood, longing and expectation, freedom and loss.

Adults pleading helplessly with the world to spare its boys.

That is what Barrie was doing.

That is what I was doing.

I don’t think Neverland was ever about staying young.

It’s about love trying to survive the agony of loss.

Thank you for reading.

Claire

Midlife motherhood, I am beginning to realise, feels less like tenderness and more like geography.

Deep fault lines run beneath the surface of ordinary days. Invisible tectonic plates of love and fear shift constantly underfoot. Emotional landscapes form slowly over decades until my children exist inside my nervous system as instinctively as the weather itself, particularly the dramatic and deeply unnecessary Lincolnshire variety.

When they were little, motherhood was visible.

Packed lunches beside signed permission slips. Nurofen syringes at 2am. Tiny shoes abandoned in hallways. Fingers curled trustingly around mine whilst crossing roads. Custard Creams carried around in handbags alongside wet wipes, pompoms, sachets of Calpol, hairbands and at least one slightly greening satsuma.

People saw me mothering then.

Praise arrived easily for the practical labour of it. The visible carrying. The exhaustion worn openly across the body. It was messy. I longed, at times, to be as impossibly composed as Bree Van de Kamp in Desperate Housewives, but I was far more a cross between Susan Mayer and Lynette Scavo, creative, hardworking, chaotic and permanently on the verge of some minor domestic incident involving a Labrador and a septic tank, a forgotten PE kit or a smoke alarm announcing dinner to the entire street.

Nobody really speaks about motherhood once children become adults. The work is assumed to evaporate the moment they can drive themselves home, cook pasta badly at midnight, vote, leave damp towels in inexplicable places and begin constructing lives that no longer orbit entirely around mine.

Yet for me, the terrain simply changed.

The work moved underground.

Less visible. More seismic.

Motherhood now exists in a permanent state of low-level ache and pride simultaneously.

My eldest son is slowly building a life through music.

Long hippy hair. Piano keys. Guitar strings. Master’s deadlines. Grassroots gigs carrying that intoxicating electricity only young musicians seem capable of generating. His band has become another kind of family now, a small tribe forming beyond the boundaries of home, and watching him move steadily towards his own horizon feels both beautiful and faintly heartbreaking in equal measure.

He asks us for almost nothing.

He quietly funds his own future. Carries his responsibilities. Makes us laugh constantly.

Yet some ancient maternal compass inside me still experiences a small wave of relief every single time I see his name appear on my phone.

My daughter moves through the world with softness and sharp edges stitched simultaneously into her soul.

The softness worries me sometimes. Not because kindness is weakness, but because the world still seems strangely uncomfortable with young women who possess both gentleness and force. Girls are encouraged to be ambitious, outspoken and independent right up until the precise moment they become inconveniently difficult to contain.

Deep down, she is absolutely a force to be reckoned with.

I see it constantly.

In the fierceness with which she loves her friends. In the way she instinctively gathers people in, smoothing fractured emotional landscapes before anyone else has even noticed they are breaking apart. In her generosity, inherited perhaps from her grandfather, giving freely without ever really expecting anything back. In her ability to communicate, soothe and carry other people’s storms as though they are somehow her responsibility to calm.

Watching that is both beautiful and deeply frustrating as her mother.

She wants everybody to feel included. Everybody to feel heard. Everybody to remain okay. Boundaries still feel unfamiliar to her, perhaps because caring comes more naturally than withholding. Peacekeeping has become almost instinctive.

I recognise that terrain because I once walked it too.

The world trains girls early to become emotional custodians for everybody else’s comfort, then later wonders why so many women struggle to identify the shape of their own needs beneath all that accommodation.

She is still becoming herself in all the uncertain ways twenty-year-olds do. Watching her navigate friendship, grief and loss has sometimes felt like watching my younger self carry a candle carefully through strong winds without letting it blow out.

Yet her gentleness remains intact, even when bitterness would perhaps be easier.

I often wonder whether this generation fully realises how extraordinary they already are beneath all the pressure to appear extraordinary online.

Then there is my youngest.

His heartbreak nearly undid me.

Not because it belonged to me.

It was entirely his.

But I felt it… and the aftershocks.

Motherhood teaches me repeatedly that my children’s grief enters my own body as though it belongs there too.

Three years of loving somebody between fifteen and eighteen is no small thing. Those years shape emotional coastlines permanently. Watching him attempt to navigate heartbreak whilst simultaneously wrestling with exams, uncertainty and the unbearable pressure young people now seem to carry about their futures has been agonising at times.

There is perhaps a particular kind of maternal helplessness in watching your child work extraordinarily hard at something that does not naturally love them back.

Their generation seems to exist beneath permanent atmospheric pressure. Endless comparison. Endless visibility. Endless measuring of worth against impossible standards. Careers no longer feel like possibilities but verdicts upon whether they have succeeded at being a person correctly.

I do not remember feeling this frightened of the future at their age. Exhaustion surely arrives early when every future feels fragile.

Perhaps this is the strange unspoken truth about motherhood nobody prepared me for.

Eventually I stopped raising children and started witnessing people becoming themselves.

I can no longer intercept pain for them.

I cannot rescue them from uncertainty.

I cannot redraw their maps for them.

Presence becomes the only offering left.

Quietly.

Lovingly.

Helplessly.

Somewhere between caterpillar birthday cakes, Labrador pawprints across pink sofas, abandoned hot chocolate mugs breeding mysteriously in bedrooms and lying awake at 4:45am whilst thunderstorms rattle the windows, motherhood shifted into something far less visible and far more ancient.

Now it feels as though I am standing on the edge of a vast shifting coastline, lantern in hand, watching the people I once protected and carried in my arms slowly disappear towards horizons that no longer belong to me.

Yet my entire nervous system still travels beside them...

Always.

That, I think, is the emotional geography of motherhood.

Not the visible labour of early childhood, but the invisible terrain that remains long after.

I still count heads subconsciously before sleep arrives.

I still check Life360.

I still wait for texts from the child who refuses to use Life360 altogether.

I still feel relief hearing somebody whisper through the letterbox, “you’ve locked me out.”

I still delight in footsteps and laughter downstairs at unearthly hours of the morning.

I still scan instinctively for storms on behalf of the people I love more than myself.

No matter how old my children become, some deep tectonic part of me will probably never stop listening for confirmation that all my tribe are safely home.

I missed saying goodbye to my Year 11s this year.

After years of teacher assisting, high-level teaching assistant work, then finally teaching; chasing coursework, calming panic, discussing poetry, getting students off shed roofs, analysing Macbeth, confiscating phones, opening windows during heatwaves, closing them during storms, and trying endlessly to convince teenagers that literature matters because people matter, I, their teacher, simply… disappeared.

Not with a grand farewell.

Not with an emotional assembly while Coldplay played softly in the background and somebody handed me flowers from Tesco wrapped in cellophane.

I was just gone.

Grade 3 spinal stenosis and a ruptured disc in my neck finally forced my body to do what my nervous system had been screaming for a long time: STOP! What broke my heart most was not the pain in my neck (although that was horrific). It was missing them. Not seeing them through to the bitter end. I know I will be back, but they won’t. Their job at school is done.

I’m sure most of them won’t miss me particularly. Teenagers are brilliantly equipped for moving forward. But that’s not the point.

People outside education often misunderstand what teaching really is. They imagine long holidays, a bell that rings at 3:30 and we’re all magically home by four making dinner, tidy classrooms with inspirational displays, having answers for everything, lesson plans, marking, and neatly organised paperwork all under control.

But teaching is not really about schools and classrooms or paper.

It is about humans.

Tired humans raising the future.

And the humans working in schools are, without doubt, some of the best people I have ever known. Not perfect. Occasionally chaotic and slightly unhinged loudmouths. But they have to be! They are often surviving entirely on caffeine, sarcasm and homemade banana cake left in the staffroom by someone who either had a birthday or was on the verge of a breakdown.

Teachers are extraordinary.

There is something profoundly selfless about people who repeatedly walk into buildings full of exhausted teenagers carrying invisible burdens of their own and still attempt to teach them about algebra, mitochondria, Shakespeare, tectonic plates or the structure of Poppies by Jane Weir.

Schools are no longer simply places of education. They are emotional support centres.

Food banks.

Safeguarding hubs.

Therapy rooms.

Battlefields.

Refuges.

Sometimes the only safe place a child enters all day.

Teachers know which students are grieving before anyone tells them. They know who hasn’t eaten breakfast. Who suddenly stopped speaking. Who is self-harming with a pencil sharpener under the desk. Who sits near the window because home feels unbearable. Who cannot focus for more than ten minutes because their nervous system has never truly felt safe. Who pretends not to care because caring feels far too dangerous.

Yet still the registers must be taken. The targets must be met. The data must be entered. The interventions evidenced. The grades predicted. The progress measured.

Somewhere along the way, education became obsessed with proving learning instead of nurturing it. I understand why. Schools are under enormous pressure. Results matter. Reputation matters. Funding matters. Futures matter.

But I sometimes think we are quietly suffocating curiosity beneath assessment objectives and performance indicators. I do not remember most of my own school test results, scores or grades.

But I remember teachers.

I remember the wicked ones (but that’s another essay!)

And I remember the ones who made the world feel larger and accessible. The ones who spoke about books as though they were sacred. The ones who made me feel intelligent before I fully believed it myself. The ones who noticed something in me and handed it back.

The first was Mrs Jean Jeans, headteacher extraordinaire, endlessly patient, kind-hearted and genuinely desperate to hear my stories no matter how wildly overdramatic they became.

The second was Mrs Pat Evans. I remember reading a piece of work aloud in class while she suddenly stopped me midway through.

“That’s good,” she announced firmly, repeating my sentence back to the room. “That’s emotive. That will get to people. That’s brilliant!”

And perhaps that was the moment I realised words could do more than simply fill a page. They could reach people.

That is education.

Or at least, it should be.

I have taught in both state and private schools, and, despite their differences, both are fuelled by the same thing: exhausted people trying desperately to do right by children whilst systems demand more and more from them.

And so many good teachers are leaving.

Not because they do not care.

Often because they care too much.

ECTs arrive bright-eyed and passionate, carrying colour-coded planners and impossible levels of optimism. Many are brilliant. But they are also entering a profession increasingly built around survival.

Meanwhile experienced teachers quietly disappear because experience is expensive.

There is something deeply unsettling about a profession slowly losing the people who know how to hold emotional complexity in a room. Teaching is performance, yes. But it is also instinct. Life experience. Presence. Timing. Humour. Engagement. Emotional intelligence. Human connection. A good teacher you can feel a classroom shift before a word is spoken.

Yet despite everything: the workload, the pressure, the endless scrutiny and observations that still leave me feeling like I am visibly shaking whilst pretending to appear calm, I still love teaching.

Wholeheartedly.

I would recommend that everyone at some point in their lives experiences the joy of teaching.

I love the moment a student suddenly understands a metaphor. I love hearing reluctant readers accidentally fall in love with a story or understand a word. I even love the students who confidently inform me that artificial intelligence is about to replace my job, because then I get to explain why literature matters!

Literature matters because it reminds us that being human is complicated, contradictory, painful, beautiful and shared. It gives language to grief, longing, rage and love. It asks us to pause long enough to feel. AI may be able to imitate information, structure and style, but it cannot replace genuine human connection. And that is literature. You cannot learn empathy from a spreadsheet. You cannot automate wonder, and no machine can replicate the strange electricity of one human truly reaching another through their words.

I also love the conversations I have beside classroom doors, before lessons or after lessons, when teenagers suddenly reveal truths they would never share sitting formally at a desk. I even adore teaching Macbeth for the hundredth time - rolls eyes. Though school’s finances hate the photocopying!

My point is literature matters. Stories matter. Curiosity matters. Children deserve more than simply being trained to pass exams. They deserve opportunities to understand the world and themselves within it. They deserve to explore why words matter.

I think that is why missing saying goodbye to my Year 11’s hurt so much.

Teaching is such a strange profession because every year people leave carrying fragments of you with them. A line from a poem. A moment when Mrs. Kinton welled up reading something aloud and had to reach for the tissues. Words get to me alright! A class joke. A student asking me, how you are always so joyful and calm. A simple conversation, knowing that it means the world to that student. A feeling.

And teachers carry fragments of students too. The profession exhausts people because caring is exhausting. Not weak. Not indulgent.

Exhausting.

But meaningful too.

Perhaps that is both the tragedy and beauty of teaching.

You pour yourself continuously into other people’s futures knowing most of it will never be properly measured. No spreadsheet can quantify the child who stayed because someone noticed. No data set captures the student who began believing in their own intelligence. No progress chart records the teacher quietly buying cereal bars for hungry children on the way to work. Or the emails years later from former students saying they chose literature at university because of your classroom.

That’s teaching.

And all this matters.

Deeply.

So, despite the pain in my neck, despite the exhaustion, despite everything modern education has become, I am still profoundly grateful that life led me to it.

I know that long before schools’ taught students how to pass exams, they were supposed to teach people how to think, feel, question, imagine and understand one another and the world around them, morally. And that somewhere beneath all the paperwork and pressure, the best teachers are still enduring and trying to do exactly that.

Human beings raising the future. I think that still matters more than anything.

I’m so proud to be part of it.

The wall started before children. Before marriage.

But not before us.

It sits in the little anteroom beside the kitchen, technically just a hallway, although it has quietly become my favourite part of the house. Not because it is especially grand or impressive, but because over the years these metal plaques have somehow become archives of who we were, who we are and, perhaps most importantly, who we will be.

Every journey has left a mark.

They are not just souvenirs, but versions of ourselves.

Australia reminds me of sleeping side by side in a tiny youth hostel bunk after we’d almost entirely run out of money, surviving on optimism, cheap noodles and the unwavering confidence that everything would somehow work out. We were young enough then to believe adventure itself counted as a financial plan.

Ireland became a regular haunt long before children arrived: Guinness, laughter and family.

Florida belongs entirely to Dad.

He took his eight grandchildren to Disney twice and seemed happiest simply observing them all, standing slightly apart taking in their sugar-encrusted little faces while Mum organised Fast Passes, sun cream and military-level snack distribution. Those holidays were chaotic, expensive, exhausting and utterly magical. We carried soggy sandwiches made with sweet American bread around in backpacks for hours before inevitably abandoning them because Grandad had decided everyone needed Taco Bell or Wendy’s instead.

Completely revolting food. Completely wonderful memories.

Rome arrived later, a surprise trip for our twentieth wedding anniversary filled with pizza, wine, wandering tiny streets and briefly remembering who we were before life became schedules, mortgages, university accommodation, slipped discs and reading glasses. 🤓

Salem exists entirely because of my deeply predictable fascination with witches after years of The Crucible and becoming mildly obsessed with folklore, superstition and the dramatic chaos surrounding teaching Macbeth. Scotland itself followed naturally afterwards - trailing Glen Coe and the Scottish plays landmarks. Obviously.

Hong Kong was the Rugby Sevens, sleeping on pavements outside the stadium to get good seats in the South Stand, drinking alarming quantities of beer and behaving in ways that felt adventurous and entirely acceptable in our twenties but would now almost certainly require physiotherapy and a lengthy recovery period.

Thailand. Tenerife. Route 66 to New York.

And Frinton-on-Sea, perhaps the place stitched most deeply into me of all. The seaside town where I spent my summers and where my own children later spent endless summers crabbing, eating chips wrapped in paper and boiling freshly caught shrimp on the stove in the beach-hut. Some places become part of your internal landscape forever no matter how far away life eventually carries you.

There are plaques here attached to memories my husband and I remember completely differently. Holidays one of us recalls as idyllic while the other remembers sunburn, hire car disasters or our youngest unexpectedly launching himself into the deep end of a swimming pool while we stood distracted in the baby pool at the opposite side. He couldn’t swim! He learnt fast.

There’s the memory of convincing our eldest, in complete seriousness, that Dad had forgotten his wallet in a restaurant and that we might all have to make a run for it! Or discovering croissants hidden inside hotel bedside drawers after he’d quietly smuggled them out of an all-inclusive breakfast buffet for later.

That’s the strange thing about memory.

Families can live through the exact same moments and carry away entirely different versions of them.

And yet somehow those separate fragments still become the same shared story.

Sometimes I stand here absentmindedly waiting for the kettle to boil and realise this wall quietly contains decades of our life together. Not the major milestones particularly. No weddings or funerals or official achievements. Just fragments. Tiny proof that we stayed curious. That we kept exploring. That life happened while we were busy becoming ourselves.

There’s a large world map hanging in our kitchen with little pins marking the places we’ve been. We have covered only the tiniest fraction of this enormous world and still I find myself longing for more places, more stories, more versions of life still waiting somewhere ahead of us.

There are plaques missing still. Scotland needs adding properly. Hong Kong too. More stories than wall space now.

And I love that.

Because perhaps the most comforting thing of all is knowing there is still room left on the wall for places we have not yet been and versions of ourselves we have not yet met.

Tiny metal reminders that we were here.

That we lived.