I’m giving up on mornings. Perhaps if I write it, I’ll really believe it.

There’s a whole industry and mythology built around being a morning person. Books and articles on the miracles that happen when you start your day at 5am. Chronotype quizzes and tests. Endless, spacious morning routines filmed for social media, with smugly time-stamped 5.30am wake-ups.

Mornings are success. Mornings are ambition. Mornings are having your shit together.

Mornings – as any wellness guru will tell you – are THE SECRET.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I am a sucker for all of this. I can roll my eyes at the smug early-risers of social media, but the truth is I badly want to be one of them. I yearn for that kind of self-satisfaction.

I long for the morning. I covet the promised quiet hours of solitude. The sunrises. The uninterrupted writing time.

Mornings for me are dream time. In my head, I fill these hypothetical early hours with all the things I wish I had more time to squeeze into my schedule: writing, yoga, walking, reading, tending to the garden.

Just as many women are secretly convinced everything would be better if only they were thinner, I am convinced my life would be better if only I could crack waking up earlier. If only I could make myself get up at 5am – or even 6am, perhaps I’d meditate regularly or make pancakes for breakfast. Perhaps my hair would look less of a mess.

But here’s the snag: I am not, naturally, a morning person. Instead of a lark, I am one of life’s confirmed night owls. This is not just an expression. Years ago, when I worked on a newspaper health desk, I did a DNA test for a feature, which found I had night-owl versions of so-called ‘clock genes’ (specifically PER 2 and PER 3, from memory).

Not that I needed a genetic analysis to tell me this. I have never knowingly woken up, without an alarm or my son, before 7am. My brain does not really, fully come online until 10am. I’d happily stay up till midnight, if I could.

Motherhood has done nothing to shift my body clock. All those people who declare that they just ‘can’t lie in any more’ after so many years of early starts with small children? Yeah, not one of them.

On the flipside, I can be incredibly productive late at night, happily reading, writing and proofreading at 9pm and beyond. And I’m rarely the person stifling a yawn at a party. Sure, I’ll joke about loving a 9pm bedtime now, like every other millennial female on Instagram, but, truthfully, I only love a 9pm bedtime because it means I can read for a luxurious hour or two.

Objectively, I can see that these are positive, helpful qualities – or at least no worse than having the opposite circadian pattern. So why do I still wish I were different? Why does the moral superiority of morning people run so deep?

Part of it could be down to what the chronobiologist Till Roenneberg coined ‘social jetlag’, that is, the gap between the rhythm of our social schedules and our own natural, biological rhythm. And the world still operates largely according to a lark’s rhythm. Even with wfh, we haven’t really escaped the convention that work starts at 9am – and school even earlier.

It suits larks perfectly, but can feel an uphill battle if you naturally prefer to sleep beyond 7am. And that’s before you attempt to take advantage of the ‘free’ time that exists before work.

Accordingly, morning people have ended up coded as efficient, conscientious, hard-working, agreeable, healthier (indeed, research has made all kinds of links with these sorts of positive traits). But, the argument goes, this may be a quirk of genetic alignment with social norms, not inherent virtue.

In other words, there’s powerful cultural conditioning behind my dream of the morning.

But while you can do your best to soften the edges of your night-owlishness to adapt, with boring good circadian habits (regular routines, light at the right times of day, blah blah), you can’t completely override it. As Roenneberg argues in his book Internal Time, early birds and night owls are born, not made1.

This is the wall I’ve hit recently. Not unlike a serial dieter, I’ve tried every circadian hack going. Daylight alarm clocks. Disabling the snooze function. Not using my phone in the evening. Getting natural daylight on my eyes first thing. Scheduling an embarrassing tweet to auto-post unless I get up in time and manually disable it (yes, really).

And I’ve found I can trick my body clock for a while. For example, if I book and pay for an early-morning exercise class I’ll drag myself there. I can white-knuckle early starts with sheer force of will (and hot, buttered toast) for a few days or even weeks.

For the past year or so, I truly thought I’d cracked it. Every Wednesday, I’ve been getting up to co-write over Zoom with my writers’ group at 6am. I knew I couldn’t do it every day, but a once a week seemed manageable. In that precious peaceful hour, I’ve written thousands of words. In winter I’d light a candle. In spring, I’d see the sun rise. The smugness of words-on-the-page before 7am was, undeniably, delicious. The thought of how much I’d get done if only I could make myself do it every day was tantalising…

It was blissful – until it wasn’t.

Gradually, it got harder to drag myself to the keyboard, the 10pm (or at least pre-midnight) bedtime required to make it work increasingly elusive.

Then a few weeks ago, I conceded defeat. I’d got myself up, got the words on the page….and spent the rest of the day feeling somewhere between drunk and hungover. I got hardly any work done in my actual work day, I nodded off while reading and then again on the sidelines of my son’s 4pm swimming lesson.

I needed to give my poor body-clock a break. I needed to stop torturing it with 6.30am gym classes. I needed to stop torturing it with 6.30am full-stop.

So I stopped. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I can’t deny I feel less tired. And, a subtle but important distinction, less strung out about getting enough sleep.

Without the nagging threat of a 5.45am alarm, my evenings have expanded. Case in point, the other night I went to see The Odyssey at the cinema: at 2 hours 53 minutes long, I didn’t get home until gone 11pm (which was fine, I wasn’t tired). But I wouldn’t have even considered doing this when I was still chasing the morning.

For so long, I’ve seen earlier starts as the solution to finding more time, it hadn’t occurred to me that, paradoxically, pursuing them might have become part of the reason my time felt so compressed.

But while I’d love to leave you here on a note of triumphant self-acceptance ­– I can’t, quite. I’m still wistful for the early hours – and the fantasy self who inhabits them. I still feel their pull as the solution to all of my problems (administrative, existential). It’s like a dream I know is over, but don’t want to wake from: my impossible dream of the morning.

Last time, I wrote to you about the internet invention of ‘trimester zero’ – a kind of TTC-maxxing (as befits our times). As many of you rightly pointed out in the comments, perhaps the worst thing about putting yourself on some kind of ‘trimester zero’ regimen is that no one can know how long ‘trimester zero’ is actually going to last.

And, of course, what follows trimester zero? What is your reward for all that good behaviour? The long, treacle-slow hours of the first trimester. Pregnant, but perhaps very few people know. Pregnant, but not showing. Pregnant, but waiting for the validation of that first scan. Which I humbly suggest is all going to feel that much slower if you’ve already been following strict ‘pregnancy safe’ lifestyle rules for many months before hand.

I hate the first trimester. No, not hate. Loathe. Loathe the first trimester.

I’m so over it, at this point.

My experience of pregnancy is dominated by the waiting room of the first trimester. In total, I have spent 38 weeks there. The equivalent of a full-term pregnancy.

Imagine that: a whole pregnancy, but it’s only ever the first trimester. Always winter but never Christmas.

Nine whole months of being invisibly pregnant, with most people not knowing why you’re subdued and sick; why you’re exhausted, cancelling plans and being evasive about the future.

Obviously, after a miscarriage this spring, I would love to be pregnant again. However, in an ideal world, I would get to skip the first trimester altogether. Those stories of women who don’t discover they’re pregnant until week 20 or similar? Is it politically incorrect to say that, truthfully, I sometimes fantasise about this happening?1

For me, the first trimester has become a very specific kind of mental assault course; something to get through, hour by hour, battling with an ever-present feeling (or fear?) of failure to launch.

Not everyone experiences it this way, of course. One of the most quietly devastating things someone has ever said to me was a friend’s pronouncement, shortly after they had their second baby, that they ‘didn’t really remember the first trimester now’.

I’d been asking them a direct question about their experience of something specific to the first 12 weeks – when I was pregnant after my second, or possibly third, miscarriage – and this was simply their honest answer. It wasn’t their fault I found it so crushing to hear that the first trimester simply didn’t loom that large for them.

Up until that point, I’d assumed we’d been having a conversation of equals, only to end up feeling like a precocious child who hasn’t been permitted to sit at the grown-ups’ table after all.

Last week, in response to the UK’s latest review into failing maternity and neonatal services, the charity Miscarriage UK2 warned that the National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation led by Baroness Amos ‘feels like a missed opportunity to fully consider the whole range of pregnancy and maternity experiences’ adding that ‘miscarriage affects more than one in five pregnancies and should not continue to sit outside conversations about improving care’.

I was glad to hear it. Miscarriage care is not irrelevant to or separate from maternity care.

For one thing, 39.7% of all neonatal deaths in England and Wales3 occur after a delivery at less than 24 weeks of pregnancy – i.e. before the legal and clinical cut-off point for a miscarriage if, in different circumstances, there are no signs of life.

How we care for women earlier in pregnancy really matters. And one of the key recommendations of the Amos report is for more continuity of care – that is being seen by healthcare professionals who know you and your pregnancy from start to finish.

Yet the blunt truth is that we simply don’t have much care in the first trimester in this country in the first place – not that’s joined up to the rest of ante-natal care in any meaningful way, anyway. Very often, the midwives who run this kind of service do not see you if you think you are having a miscarriage. Instead, you’re bounced to an EPU (if you’re lucky) or emergency gynae or A&E. The message is clear – and it hurts: you no longer require pregnancy care from us, you’re no longer pregnant in quite the same way, you’re now….something else.

Riven throughout pregnancy care in this country is a sense of having to pass a certain threshold to qualify for medical attention. I won’t rehash the more upsetting details of the Amos review here, but again and again, in report after report on this area of healthcare, what emerges is a sense of ‘prove to us you really need it’.

You see this attitude in the stories of women incorrectly sent home because their labour is not believed to be advanced enough. It underpins why women having late miscarriages are sometimes turned away from hospital maternity units because they are not pregnant ‘enough’. (But, of course, these women don’t have anywhere else to go either – no longer being in early pregnancy4).

And I’d make the case that it all begins with the way we treat the first trimester. Which is to say we mostly ignore it.

It messes with your head, this sense imparted from our current systems that you have to ‘earn’ proper care: this hierarchy determined by weeks and days and centimetres dilated.

My husband recently said something about my body having been through seven pregnancies – the context was kind, him trying to remind me that, physically, that is quite a lot for one body to go through.

But his wording pulled me up short.

Yes, it’s factually correct. And on one level I recognise that. But at the same time something about the description felt alien and inaccurate. Because I almost never think of myself in this way. Six miscarriages, yes. One full-term pregnancy, one baby, yes. But seven pregnancies? There is at least a part of my brain that tells me that’s over-stating things.

Which perhaps goes to show how much I’ve internalised all kinds of rubbish about the first trimester and early pregnancy not really counting.

And it’s cruel, really, isn’t it? What the current set-up does to us. To make us feel like we don’t count.

I recently stumbled upon ‘trimester zero’, TikTok’s supercharged version of #TTC.

When I did, I felt my entire body go: Please no. Please let’s not do this to ourselves.

I’ve spent basically a decade now trying to have babies (with a few post-partum years ‘off’ in the middle). And as soon as I saw the phrase, I understood two things at once. One: just how seductive the idea could be. And two: nothing good can come from this.

Trimester zero is a term that’s been popularised by ‘pregnancy prep’ influencers on TikTok and Instagram, who often have a supplements discount code for you or a hormone-balancing course to sell.1 ‘Trimester Zero’ has even been trademarked by one ‘naturopathic doctor’, according to The Guardian.

The idea is to improve your health for pregnancy before you are actually pregnant (which makes sense, up to a point). But often, this is taken to extremes, meaning you’re all but living as if you are already pregnant in order to ensure perfect conditions for a future embryo.

Anyway, as you’ve probably guessed (or seen for yourself), the focus is very much on lifestyle optimisation: ‘fertility boosting’ diets, exercise, supplements, stress reduction, ‘pregnancy-friendly’ skincare, cycle tracking, and ‘nontoxic swaps’. Sometimes there’s also a side-helping of manifestation, prayer, and a tradwife-adjacent aesthetic, this being the internet in 2026.

And yes, there’s definitely a whiff of Christian-Nationalism surrounding some of it. Again, this being the internet in 2026.

So, that right there is the big, obvious problem for me with ‘trimester zero’. Encouraging women to live for undefined periods of time as if they are, essentially, ‘pre-pregnant’ – to think of themselves in this way, above all else – at a time when there are people terrifyingly close to the levers of power in America saying things like ‘women are the kind of people that people come out of’ and advocating taking away their right to vote, while here in the UK we have politicians proposing taxes for women who don’t have enough babies?

No thank you. I want no part in that.

Then there’s the pseudoscience, Or, to be generous, the over-interpretation of the evidence. Giving up nail varnish, gluten, or dairy? Been there, done that. There really was no need. And before you let anyone convince you that you need a whole new ‘pregnancy-friendly’ skincare routine… do read this by Claire Coleman on what the evidence actually says. (Spoiler: You really don’t need to worry about it – in pregnancy, let alone while trying to conceive.)

Inevitably, trimester zero massively over-emphasises the role of individual lifestyle in fertility and in preventing pregnancy complications, when in reality it’s just one part of the puzzle.

Likewise, we already have enduring problems – in healthcare and in society more broadly – because self-sacrifice and suffering is seen as merely part and parcel of pregnancy and motherhood. Trimester zero starts the clock on all that even earlier. Again: not for me, thanks.

But in spite of all of this, I’ll admit I didn’t entirely hate the label, when I first saw it. Truthfully, there was a small part of me that felt almost grateful for the coining of a specific phrase for this particular chapter of life.

Naming things can be powerful. It can create space for experiences that were previously invisible. The obvious comparison is how some women and birth workers have sought to label the three months after a baby is born as the ‘fourth trimester’, to acknowledge that the intense physical demands on a body don’t stop once the umbilical cord is cut.

Then again, perhaps an unmet desire for recognition is precisely why the pregnancy-prep influencer business model works.

Trying to conceive the first time around, long before I wrote publicly about having miscarriages, was one of the loneliest times of my life, I think.

It’s a clever demographic to target, especially if you can make ‘trimester zero’ seem cute ‘n’ aspirational with the right branding and social content, because fundamentally you’re selling to a group who feel unseen and uncared for.

Preconception care in the UK is basically non-existent. Besides which, it’s not always easy to share with people that you’re trying for a baby, even before you add infertility or loss into the mix. All that hope and expectation can feel too fragile to casually pass around.

So can I say with confidence I wouldn’t have bought a ‘trimester zero’ supplements bundle had they existed at the time? Not with my hand on my heart, I can’t.

I understand, deeply, that impulse to want to make an uncertain, unfamiliar time feel more fun and shiny. When you desperately want to do something rather than simply wait, I can see how a complicated ‘trimester zero’ routine might feel like the answer.

But here is what it boils down to for me. ‘Trimester zero’ is unhelpful because it’s not sustainable. It’s too much to track; too many things to avoid and think about and control – not least if you would also like to maintain a job and a personality.

Take it from someone who has tried, really quite hard and for really quite considerable stretches of time, to eat, drink and exercise as if they were pregnant before they actually were in order to minimise all possible risk: It’s no way to live.

At a certain point, having invested all that effort can start to make each negative pregnancy test or overly prompt period (rude) feel even more demoralising. Everything you’re doing – and all for a non-existent baby rather than for yourself and what makes you feel good – can start to feel like sacrifice, even punishment, instead of self-care.

And prioritising the needs of a theoretical unborn child over your own well-being – you, as a fully formed, living, breathing, gloriously complex, changeable, nuanced human being? That doesn’t sound like a road we want to go down at all.

I can’t keep up with the laundry. I can’t keep up with the beauty standard. I can’t keep up with my inbox, the news, my podcast feed (sidenote: two episodes a week from one podcast is too many. Unless you are a news outlet, please stop!)

I can’t keep up with writers who publish a book a year (or even every other year). I can’t keep up with the school WhatsApp or the weeds in my lawn.

I can’t even keep up with my own newsletter.

At its worst, this can’t-keep-up feeling means everywhere and anywhere I look – around my house, at my phone, out of the window – I see things that require my attention, problems to solve, unfinished tasks and unsatisfied desires. They feel like a reproach, sometimes, all these things. It makes me want to run away.

Like the increasingly rampant tangle of brambles along one side of our house that makes me feel itchy with impatience to hack it away every time I drive or walk past. Which is basically every day.

Or the Sunday paper, languishing on the floor by my desk as I have not yet got round to it. It is – at time of writing – Wednesday.

There are currently no fewer than nine unread magazines strewn between my hallway table, the living room, and the sofa in my office, which I optimistically hope to get to some day (I move them around sometimes, as if this might make the difference). I even bought a copy of Vogue on my way home from seeing The Devil Wears Prada 2, the film having piqued a sort of rebellious nostalgia in me. I was, you see, going to find time to sit and luxuriate in reading it from cover to cover. I was going to be that kind of person again.

Ha. ha. ha.

This isn’t meant to be a poor-me post about not having enough time (at least, I hope I can pull it back from the brink of being that).

I don’t actually think this particular bout of overwhelm is about time management at all, or even the related issue of energy.

But I don’t know exactly what it is about either.

I’m not burnt out this time. I know, rationally, that if I’m time-poor it’s only because I’m trying to do lots of things. Mostly by choice. A week’s holiday at the beginning of the month eased the can’t-keep-up of it all a little – but not as much as I’d hoped.

Is it ageing-millennial panic? Is it inching closer to 40? Is it post-miscarriage hormones? Existential dread? The mental load?

All of the above?

I suppose it begs the question, if I feel like I can’t keep up, then who or what am I trying to keep up with? Answers on a postcard please. (Or in the comments, which I promise I will try to reply to in a timely manner).

As for what to do about it, the answer should be obvious, as someone who runs: slow down. Stop chasing and straining and pushing to keep up with the people ahead of you. Slow it right down until it feels vaguely comfortable. Or, at least, tolerable.

Slow down as much as you need to keep going – and try not to mind about anyone else.

There are many things on my list – high-quality research into causes of and treatment for recurrent miscarriage, better access to early-pregnancy units, routine psychological support – but, generally, the décor of the Bad News Room doesn’t feature.

But also, during my most recent miscarriage, I could not help thinking: This room. This fucking room.

How I’d love to make it over to be less grim.

The walls were institutional magnolia. Two sides lined with vinyl-upholstered waiting-room chairs. (The kind that expel a little puff of air when you sit down on them, in a way that feels semi-embarrassing).

There was a small, fake-pine coffee table (but no actual coffee, obviously) pushed up against one wall. A box of tissues. The requisite charity leaflets in their Perspex holsters.

Oh I’ve been on their podcast, I noted, looking at one. As for the other, I interviewed its founder for my book.

Looking at those leaflets, in that particular Bad News moment, waiting for the consultant in the little room marked ‘quiet’, a few doors down from the scanning room, made me feel almost fraudulent.

Like: who did I think I was I to have done such things, presented myself as an authority on pregnancy loss, when I can’t even keep myself out of the Bad News Room? Who was I trying to kid?

Which isn’t remotely fair, as it’s not like I wrote a book full of tips and tricks promising to tell people how not to have a miscarriage. But since when does a post-miscarriage brain play fair?

As I sat there, waiting for the consultant, I found myself drawn back to how, exactly, I would make the awful room look better. It was like my brain couldn’t resist it. In life, I’m a person who likes to make things look nice. I’m always mentally rearranging furniture, painting walls, adding flowers to other people’s front gardens, adjusting necklines.

But this might have been my mind’s weirdest renovation project yet.

I really got into it, though. Suddenly, Miranda July’s protagonist in All Fours spending $20,000 making over a motel room made complete sense to me.

Why should the Bad News Room be functional and inoffensive, when it could be exquisite?

First, there should be some art on the walls. Huge canvases by Tom de Freston or Nan Collantine, perhaps.

It should have enormous squashy sofas in fabrics that don’t need to be wipe-clean. Velvet. Nubbly faux sheepskin. Linen in cheerful deck-chair stripes.

The walls should be painted in any colour that feels on purpose. Setting plaster. Sage green. Aubergine. I would also accept flamboyant, botanical wallpaper, perhaps by House of Hackney. Or more stripes (always with the stripes, my brain).

There’s no big light in my Bad News Room, obviously. No institutional strip-lighting. Only lamps, with silk shades, an unusual print here – a judiciously eccentric bit of fringing there.

Oh and bookcases. There have to be bookcases. These would be stacked with subject-relevant books, obviously. (The Brink Of Being, by Julia Bueno, The Worst Girl-Gang Ever, Beyond Grief, by Pippa Vosper, Kat Brown’s No One Talks About This Stuff, Adrift, by Miranda Ward, Underwing, by Jennifer Lane).

Also: Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am, Cathy Rentzenrbrink’s A Manual For Heartache. Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail.

And in case you want comfort reads: The Cazalet Chronicles. Jilly Cooper. Marian Keyes. The Timewaster Letters. Adrian Mole. Plus thrillers, courtroom dramas, and psychos for escapism – but all carefully selected to ensure none of them use pregnancy loss as a jump-scare, or infertility as the backstory for why a woman Went Bad.

Oh – and some art books might be nice. Glossy, expensive things, filled with the world’s best photography, fashion, gardens.

There should also be some means of playing music, should you want it. Likewise for watching TV – with infinite streaming options so you can find your comfort-blanket boxset as required.

Literal blankets would also be provided. And hot water bottles. Tissues too, obviously, but only from inside the most delicately hand-painted tissue box cover.

Plus snacks! Fresh pastries. Chocolate truffles. M&S treat tubs. Unusual crisps. Dates. Fresh fruit. A carafe of water, thoughtfully placed at hand, with pretty, jewel-tinted glasses. Also: exciting soft drinks, their cans selected for aesthetic appeal but also unfamiliarity, to give you the transporting illusion, just for a second, of browsing a foreign supermarket.

And don’t forget the coffee machine. (A good one, but it has to be instantly easy to work, no squinting at a manual required.) Next to it, you would also find an array of different kinds of tea, the paper-wrapped teabags neatly arranged in rainbow order, from rooibos to lavender & valerian, nestled inside a wooden box. Not forgetting an absolutely massive box of Yorkshire tea (or your preferred equivalent) too, obviously.

The mugs provided should be robust and generous – chunky and hand-thrown. The kettle mustn’t rattle alarmingly or be encrusted with limescale, either.

What else? Would one of those ‘push for champagne’ buttons be too extra? Is the fact I might even consider wanting to drink a glass of champagne in such circumstances a sign of how addled my brain is by going through this so many times?

The point is, such a room should do everything it is possible to do to entice you with comfort, remind you of what pleasures still exist beyond its walls. It should be cosseting, frivolous, luxurious. Because you will get to leave this room eventually – and then you’ll have to work out how to feel all right in the world again.

I’m not pretending that wanting any of this is sensible or reasonable or even remotely possible. It would, of course, be a fantastically inefficient use of money. I’m also well-aware that this sort of quiet room often isn’t available at all, after a miscarriage. Perhaps let’s start with that, before we crack out the moodboard and swatches.

And, crucially, you can still feel like it’s the end of everything in a beautiful room.

But, hey, it wouldn’t hurt.

PS. Thank you for your lovely messages and emails after my last newsletter. They help.

I’ll get this out the way quickly: I had another miscarriage. That’s six now, but who’s counting? (Not the NHS that’s for sure, nor the Office for National Statistics, nor indeed most data-collection bodies in most wealthy nations…because, as you’ll know if you’ve read my book, most countries don’t bother to record comprehensive data on miscarriages).

Anyway, that’s why I disappeared for a bit. And by subtitling this newsletter ‘for the worst of times’ I can’t say I’m referring to the current geopolitical bin-fire/ the world being held hostage by deranged, evil men – which would be far more noble and outward-looking of me – I mean it on a myopically personal level.

Several weeks on, I still feel almost allergic to anything too demanding or close to home.

I have not, for example, watched any of Babies yet – the BBC’s new six-part drama about recurrent pregnancy loss. Apparently it’s excellent. But also a very difficult watch if you’ve lived it. (It’s the true miscarriage/baby loss/infertility paradox this, isn’t it? I’m overwhelmingly glad this show has been made – not least because people I trust say it gets such a lot right about recurrent miscarriage – and yet I can’t bring myself to watch it. Not so soon after a miscarriage of my own.)

I’ve also not watched The Plastic Detox, the Netflix documentary on microplastics and fertility. (Though the Big Fat Negative team did, and wrote this very helpful reality check).

Right now, superficiality seems to be my coping mechanism. I’ve been absorbing myself with: My running data and new training plans1, colour schemes for the garden, repainting the front door, face-rolling, new lotions and potions, and making adorable jars of Cadbury’s Mini Egg overnight oats, like I’m a 23-year-old meal-prep influencer.

Every miscarriage I’ve had has felt like its own mini madness – subtly distinct in character each time. This go-around it’s apparently a mania for the presentational; of wanting to feel light and glossy and new again.

So, in no particular order, here are the things that I’ve loved, bought/considered buying, eaten and read lately…

Really, really good jeans. Look, I know. What kind of insane masochist decides to shop for new jeans just after a miscarriage? I guess my thinking was that if I found a pair I liked while feeling this shit, they must be good. Maybe? But, really, who knows why we do anything. Amazingly, a pair from new-ish brand Palome2 managed to meet this unhinged test criteria. I bought these and they are ridiculously great. They were £70, but the denim feels to me like they should cost three times that. They are noticeably better quality than my previous go-tos from M&S and Mango and the multiple pairs of £100+ Levi’s I also tried on and didn’t buy. The only bad thing I have to say is that Palome’s sizing range sucks. I would like this blue shirt next though.

M&S Combo Mix Salt & Black Pepper crisps. The best crisps of all time. No arguments. Friends who bring you them as part of a miscarriage care package are the best friends of all time.

How pleasing is this little box of matches shaped like a quaint bookshop?

Rivals (Disney Plus). I avoided this when the TV adaptation first launched, as I didn’t know if it was really meant for me, as someone who missed the teenage Jilly Cooper phase (we were more of a Catherine Cookson household). I also hadn’t read the book first, which always makes me feel like I’m breaking a rule. Anyway, I’ve watched it now – just in time for season 2 – and I cannot get enough. Humour, high-camp, glamour. I’d say inject it into my veins, but I’ve been pricked and prodded with needles quite enough lately.

Harry Styles’ Aperture. I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with this song, but I am. I’ve been running to it quite a lot (and fantasising about being the kind of person who runs marathons).

Love Story. (Disney Plus). The perfect answer to my plea in a previous newsletter for more TV with Good Clothes. (I say this, while also trying not to examine just how ghoulish it is – of me, of everyone – that we so rapidly metabolised this very sad story about two very real people into a frenzy of affiliate-link laden ‘Get The CBK look’ listicles).

Elegance, by Kathleen Tessaro. Do you remember this book? It was a massive bestseller in the early 2000s – about Louise, an unhappily married American living in London who finds an old A–Z of style, written by French fashion expert, Madame Antoine Dariaux (a real book) in a secondhand bookshop. Naturally, she starts following Madame Dariaux’s advice and transforms her life (in ways both shallow and deep). I’m not sure what made me think of this novel again – maybe it was CBK-related? – but it was an excellent re-read when I wanted to turn my brain all the way off (a phrase I liked so much in Monica Heisy’s excellent newsletter, I’m stealing it). There is, inevitably, language that has dated badly, but also plenty of pleasurable 90s nostalgia (Kookai! Tops from Morgan de toi! No one has a phone!)

This piece by Penny Wincer on the double-edged sword of writing about your own life – and the whiplash of being pitied for what you share. As she writes:

‘We often talk about the feelings of solidarity gained from sharing our stories when the response comes from those who say ‘me too’ and ‘you are not alone’. But others will starkly remind us that our experience might be even worse than we think it is.

The video for Taylor Swift’s Opalite. I never see music videos, so no idea how this one found me. It’s ridiculously delightful. I knew nothing about the backstory, so I was baffled when Graham Norton pops up. But now I’m all in.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner trying to work out why she’s seen the musical Operation Mincemeat 13 times. Hilarious and unexpectedly moving. (Also newly relatable, now that my son has become obsessed with the soundtrack and we listen to it a minimum of twice per day.)

This piece on the Hot Girl Arms Race – which I read thanks to beauty journalist Claire Coleman’s new newsletter, Beauty Geekery. (If you’re a data-driven person, like me, you’ll love Claire’s no-nonsense, science-led take on skincare, hair, make-up and all things beauty industry. Most beauty ‘journalism’ is nothing of the sort. Claire’s is.)

This entirely lovely piece of writing about parenting. (Proceed with caution, obviously, depending on your circumstances.)

This poem on delight and loving the world, in spite of everything.

And finally, this piece by on the interminable admin of having miscarriages, which I’ve mentioned here before, but I appreciated it all over again in a month landmarked mostly by hospital trips for blood tests – and getting very little else done.

Speak soon,

In it, I’m wearing a t-shirt that reads: Five miscarriages, still pro-choice.

The picture is part of a new exhibition – Pregnancy Endings – a portrait series that aims to show the interconnectedness of miscarriage, abortion, baby loss, and birth.

The exhibition is part of the Feminist Miscarriage Project (which you can read more about here) and the portraits were taken by Tara Todras-Whitehill, whose 2019 series I Had An Abortion you may remember (the people photographed included Gloria Steinem).

For the Pregnancy Endings portraits, we were all asked what we’d like our t-shirt statement to be. Some are personal stories, such as ‘When I didn’t want to be pregnant I was/When I did I wasn’t’ and ‘I continue to parent my stillborn daughter proudly and out loud’. Others are rallying cries, such as ‘Dignity in every pregnancy ending’ and ‘Teach abortion, Teach miscarriage, Teach fertility’. There’s also a group portrait of healthcare workers – taken in a scanning room – whose t-shirts read: ‘We provide NHS care for people who have abortions, miscarriage, ectopic pregnancies and IVF’.

As for my own t-shirt statement, I thought I’d share with you the piece I wrote for the exhibition notes, trying to explain why I feel so strongly about the need to make it plain that you can grieve early miscarriages and remain steadfastly pro-abortion.

Two Ancient Trees

When I set out to write my book on pregnancy loss there was a chapter I felt strongly I wanted to include: a chapter on abortion.

Initially, I wondered if it might be a hard-sell. After all, the book is based on my own experiences of recurrent miscarriage and I have never had an abortion or a termination for medical reasons.

Yet including this chapter mattered to me, perhaps more than any other.

Inconveniently, when it came to getting the words down on paper, it was also by far the hardest to write. I doubted myself constantly. Every description seemed fraught, every word choice trespassed on a cultural battleground: heartbeat, life, baby, personhood.

I feared that in writing honestly about how jarring I sometimes found phrases deployed in the defence of reproductive rights (‘it’s just a bunch of cells’, ‘it’s not a real baby yet’) I’d be unwillingly doing the work of those who would strip away women’s freedom and bodily autonomy.

At the same time, I worried that writing about the importance of being able to end a pregnancy might be hurtful to the kind of reader likely to seek out my book, demanding too great a leap of empathy from someone who wants, more than anything, to be able to stay pregnant.

Why did I feel so strongly about it?

Why was I making things harder for myself?

Well, for a start, I knew that termination for medical reasons is more common in this country than stillbirth. To overlook this in a journalistic study of pregnancy loss would be erasing the experience of thousands.

It also felt important to set out my stall as someone who has grieved the loss of first-trimester pregnancies profoundly and who remains staunchly pro-abortion. I suppose I needed people to know that you can be both.

Because at the time – in the late 2010s – I sensed a reticence to take up the topic of miscarriage and baby loss as a mainstream feminist cause. And I wondered if abortion rights didn’t have something to do with this.

Things have changed, of course. Shortly after I finished writing my book, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, America’s uneasy legal arrangement that was supposed to protect the right to abortion.

And we’ve seen in horrifying, livid ways since – through stories of women dying after being denied medical treatment for miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy – just how closely aligned are the rights of women who need abortions and women who lose wanted pregnancies. We are one and the same.

As I eventually wrote in that thorny, difficult chapter, our interests are entwined ‘like two ancient trees that have grown up and around each other for so long it is hard to know where one begins and the other ends’.

What do you think? And, if you feel able to share, what would your own t-shirt say?

• The Pregnancy Endings exhibition is open now, until May 4th - at the Bomb Factory Art Foundation in Holborn. It’s really powerful in person, so if you’re in central London, do go if you can. (More details here).

Last week, I read Underwing, Jennifer Lane’s new memoir of grieving her daughter Sky after a termination for medical reasons. I found it very moving and thought-provoking – it’s unflinchingly honest and raw at times (writing about grief from quite close-range).

Interspersed with Lane’s account of her first year as a bereaved mother are snippets of stories from old mythologies, interesting detours into nature writing and the lore of animal symbolism in ways that reminded me a little of Wintering, by Katherine May.

I wasn’t sure, at first glance, how I’d get along with this book. As well as a powerful writer, Lane is a Pagan, a practising green witch and a reiki practitioner while I am….perhaps the least woo-woo person you can imagine.

In fact, it turns out that, as a gardener, I can find a lot more common ground with a green witch than with the crystals ’n’ manifestation girlies (of this kind of New Age mysticism, which she says has a ‘blatantly capitalist bent’, Lane writes: ‘Life also encompasses death, dying, sickness and trauma, but there are certain people in the New Age community who only focus on the light…some would put a soft hand on your arm and paint on a pained expression to tell you it’s your own fault when bad things come your way’).

What struck me most about Underwing is how clearly it shows what a seismic experience, like the loss of a baby, can do to a person’s belief system – Lane’s grief seems to send her both deeper inside hers (magpies, curlews, foxes…what are they trying to tell her?) while at the same time cracks appear. She questions herself – as a Pagan, as a witch – constantly, scouring the past for signs and portents from the natural world that she might have missed.

I may not be able to relate entirely to death omens or rituals to ask the goddess Brigid for a baby, but I absolutely related to that fracturing of your identity, while delving deeper into the beliefs essential to it for answers.

To be clear, I don’t have a ‘belief system’ in the sense of any religion or spiritual tradition (and so I hope it’s not disrespectful to draw parallels here) but recurrent pregnancy loss did see me clinging to certain parts of myself tighter than ever – I could work harder, put more effort in, do more research. Science would yield answers, I just had to find the right expert, the right randomised-control trial.

Yet, at the same time, I started to see the limitations of it all. Sometimes the evidence I needed just didn’t exist. Sometimes it did, in a literal sense – but I could pick its reassuring conclusions about the safety of [insert activity/behaviour/food stuff here] in early pregnancy to shreds in minutes. Women with a history of miscarriage would have self-selected out of this study, I’d argue to myself. Or any number of other quibbles with the methodology that could explain why I didn’t feel reassured.

I also flirted with alternative health and healing for the first time. I wore socks inside my slippers to keep my womb ‘warm’. I did a bit of acupuncture and reflexology. Breathwork. Meditation. These things might sound like nothing now, in the age of Big Wellness, but at the time, for a person for whom the average yoga class often skewed too ‘woo’, this was quite a departure.

We have quite cliched ideas, I think, about what profound loss or trauma can do for our beliefs. We imagine dramatic conversions or disavowals – crises of faith. But, as Underwing made me think, perhaps the reality is more often more slippery than that.

It’s more like living in a house while it’s being destroyed and re-built around you. Everything is a test, everything is a challenge. Everything shifting all the time. You see the splintering plaster and shards of wood, but you’re also still sure you can find treasure in the attic if you just look hard enough.

Anyway, Underwing is out today, you can order it here. Jennifer Lane is also on Instagram and writes the Substack The Green Witch.

P.S. I’d love to know your take on this and what profound loss did to your own belief system (in the loosest possible sense), drop me a comment or a DM.

Call it the last-chance saloon, the hail-Mary pass, or the darkest hour before the dawn – it’s a storytelling beat that’s irresistible to me.

So many fertility stories are structured around this trope. Almost all of them, in fact.

You know the ones – the against-all-the-odds stories, the it-finally-happened-when-we-thought-all-was-lost stories. The successful pregnancy after x number of miscarriages. The one last embryo transfer that worked.

Yes, sometimes these stories and their headlines irk me. ‘Miracle twins for local mum after TEN miscarriages’! (The word ‘miracle’ – especially when prefixed to ‘baby’ or ‘cure’ ­– is guaranteed to raise my hackles).

But, still, I always read them.

Or rather, I used to read them.

Ironically, as I reached what felt to me like my own reproductive last-chance saloon – before I got pregnant with my son back in 2019 – I stopped craving these sorts of stories as much.

Instead, I wanted to read about people who’d had multiple miscarriages and didn’t go on to have children. I wanted to read about people who decided x number of losses was enough, actually.

I wanted to read about how they reached that point – how they knew, how they made their peace with it. I wanted the steps along the way, as well as the full, fabulous lives they went on to build afterwards (of course).

Perhaps this is why I started writing about that fifth pregnancy – in bits of writing that what would eventually go on to form Life, Almost – before I knew how it would work out. Back then, I’d started to think of it as a make-or-break pregnancy for us. In the opening pages of Life, Almost I write:

The reason I so badly want to know if I am pregnant right now is because, if I am, I know it could well be for the last time, whatever happens. I don’t know how much more of this we have left in us. I don’t know if I can put us through it all again.

However (further irony) by the time I came to actually publish those words in book-form – once I did know how things turned out – I felt very strongly that I didn’t want my own story to follow a neat, miracle-baby narrative arc.

Because I knew by then that, however much the intense uncertainty before and during the early days of that fifth pregnancy, after four previous losses, felt like it surely had to be darkest hour before the dawn… it wasn’t.

When I was 24 weeks pregnant, the world was shutdown by a global pandemic. My pregnancy was psychologically and emotionally fraught, right the way through to term. It never really let up. And then I struggled post-natally, too. Sometimes, it felt like I was experiencing the hero’s triumph and still battling through a long night of the soul, simultaneously.

But old habits really do die screaming. Because now, six years on, I find myself still lapping up hail-Mary, last-chance-saloon stories again – only now, instead of fertility, they’re about publishing.

The author who feared they’d have to sell their house, if their next book didn’t sell – who went on to have an international bestseller. The manuscript turned down xx times before going on to win a big prize.

I keep a running internal record of these stories, assiduously collecting them as if to prove something to myself. I note how many agents turned down successful authors. How long it took someone to write their big hit.

The authors who mention being on the verge of quitting.

The author who didn’t know how they were going to make their next mortgage payment before a hail-Mary book sold for six figures.

And the thing is, I know that all these snippets I’m holding on to will be vastly over-simplified versions of the real stories. I also know that, even if my wildest book-writing dreams come true, my own story will still feel far more mundane and less heroic.

Because I know that life doesn’t work this way. I don’t really believe in long, dark nights of the soul followed by dramatic breakthroughs any more. Just many, murky evenings of quiet crisis, followed by small steps this way, then that. Many decisions that loop back on themselves, made, un-made, and then re-made.

I know this, because it’s how the story of whether or not to have another baby is unfolding for us right now. I’ll be 40 this year. I had my fifth miscarriage nearly three years ago. A chemical pregnancy in December. (Pregnant for a day, and then not pregnant again.)

I didn’t want to try again. And then I did. And then I didn’t again.

Now, we really are in the last-chance saloon.

Yet there has, at no point, been a clarifying moment of epic re-commitment to the quest. No rash of expensive further investigations, no throw-the-kitchen sink at it. No heroic last-ditch effort. Just tentative, quiet exploration. (Often before backing off again).

Instead of a grand epiphany, there has been a referral request I’d forgotten I’d made, finally coming good. A fresh bout of NHS-approved tests. (Hormone levels, vitamin D, blood-clotting stuff, thyroid, AMH etc. All normal. Frustratingly, bafflingly normal).

Instead of heroics, there has been doing just enough to stave off as much regret as possible. All the while, trying not to put life on hold. All the while, quietly letting go of expectations, as various options for how our family might have looked slip beyond our grasp. A three-year age gap… a four-year age gap…five…

As a story shape goes, it’s been less a dramatic scaling of a mountain, and more a gentle tide going out, acceptance coming in. Will there be one final boat we manage to catch?

I tell myself I’ll be happy whatever happens. And, mostly, I really believe this. Only every now and again do I admit the sly, unhelpful voice that whispers: But you always said you wanted three children…

Perhaps this anti-dramatic story is the reason I’ve transferred my fertility fantasy arcs to publishing fairytales – and not just because the stakes are a lot lower than babies.

Because in this area, at least, I can convince myself I still believe in the satisfying clarity of the hero’s journey.

And maybe we all need a version of that to keep us going.

Hello, hello,

Apologies that you’ve had a couple of newsletter-free weeks from me. I did have a post ready to go, but what started out as one thing ended up really quite personal by the time I’d finished writing, so I decided it needed a bit of room to breathe before sending it out. I expect I’ll share it with you next week though.

For now, here’s this month’s round-up of brilliant things, delicious things, book-shaped things, entertaining things, window-shopping things, etc.

Some things I want…

This candle. I had to go into Manchester for a very mundane work task (involving a laptop and a systems update), but it did mean I got to walk past The Nice Shops, so I went into The White Company and smelled all the aspirational smells. This candle was my favourite. Orange leaf, oak, leather…and something softer and feminine underneath.

This hat is something I’ve actually bought this month. Due to the rain this side of the Pennines, I pretty much wear a beanie from October through March1 And I thought red might be pleasing on grey days. It’s also neither too scratchy nor prone to pointy-ness, in the manner of an elf’s cap (just me that has this issue with beanies?)

This pistachio spread. I promise I won’t recommend jars of green gloop to you every month, but this really is delicious. (On toast, porridge, croissants, straight from the jar…)

These sunflowers. The café-au-lait colours are probably far too chic for my, um, eclectic (and usually very pink) garden. But I think I might order the seeds anyway. Every winter, in the depths of the wet and the mud, I think I will never summon the energy or enthusiasm to garden ever again. And then, as if by magic, it’s still light at 5.30pm, the first daffodils emerge, and I get The Itch.

Some things you need….

This almond cake recipe (from Queen Nigella), which is made with shop-bought marzipan. It’s sublime. My husband hates marzipan – declaring it an unfood – but even he liked this cake. It’s so good I made it twice in one week. (There was an unsupervised-cat-on-the-kitchen-worktop incident which rendered the rest of the first loaf inedible, so I made it all over again the following day. And scowled lots at the cat.)

The Feminist Miscarriage Project. Do check out this collaboration from two feminist academics – now on Instagram. Its aim is to promote intersectional research and also to expand the way we think about miscarriage, connecting it with other pregnancy endings, including abortion. I’m taking part in an exhibition of photographs they’re co-ordinating later this year.

Something to watch…

You didn’t think you were getting away without my take on Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, did you? Honestly, I kinda loved it. Mad and maximalist, horny and oozy (suggestive bread-kneading, albumen all over the place, that fish preserved in aspic). There are lots of perfectly valid criticisms – chiefly, that it is perhaps a bit emotionally shallow – but, truthfully, I love anything that takes a big artistic swing, even if it doesn’t quite work. I love that it was a spectacle. I love that the cinema was packed with women when I saw it. I love that people have such strong feelings about it. I’ll take that over a safe, scholarly adaptation any day.

And I enjoyed that it was playing around with our idea of what Wuthering Heights often is – i.e. this deeply romantic, archetypal love story – versus what the book is actually like (casual bit of puppy hanging and corpse-exhumation). The new version is full of nods to the story’s artificial after-life: sometimes it looks like a music video (fitting, when most of us are singing ‘it’s meeee, your Catheeee’ in ours heads any time WH is mentioned) at other times Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are lit like something out of classic Hollywood, or framed like a Mills & Boon cover image. I don’t think any of that is unintentional.

Anyway, if you related to my post about Good Clothes on TV, I’d say watch it for the fabulous costume design alone. (And then maybe read this on aesthetics over accuracy in period costume, which I found interesting).

And something to read…

My Good Bright Wolf, by Sarah Moss. I was blown away by this memoir from the acclaimed novelist about food, femininity and anorexia, written following the return of her teenage eating disorder in midlife. Tellingly, Moss writes about how around the time of her relapse she’d been listening to a lot of wellness podcasts of a type many will recognise: the confident male expert espousing the benefits of eg. fasting or optimizing blood sugar levels, not for weight-loss but for health reasons, you understand (🙄). Starting with her austere, middle-class 1970s childhood, Moss meticulously reveals how the female body becomes a battleground and unpicks where her need to stay small might have come from. But, most strikingly, the narration is interrupted – sometimes unrelentingly – by a critical voice that dogs Moss’s attempts to tell her story. (‘That never happened,’ it’ll interject. Or ‘You can’t possibly remember that’, ‘Stop making a fuss’.) It’s a powerful way to tell a story, especially when so much of it hinges on the fallible memory of one person, but it’s also a painful rendering of what it’s like to live with such an exacting inner critic. I listened to the audiobook, narrated impeccably by Morven Christie.

The Husbands, by Holly Gramazio. If you’re in a reading rut, this would be a great, fun book to break you out of it. Perennially single Lauren returns from a friend’s hen do to find a strange man in her flat claiming to be husband. Even stranger, a quick scan of her phone (wedding photos, a text message chain) suggests he’s right. He disappears into the attic… only for another, different husband to emerge. Lauren’s attic, she slowly realises, is creating an endless supply of husbands for her. Cue some very funny reasons for ‘returning’ a husband and increasingly outrageous pretexts to get a dud husband to go back up into the attic. It’s all very enjoyable, but there’s a serious point underpinning it: about how we choose not just a good partner, but a good life, especially when the choices are potentially infinite. I whipped through it in a couple of days.

That’s it for now. Keep going. Spring’s nearly here.

I worked something out about myself this week. I really like clothes. Specifically, I really like clothes on TV. If I’m watching something – if I’m going to really enjoy a series – it needs to have good clothes.

All the telly I’ve loved the most has GREAT clothes.

Think Shiv Roy’s silk blouses and camel coats in Succession. The power tailoring in Ally McBeal (my teenage obsession). Gossip Girl. Sex And The City (obviously). Mad Men. Downton Abbey. The White Lotus (especially Aubrey Plaza’s Sicilian holiday wardrobe in s2). The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. The Crown. Daisy Jones & The Six. Lena Dunham’s Too Much. Basically anything set in Scandinavia (it’s the knitwear).

Friends has Rachel (come for Long-Island-princess-meets-90s-grunge, stay for the Ralph Lauren years).

Series 16 of Taskmaster has Susan Wokoma’s many excellent dresses.

Even The West Wing has CJ’s black-tie showstoppers to sustain you in what is otherwise a clothes desert.

In fact, the only show I can think of that I truly love but which I do not consider to have Good Clothes is Gilmore Girls. (sorrysorrysorry).

Perhaps this sounds mad to you. But it’s almost like a craving. For me, sitting down to watch a show that doesn’t have good clothes – even one that otherwise ticks the boxes – is like sitting down to a meal that’s fine, but not your favourite.

There’s nothing wrong with it, it just affects my anticipation and desire for it quite drastically. Possibly disproportionately.

This isn’t about fashion or shopping or getting ideas1. Good Clothes doesn’t mean outfits I want to wear, necessarily. See: And Just Like That2. Or Girls (sometimes bad clothes make excellent TV Clothes).

So what does make ‘good’ TV clothes?

Well, first there’s got to be something that’s pure visual feast. Something glamorous, something out there, something decadent, something bold, something lustrous, something intricate, something unusual.

And truly good TV clothes have to be doing more than just signalling that the main character is thin/hot/young/works in fashion. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of this in on-screen wardrobes now – especially on original shows made by streamers – a sort of contemporary blandness. The clothes look nice, but they’re also utterly forgettable. Is it because they know we’re all looking at our phones, while we watch TV? I hope not.

Because clothes – clothes done well – are about more than having something beautiful to look at (though, ideally, they do that too). Good Clothes help you imagine what it’s like to be that person, to feel how it would be to move around in their body. They’re sensory as well as visual.

All the writers I love best know this. They all do clothes really, really well. Whether it’s Maggie O’Farrell describing the sound of a silk dress moving across a stone floor or the feel of a row of buttons, or Elizabeth Jane Howard detailing the Cazalet women’s trips to the dressmaker, or Hilary Mantel taking a momentary aside from the King’s Great Matter to mention Cromwell’s covetable grey velvet.

Perhaps what I really mean is that I want good costume design. (But that sounds suspiciously pretentious.)

What I do know is that my clothes-hunger might explain why I feel stumped for what to watch at the minute.

Now that series two of The Night Manager has finished – in which excellent clothes were served up by Roxana, played by Camila Morrone, picking up where Elizabeth Debicki’s Jed left off – I need a new tempting, telly wardrobe.

All this to say, please give me your recommendations for Good Clothes^TM TV…..

Hello, hello,

I am deep in a what’s-the-point-of-anything funk (let’s put that down to it being Day 612 of January and also feeling like I’m going in circles with my book edit) so I’m writing you this list of nice things, cosy things, informative things ­– and so on – and hoping it will snap me out of it.

If you’re new to this newsletter, I do one of these round-ups a month. It used to be mostly books, articles, and fertility news, but that was starting to feel too much like homework (for me and, I suspect, for you) so now there’s a bit of a window-shopping and other little life-enhancers thrown in for good measure.

Some things you want…

Nordic Socks. Seriously good, warm socks. I got a pair of these for Christmas and now I’m a tiny bit sad whenever they’re in the wash and I can’t wear them inside my boots.

White Mausu black bean rayu – I’ve yet to find a meal that can’t be improved by this smoky, miso-y chilli oil, tbh.

Pollen Bakery’s matcha milk jam. This pond-green matcha and white chocolate spread was another Christmas present. And while I’m not totally convinced of the wisdom of calling something ‘milk jam’, if you like matcha and sweet things, this is delicious on toast.

This wireless, rechargeable lamp - lovely for a kitchen worktop, perhaps?

Some things you need…

The best new year’s advice on the internet. This should be the year you stop trying so hard to turn yourself into a better person and focus instead on actually leading a more absorbing life, reckons Oliver Burkeman.

This list of things that are always good (for when life feels bad), by author and TV writer Monica Heisey.

The Birth Keepers – A Guardian Investigates podcast about two influencers who made millions selling a radical version of free birth: no doctors, no midwives, no ultrasound, no ante-natal appointments. This year-long investigation into The Free Birth Society, by reporting duo Sirin Kale and Lucy Osborne, was released in December and it is excellent. It is impeccably researched, fair-minded and sensitive. It is also, for reasons I’m sure many of you can all-too easily imagine, extremely upsetting. (I have had to pace my listening of it, but I am also so glad this story has been told.)

XigXag – a really good app I’ve been trying for audiobooks instead of Audible. (There’s no subscription and the price per audiobook gets cheaper, the more you buy).

Lauren Bravo’s beautiful – and funny – piece about the long, lonely tail of having miscarriages. It had me from its opening line: ‘I lost two babies last year, and didn’t get much else done.’

Something to watch…

If you read last week’s newsletter, you’ll know I loved the film version of Hamnet, which I managed to get to the cinema to see. It’s a beautiful film, but intense and haunting, too. And if you’re feeling conflicted about watching such a visceral depiction of the loss of a child – especially in public, at the cinema – well, trust your own instinct on that. Sometimes, as much as we want these stories represented, it’s just not the right time for us, personally. (Case in point, when the novel the film is based came out, in March 2020, I was pregnant with my son, hovering around the viability mark. I didn’t – couldn’t – read the book until almost a year later, despite being a Maggie O’Farrell superfan.)

And something to read…

The Land In Winter, by Andrew Miller. This is an evocative and tender story about two couples who live near each other in England’s West Country, during the Big Freeze of 1962. Both the women are newly pregnant1 and newly friendly with each other, when the blizzard sets in, disrupting their lives and marriages in ways both big and small. What I liked about it, is that while there’s sadness and malaise in the book – the long shadow of the Second World War looms large, as does mental illness – it’s not bleak. Read it while waiting for spring.

Or, if you need a completely different sort of book, how about Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures series? If you like magical world-building in the tradition of Philip Pullman or the Narnia books, you’ll love it. I read the second one – about a quest to save the dragons of the Archipelago from being poisoned – over Christmas, and I think I enjoyed it even more than the first. (Also, if you need convincing that grown-ups should read more children’s books, give this a listen on BBC Sounds).

Do you know what? I do actually feel a bit better now. (Roll on February!)

In the past 24 hours, I’ve typed and then deleted comments on at least two media pieces about the film Hamnet.

I typed them out in frustration – a probably deeply unfashionable, over-earnest frustration – at the way the film has been received by some. I deleted them again because I’m not sure what good it does to leave little pieces of my heart below-the-line (I guess if I’m going to do it, I’ll do it here, from the comfort of my own newsletter.)

I saw Hamnet before I read any of the growing discourse around whether or not it’s ‘grief porn’ or ‘emotionally manipulative’. But, unfortunately, I’ve read these takes now.

And, well, I’m quite cross.

Perhaps predictably, I thought the film was incredible. It could just be one of the best films I’ve seen. It looks gorgeous: the palette all earth, mosses and ferns, save for Agnes’s red dresses, which stand out like a warning. Every performance is impeccable – not only Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, but Emily Watson as Shakespeare’s mother Mary, through to the young actors who play the Shakespeare children.

And, for me, the film’s presentation of loss and grief is nuanced, considered, grounded in something true.

For instance, there’s a scene in which Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) arrives home, called back from London, but he’s too late, his son already dead. He sees the body laid out in its winding sheet – and smiles. He cannot help himself. ‘My boy,’ he says. It’s a devastating moment, an interesting acting choice, and a succinct expression of the powerful parental love and pride that remains when other people see only horror.

In an earlier scene, when Agnes gives birth to the twins, Hamnet and Judith, and her daughter appears to be stillborn at first, the midwife attending tries to insist Agnes not hold the baby girl as it’s ‘bad luck’ to look upon ‘it’. A moment designed, surely, knowing full well that even within living memory, many women faced a similar attitude when their babies died, not permitted to hold or see their children as it was deemed better for them psychologically this way.

Or consider the scene when, after Hamnet’s death, Shakespeare tells Agnes – who is ashen, numb with grief – that he is returning to work in London. They argue. She is angry he wasn’t there and that he gets to leave again. All the while, she is peeling boiled eggs at the wooden kitchen table, picking the shell off with her fingers.

It’s such a small thing. But I remember thinking, yes, this is what grief can be like: the veil of all pleasure and comfort stripped away, leaving nothing between you and life’s depressing, sensory squalor. Eggshell sticking under fingernails.

And yes, I cried. Not in a way I’d describe as cathartic. Not in a way that felt like a ‘good’ cry. I was haunted by this film for days afterwards.

It’s not perfect. Is it perhaps a touch too twee-ly bucolic in places? The aesthetic veering into tradwife territory? Maybe. Then again, perhaps that’s deliberate. Perhaps there’s a point in making that particular visual nod only to contrast it with a brutal, unsparing death scene of a fever-racked child – his mother frantically trying to heal him, but ultimately powerless in a time before vaccines, before antibiotics.

The idea that any of this makes Hamnet a ‘weepie’ in the way of a John Lewis advert or even a sentimental, soft-focus movie like Love Story or The Notebook is…. so far removed from the point of this film it feels almost offensive to me.

What do we mean when we dismiss something as ‘grief porn’? I guess it’s implying something gratuitous, debasing, bordering on shameful.

Which is interesting when you consider the way many bereaved parents today often describe being made to feel, shamed into silence: it’s too much, we don’t need to hear it.

Or else, the word ‘porn’ is being used to suggest – what? – inauthenticity? In calling something grief ‘porn’, are you, therefore, suggesting that the emotions it inspires in someone else are somehow less meaningful than your own more artistically discerning emotions?

It’s curiously arrogant to see a film provoke something in an audience, something that you do not experience yourself, and to assume the deficiency must be the film’s – or the audience’s. To decree that what they are experiencing verges on degrading; merely ‘grief porn’.

It’s not that the film should make you cry, or that you have to like it, even. My point is only that it’s a mistake to assume you’re seeing something they’re not, rather than the other way around.

My emotions didn’t need to be manipulated when I watched Hamnet. It tapped into a deep well of what was already there – experiences and feelings that are not rare and yet rarely represented with nuance, gravitas or main-character energy. Things that don’t often get much of a look-in during awards season, certainly.

My guess is, it’s the same for many of the people crying in the cinema at Hamnet.

Because there is a huge cohort of us out here who – for many reasons, be it a traumatic birth, a miscarriage, illness, the loss of a baby or child at any age – do not need reminding, as Shakespeare’s mother Mary says in the film (a line drawn from the original novel):

‘What is given may be taken away, at any time… Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.’

Lest I be accused of ‘grief cos-play’, to be clear, I have not lost a child. Or a baby at full-term. I have lost only the beginnings of children, five times over.

But you do not actually need to have lost an 11-year-old to the bubonic plague in 1596 to feel the truth of those words in your bones.

And perhaps it’s this deep ocean of underrepresented human experience (often, though not exclusively, intimate female experience) that’s being overlooked by the critics carping about ‘grief porn’, apparently baffled at the response to this film.

Perhaps this is what they’re missing.

Which is so predictable, I could cry.

I try to be realistic. And honest with myself about what I will truly enjoy and appreciate in the year ahead – as the person I actually am, rather than who I think I should be.

What I do is: I go to my local bookshop and pre-order a few things I’m really looking forward to reading. I try to spread them out across the year. I don’t actually have to pay until the book comes in (a plus after Christmas) and, very often, by the time the publication day comes around, I’ve semi-forgotten about it, so the text from the bookshop to say it’s arrived feels like I’ve given myself this gift all over again.

I usually go for a mix of things by writers I know I love and want to support, plus debuts that sound too delicious to miss. I absolutely do not pick anything that feels even vaguely like homework (I have a problem with setting myself homework, as I’ve written before).

Last year’s pre-order presents-to-self included Holly Bourne’s So Thrilled For You, Charlotte Runcie’s Bring The House Down, and Jean Hannah Edelstein’s memoir Breasts. (All excellent).

The year before it was Piglet, by Lottie Hazell, and Hagstone, by Sinéad Gleeson.

Here’s what I ordered for myself this year.

Female, Nude, by Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

This sounds intense, sexy and – perhaps most crucially when facing February in Britain – sunny. Sophie, a painter, goes to Greece on a final single-girls trip before her best friend gets married. Back home, her partner is keen to start trying for a baby. In the course of the holiday, Sophie paints a nude portrait of another friend, and becomes involved with Ky, who lives and works on the island. Both the painting, and the affair, will challenge everything Sophie thinks she knows, about art, about motherhood, about sex.

(Out February 12^th)

Fundamentally, by Nussaibah Younis

Technically, this is out already – but I’ve pre-ordered the paperback. An unlikely comedy about Nadia, who accepts a job at a UN camp rehabilitating ISIS brides, and the friendship she forms with Sara, a precocious and sweary East Londoner who joined ISIS at just 15.

(Out in paperback February 12^th)

Witch Trial, by Harriet Tyce

Yes, Harriet, as in Harriet-from-The-Traitors. (Apparently her book sales are up 95 per cent since the show started). Funnily enough, her new one, Witch Trial, had just been recommended to me as an incredibly smart thriller – about the murder trial of two teenage girls, accused of killing their friend – a few days before the new series started. No spoilers here, but her performance on the show bodes well for clever plotting and explosive twists.

(Out February 26^th)

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke

Bring on the tradwife dystopia…This is billed as Ballerina Farm meets The Handmaid’s Tale. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle – which she shares with her 8 million followers. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. (So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes?) Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1805. Is this a hoax? A reality show? Or has she really travelled back in time?

(Out April 9^th)

People Pleaser, by Bryony Gordon

I love the premise of this, which is basically the 1990s Jim Carrey film Liar, Liar[1]…but with people pleasing. After years of trying to keep everybody around her happy, Olivia Greenwood wakes up one day and finds herself unable to please anyone but herself. Delightful.

(Out April 23^rd)

All Grown Up, by Daisy Buchanan

After 30 long years, Louisa’s daughters can finally look after themselves … or so she thinks. Because suddenly, they’re back – apparently for good. Meg’s second-guessing her marriage. Jo’s career hangs in the balance. Amy has inexplicably quit university. None of them empty the dishwasher. A modern spin on Little Women, told from Marmee’s POV and transposed to Chesire? Yes please!

(Out June 4^th)

Land, by Maggie O’Farrell

I first read Maggie O’Farrell’s debut novel, After You’d Gone, when I was at sixth form (I can still remember the feel of the laminated, hardback copy I’d borrowed, at random, from Cambridge Central Library) and it changed both my brain and my idea of what a novel could do to you. It just sort of…took up residence inside me. I’ve read everything she’s written since, and will read everything she writes next. Her new novel is about a father and son tasked with mapping the whole of Ireland for the Ordnance Survey in 1865 – not long after The Great Hunger has ravaged the country and its people.

(Out June 2^nd)

What about you? Any pre-order presents-to-self in your future? What about other January rituals that aren’t depressing? Do tell.

[1] An absolute classic example of divorce-panic in family films of the 90s… see also: Mrs Doubtfire…but I digress.

It snowed here this week. I love the snow.

I love it for all the usual gushy, romantic reasons: that soft, muffling light; how everything looks gorgeous under a blanket of snow. Not just bare branches and seed heads, but bus stops, litter bins and dead Christmas trees waiting to be collected by the council. Only the best angles are highlighted – the rest concealed. (If Charlotte Tilbury did weather, it would be snow.)

Of course, now that I live somewhere where snow is a pretty regular winter visitor, I know it isn’t all magic and photogenic frosting. Sometimes, snow means I can’t get my little car off the lane. One year, it got so cold outside that a vital element of our boiler froze, rendering it functionally useless. And it’s hard to keep the romance alive when you’re pouring boiling water from a kettle on to what you hope is the right pipe.

But, still, although the love is a little more worn-in and clear-eyed these days, I really do love the snow.

I love the snow because it always reminds me of a particular day, at a particular time in my life when I really needed some magic.

It was the beginning of December, at the end of our year of miscarriages. Dan and I woke up one Sunday to find the town where we lived at the time covered in snow. It hadn’t been forecast. The roads hadn’t been gritted or cleared. It was the pure, driven snow of Christmas carols and Mariah Carey music videos. Deep and crisp and even.

For my job at the time, I was supposed to buy and go through all the Sunday newspapers, to check for any health stories we might need to follow-up on. But I couldn’t get them that day. No where had them. No deliveries, because of the snow, we were told.

And so our day unfolded completely differently from how we’d planned. I emailed my boss, worrying about the implausibility of it all. But also delighted to have an unexpected free day. A grown-up snow day.

Then Dan and I walked to the bakery (I forget now whether it was open). We took pale-faced selfies in the churchyard on our way home. We opened the kitchen door and watched our cats try to make sense of the cold, white stuff.

I wonder if that day sticks in my head now because it felt so joyful – and joy had been missing for most of that year. And yet it just happened. We woke up one morning and there it was, laid out for us.

So now I love the snow because it feels like a promise of unknown possibility; a reminder that things can change.

Everything could look different tomorrow. It might even be better.

Things you never imagined would or could make you happy can and will happen. Crucially, these can be things you didn’t carefully orchestrate, research to the nth degree, or think to put on a vision board you’re not sure you believe in.

Lorelai Gilmore says the reason she loves the snow is because ‘when it snows, something inside me says, “hey that’s your present”.’

When it snows, something inside me says: ‘You never know, you never know’.

Hello, hello,

Thank you for your lovely comments and emails on my last newsletter (if I haven’t replied to you yet, I WILL, I promise).

I suspect this will be the last thing I write to you this year. I know it’s a little early to be winding down, but I strongly believe we should all set out to do a lot less in the winter. That’s not me being whimsical. Our bodies our very light-driven. And the sun didn’t rise here until 8.13am today.

I also know this can be an especially challenging time of year if you are yearning for a baby (whatever specific form that absence takes for you).

So, before I go, I thought I’d leave you with a delicious selection box of links and recommendations that I hope will bring you some comfort and joy….

Some things I want (which you might like too)

This blanket – or something like it – for the new sofa in my office.

Pistachio Lindor.

A kintsugi kit to repair a vase that used to belong to my Grandma.

These very fancy gloves (if I promise to try my best not to leave one behind on the bus, maybe?)

A yellow orchid.

A library ladder.

John Koenig’s The Dictionary Of Obscure Sorrows.

Some mad vintage earrings from Gillian Horsup antiques. Like these. Or these.

The Rose Field - the third instalment of Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust trilogy.

Geranium bath oil, from C. Atherley.

This funny little vase.

A cookbook for my fantasy self.

The stripey M&S Autograph pyjamas I pointed out to my husband back in September.

Some things to read

The Snowchild, by Eowyn Ivey. In Alaska in the 1920s, a childless couple who’ve moved to a remote homestead for a fresh start have their lives turned about by the arrival of a mysterious girl, who apparently lives alone in the wilderness. This is a gorgeous, moving and slightly magical book (with the loss of a baby quietly ever-present in the background). The perfect book to read when winter feels unforgiving.

Well, This Is Awkward, by Esther Walker. I finished this a week or so ago and it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read this year. Mairead – single, child-free, head of an influencer talent agency – has to take in her pre-teen niece when her eco-activist sister has an accident and…well, everyone goes on a voyage of discovery. It’s sharp and satirical (tbh, I’d recommend it on the invented influencer names alone: I’m still smiling to myself about Pottery Mama and ‘That Divorced Girl’) but there’s also stuff going on below the waterline about what children really need and what it means to be a parent.

How To Survive Christmas, by Jilly Cooper. I picked this up second hand after Dame Jilly died earlier this year. It’s a non-fiction collection of festive vignettes and advice. As you’d expect, it’s full of funny observations about a certain kind of upper-middle-class Shire Christmas. There is also a succinctly brilliant section about being childless at Christmas:

People assume, quite mistakenly, that it cheers up the childless to be surrounded by little nieces and nephews at Christmas, or to be asked over to watch a neighbour’s children open their presents, or to be roped in to help with a children’s Christmas party. It is, in fact, torture.

I will say this isn’t an unreserved book recommendation, because it’s at least 15 per cent too 1990s Daily Telegraph for that (jokes about single mothers, drink-driving laws etc). But most of it is very funny. (‘Women tend to behave as though they’re taking a degree in Christmas’. 🙋🏻‍♀️). And the rest is, um, a fascinating time-capsule.

Children’s literature. I plan to read children’s books for the rest of December. I did this last year, almost by accident and it was delightful. Last Christmas, I re-read The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe and listened to The Snow Queen, read by Gretchen Rubin. This year, I’ve got Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King lined up, then as many of the Mary Poppins books as I can manage, and maybe A Wizard Of Earthsea if I have time.

Some things to watch

The Holdovers (Netflix) – Dan and I watched this in summer, but I remember thinking it would be a perfect film to watch at this time of year, especially if you feel on the outside of Christmas looking in. Set in 1970, it’s about an unlikely trio who end up ‘held over’ together over Christmas break at a New England private school: the curmudgeonly, not especially well-liked, teacher left in charge (Paul Giamatti), his teenage pupil who’s been left behind at school while his mother and new stepfather holiday in St Kitts without him (Dominic Sessa), and Mary the school cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who is grieving her son, killed in Vietnam. It’s funny, melancholy, and hopeful all at once.

The Night Manager series 1 (BBC iPlayer) – For some reason, I missed this the first time round in 2016 (working until 9pm most nights on a national newspaper might have had something to do with it…) It’s brilliant escapism: all palatial sun-soaked Marbella villas, Swiss ski resorts, and Elizabeth Debicki in backless satin. Everyone and everything in it is sexy, basically. So now I’m caught up and eager for the new series, out on New Year’s Day.

Home For Christmas/Hjem Til Jul (Netflix) – I think I’ve recommended this charming, comforting-but-not-sickly Norwegian comedy every Christmas since I started this newsletter. I love it so much. Basically: perennially single Johanne snaps and tells her family she has a boyfriend, actually, at the beginning of December. Cue 24 madcap days as she tries to find one to bring to Christmas dinner. Watch the original with subtitles rather than dubbed into English to get the maximum fun out of someone saying ‘merry Christmas fuckboi’ in Norwegian. And if you’re already on board this delightful sleighride – the new series starts tomorrow. Rejoice!

Some things you (may) need

25^th December, by Everything But The Girl. The perfect seasonal song for when the Mariah Carey of it all feels intolerable, but you also fear Joni Mitchell’s River will tip you into the abyss.

If you are right in the heart of pregnancy and baby loss, I have written specifically about this season here and here. And there is a guest post here on my old blog about miscarrying over Christmas.

Beth Kempton’s The Calm Christmas Podcast – I find this so soothing. I have yet to make any of the craft suggestions or recipes (and very much doubt I ever will) but I love Beth’s ethos for this time of year: simple, green, gentle, spacious.

Finally, how about a new (extremely undemanding) festive tradition? After a very miscarriage-y year one year, Dan and I decided we’d do Christmas Episodes Day – we each picked a few Christmas specials from our favourite series and watched them back to back. With snacks. A bit of Josh’s PTSD in West Wing, followed by some Royle Family? Robin finding out she can’t have children in How I Met Your Mother, then a quick visit to Dibley for four Christmas dinners? I even agreed to watch Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, at Dan’s request, although it makes me squirm. (I just want people-pleasers to have happy endings, OK?)

Oh…. also, as we approach The Sound Of Music season… a reminder: Justice For The Baroness!

Until next year,

Last night, I blu-tacked the school’s Christmas Countdown list to my kitchen wall. It’s a full A4 sheet of the various dates and things to remember from now until the end of term (chocolate for the PTA fair, two non-uniform days, Christmas jumper day).

I’d been feeling melancholy. Winter bites hard where we live – and by November I’m out of juice and ready to hibernate. But, as I stuck up that list in a bid to convince my tired brain I am actually on top of things, a satisfied thought whispered: This is exactly what you dreamed of; how you hoped it would be.

It’s true. I’ve written many words over many years about wanting – and not having – a baby, but that was just a shorthand, really. I didn’t dream of having a baby. What I dreamt of was having a child.

I dreamt of nativity plays, reading together, the school run and parents’ evening, wellies and kit bags, writing letters to Father Christmas. I dreamt of the deep-rootedness and rhythms of family life.

But it’s easy to lose sight of all that, when you can’t seem to get out of the starting blocks.

Instead, I started to dream of being pregnant – visibly pregnant – becoming hyperfocused on one day having that stomach: proud and full.

And, as the years dragged on, those other dreams fell away. I stopped having them. But more than that, I forgot what it was like to the be that person who dreamt those things; who believed them to be easily possible.

I found a list the other day in an old notebook, while clearing out my office. I’d written it for myself during my pregnancy with my son, after four previous miscarriages. A careful checklist of milestones I would add to and tick off every week or so. ‘7-week scan’. ‘Get through Christmas’. ‘Get through New Year’.

I was struck by how perfunctory my list was. How spare. With this kind of inching, minute-by-minute pregnancy, that version of you who once had a bigger vision of motherhood gets subsumed. You have to protect yourself from your own dreams.

But back to that other list – the one tacked up by the fridge with reminders about the panto trip and when to bring in a quid for the Santa dash – I’m undeniably right there, now, in the kind of parenthood I once dreamed of. In this respect, the past couple of years have often felt like a re-awakening.

It turns out I am much more suited to this part of parenting. I’m better built for the robust practicality of navigating school schedules and beans-on-toast-after-swimming than I ever was the milk-soaked haze of babyhood.

Yet, despite all the writing and ideas around motherhood I absorbed before I became one, I don’t know that I had any reassurance that a richer experience of motherhood was still to come beyond the baby and toddler days. That so much of the fun stuff kicks in later – years later.

So much writing – and talking – about motherhood (which, actually, is very often centred on mothering babies) is laced with yearning, preoccupied with time slipping away, with making memories, with ‘firsts’ and ‘lasts’. And I’m not immune to this way of thinking. But, mostly, in my experience so far, it just builds. It’s all gain. Time and knowledge and moments accrued.

I also feel less pressure, where I am now, to be any particular ‘kind’ of mother. Maybe I’m better at ignoring it, maybe I’m just less bothered by what anyone else thinks, but it feels less tribal, five-and-a-half years in. No one’s asking for my stance on breastfeeding, c-sections, or co-sleeping any more, as if trying to work out which ‘side’ I’m on.

And it can be thrilling, actually, when you realise how the form and texture of your motherhood is no longer wholly determined by your choices (or the whims of your body); when, instead, someone else – someone discovering the world anew – starts to take the wheel.

Accordingly, my motherhood now is made up of standing on the sidelines of muddy rugby pitches (should probably learn the rules at some point). Of getting good at cold-weather dressing. Of hunting for Pokemon. Of lengthy conversations ranking the songs from Mary Poppins in order, from most favourite to least favourite (first place: Sister Suffragette, every time).

There’s something so specific about all of this – unique to him, and so to us as a family – that makes this phase of parenting feel deeper and richer than anything that came before it.

My life and days are changing, going in new directions because of the person my son is becoming. And I’m well and truly buckled up for the ride, excited for where we might be going next.

Every time I open Instagram lately, I feel like I’m being told off.

THIS is why your outfits look dated.

Why I’d NEVER wear this.

STOP doing this one thing that ages you.

Gargh! Now look, I’m no social media naïf. I know what makes the app and the algorithm tick these days (mostly thanks to the excellent tutelage of ). I understand the need for punchiness. For hooks. I’m well-aware there’s never been so much competition for our fragmented, frayed attention.

But, still, I can’t be alone in finding this new tone exhausting and demoralising.

I’m sure some will say to this that social media has always been an engine for making us feel bad about ourselves. Which is true to an extent, but it also sweeps over the way things have changed – and are changing.

Because, while Instagram was always a complicated mix of envy, aspiration and intimacy, it was never like this.

Consider how Instagram looked and felt circa 2017/18 – which is when I first started using Instagram regularly and to some purpose (not just to put ‘cool filters’ on my photos 😳). It was, with hindsight, the hey-day for a certain kind of British influencer – the ‘mumfluencers’. It was colourful, candid, and confessional. And, sure, sometimes cringe.

It wasn’t perfect. There were still spats and pile-ons. But I miss how (mostly) earnest it was. I miss those long, wordy captions. Those little stories of people’s lives. Those honest moments. Posts designed to shatter taboos.

Of course there was still #sponcon and curated, ‘aspirational’ content, just as there is now, but there was also a rich seam of posts – from accounts big and small, professional and personal – designed to make us (and I think I mostly mean women) feel less bad about ourselves; less alone.

It seems almost charmingly innocent in the rear-view mirror.

Now, the new mode for people who are really making Instagram work for them seems to be saying the quiet part out loud. Here’s how to be thin, how to look rich, how to not look old or weird. It all screams: HERE’S HOW YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

Again, you could argue that this is nothing women’s magazines haven’t done for decades. But this new incarnation feels so brazen.

More than that, it’s all so humourless. Whether it’s conservative American momfluencers preaching discipline and achieving ‘greatness’ in motherhood, or unsmiling fashion and beauty accounts silently wagging their fingers at us, the tone is not just harsh, it’s death-grip serious.

Whether it’s optimising your strategy for the lines at Disney World or making sure your eyebrows aren’t giving 2016 (apparently mine are), the subtext (sometimes just the text-text) is that the stakes are very high. Pull your socks up. Pay attention. Or else.

And it fits doesn’t it? Call it a backlash, call it a vibe-shift, but in 2025 everything is tougher, less forgiving, less inclined to either sympathy or empathy, a bit more what’s-your-excuse.

It fits with what Marisa Bate identifies here as the insidious return of having it all.

It fits with the Ozempic-boom ushering in the return of an undisguised pursuit of thinness.

It fits with the apparent enthusiasm out there for AI to replace actual, human women, with all their inconvenient human messiness. (See: Tilly Norwood the AI actor).

I can understand why Instagram now feels the way it does. But my question isn’t so much why has this harsher, audience-bating tone been adopted – my question is why are we tolerating it?

Are we so beaten down by the political direction of the last five years?

Is there some undercurrent of doubt here? Do we subconsciously wonder if we might really be happier if we just learnt to stop worrying and love weight-loss drugs/expensive neutrals/fitting in a 5am workout/structural inequality?

Why aren’t we deriding this more? Why are we (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone) rewarding it with our monetizable eyeballs?

I was thinking about all this in the same week an Instagram friend – who is an infertility and baby loss advocate – told me that she she barely sees any writing or posting around the subjects any more; that she feels there’s no appetite for hearing about loss and infertility in the way there used to be.

It’s difficult to measure this objectively, of course. But while there are some brilliant, newer accounts focusing on this subject – like Helena of Maila’s present – and, in general, there is more openness about miscarriage and baby loss from high profile women and influencers, it does feel like there’s less of a grass-roots Instagram community. It feels like there are fewer people sharing the intimate day-to-day of difficult experiences, in a way that Instagram used to feel built around.

And so I wonder if the two things aren’t linked? When the general tone online feels so much harsher – less forgiving, more hectoring and shamelessly mercantile – who, quite reasonably, wouldn’t think twice about sharing something as tender as their baby who died, their early miscarriage, their postnatal depression, their pregnancy after loss, their termination for medical reasons?

Who would willingly bare their soul, their bleeding parts, in a space that increasingly feels like a disapproving, dystopian beauty pageant? Vulnerability? In this social media economy?

But it’s those moments of considered – intentional – vulnerability that I miss most about the app. Can we ever get it back? And if so, how?

I worry we’re losing sight of what ‘taking care of ourselves’ actually means. She takes care of herself. You can tell she looks after herself.

It’s usually issued as a high compliment, but really it’s a kind of code.

She takes care of herself. Translation – she is clearly making a particular effort to stay thin and young-looking and, most importantly, it seems to be working.

I’m not really sure where this stray train of thought has come from this week, though I did see the pictures of the Kris Jenner deep-plane facelift for the first time over the weekend (you can’t escape these things for ever, apparently) in a magazine article about a New York plastic surgeon, and I had a bit of a stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off moment.

Anyway, I found last week – baby loss awareness week – quite tough, as, I imagine, did many of you. And, as I’ve been trying to pick myself back up again this week, I’ve been thinking about how we actually take care of ourselves, in the true sense of the phrase, meeting needs in ways that have little-to-nothing to do with being hot or thin or young-looking.

Here’s my list of suggestions…

• Order the thing off the menu you actually want to eat, not the thing you think you should eat.

• Sit under a blanket and read. Bonus points if you also put the Netflix log-fire on.

• Watch a film or series you love without second-screening. (I’ve been trying to leave my phone charging in the kitchen in the evenings. When I remember to do it, it really helps).

• Iron your pyjamas.

• And/or your pillowcases.

• Go to bed early.

• Buy yourself a bunch of flowers. They don’t have to be expensive or fashionable. (I quite like buying the cheapest bouquet in the supermarket, then splitting it up into lots of little posies in random tiny bud vases/bottles/jam jars.)

• Put your Vinted ‘holiday mode’ on if you know your week is going to be busy.

• Drink a glass of water.

• Tidy your room.

• Have a luxury breakfast, just because. (My current favourite is banana bread with fruit and Greek yoghurt).

• If someone is sitting in your reserved/booked seat on a packed train, actually ask them to move (politely, respectfully).

• Tell someone you disagree with them (politely, respectfully). Nb: This applies to in-person encounters only. Leave all the people inside the internet you disagree with well alone.

• Drink another glass of water. (Yeah, turns out, this is one of those things you have to keep doing, like, for ever. Who knew.)

• Whatever the thing is that you always forget to pack/have a mad scramble to find at least once a week – treat yourself to an extra one and keep it in your car/bag/suitcase/bedside drawer. I’m thinking: phone chargers, lip balms, hair ties, gloves.

• Give yourself permission to stop reading a book you’re not actively enjoying.

• Ditto a TV series. Don’t watch it just because everyone else is talking about, if you think it’s pants. It’s supposed to be fun! To this end, I will not be watching any more of: Severance, Nobody Wants This, The Morning Show.

• If you drive, put de-icer on your shopping list this week. Winter is coming.

• Get up as late as you can in the morning without actively making your life more stressful. Forget 5am club/miracle morning/optimistically setting your alarm 30 minutes earlier for complicated-morning-routine-reasons in pursuit of serenity/world domination. Seriously, just get as much sleep as you possibly can. It’s like we’ve all lost our minds or something.

• Keep your promises to yourself.

• Get a flu vaccine. (Especially if you’re a freelancer – they should probably make this a tax-deductible expense tbh).

• Do the easy version, not the perfect version, if things feel overwhelming. Send a card via a website. Send a thank-you text instead of a card. Go for a walk, not the run you originally planned but won’t have time for/are exhausted by the thought. Buy a good-enough present from the shop you’re already in, rather than the potentially-perfect present from the shop you could potentially-maybe-possibly squeeze in a trip to later in the week if you get up earlier/move things around/combine it with that other errand.

• Unsubscribe from emails you delete every single week without reading (yes, even if that means this one 🫣).

Anything you’d add? Let me know in the comments - I’d love to hear from you. Look after yourselves.

My button got hit. It was the first time it had happened in a while. But: wow. I’d almost (almost) forgotten what it felt like.

If you’re wondering what I mean by the button, I’m thinking of an analogy that’s sometimes shared to explain the evolution of grief over time – grief is like a ball, in a box, with a pain button. At first the ball is big, filling and dominating the space inside the box, so even the slightest movement hits that pain button. In fact, the ball cannot move anywhere without hitting the button. This is like the early days of grief, when everything reminds you of your loss and just existing is acutely painful.

However, over time, the ball – your grief – becomes smaller (or, depending on how you look at it, the box – your life – becomes bigger) and so, although it’s always still there bouncing around inside of you/the box, the grief-ball hits the pain button less frequently.

But, occasionally, it still happens.

Another – beautiful – analogy that one of my favourite people on Substack, the clinical psychologist Dr Michelle Tolfrey, has posted about here, is grief as a piece of sea glass. Over time, the edges may be sanded down, worn, and softened into something you can comfortably and safely hold in your palm – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still a shard of glass.

‘The shape can change, but there is always the risk that it will cut you in some ways,’ writes Michelle. ‘The sea glass might sit safely on your bedside table for days, weeks or years, until unexpectedly it gets knocked to the floor and broken. And one day, as you swing your legs out of bed, you stand on it and the pain takes your breath away, knocking you off your feet.’

This is what happened to me.

I’d strayed into scrolling on Instagram late one night (a sentence-opener that never leads anywhere good) and had landed on a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend’s page, after seeing that she’d recently published another book. An announcement I’d managed to miss at the time.

Apparently, I’d also missed that she’d recently had her fourth baby.

And that was what did it. The ball hit the button. My bare foot scrunched on glass.

I should have known better, of course. There was, I remembered too late, a reason I didn’t follow this woman on social media in the first place.

It’s not her fault. We don’t even really know each other. It just happens that her major milestones have coincided badly for me. She had her first baby just before I would have had mine, had I not had a miscarriage that first time. Then, by the time I was on miscarriage number four, she was on to baby number two. Back then, what I saw as the unfairness of it all would sometimes leave me winded.

I feel compelled to emphasise here that things like this rarely bother me these days. I’m good! I really am very happy with my lot. It would probably make you sick, actually, how grateful I walk around feeling on a near-daily basis.

But, for whatever reason that night, perhaps a combination of being over-tired/heading into an uncertain phase of maybe trying for another baby/ trying to publish another book, those old feelings stirred.

And for me, acute moments of grief tend to bring feelings of worthlessness.

It doesn’t matter how committed I’ve been to ploughing my own furrow, charting my own course. There are certain things that bring it all crashing down, leaving me wondering who the hell I was kidding. It’s like the sudden and total collapse of a model house made of matchsticks – the flimsiness of its original construction laid pathetically bare.

You really thought you were doing OK? You really thought you were building something here?

My guess is, we all have something hyper-specific that triggers this feeling.

In her book, The Seed: Infertility Is A Feminist Issue, Alexandra Kimball, who’d had multiple miscarriages and rounds of IVF, describes the intense envy she felt towards women attending demonstrations and rallies with their babies in carriers, bearing slogans like ‘future feminist’.

She writes: ‘I’ll spend a whole afternoon looking at photos of them online, feeling envious and admiring and bitter all at once…Feminist mothers – these were the hardest to look at’.

For Carrie Bradshaw, it was being ‘the sex column they run next to ads for penile implants’, compared to her ex’s new girlfriend, who’s all ‘shiny hair, style-section Vera Wang’. (For some reason, I inevitably think of this scene from Sex And The City when this feeling comes on. It’s something about the choked-voice-head-in-hands of it all. I just looked it up and the episode is called Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman, which is perhaps how I’ll label this feeling to myself from now on.)

In my case, it’s authors taking their tiny babies in slings along to signings and bookshop events.

With the benefit of a little time and daylight, I can see it’s not only their baby I’m envious of. It’s the idea of being able to do other things – other things I am also envious of, like writing or publishing books – while simultaneously continuing to be pregnant.

Imagine! Having the brain space for pregnancy alongside other life goals, rather than it being an all-consuming, perma-state of anxiety. To me that feels, truly, like the unattainable luxury.

Of course, I know that this woman’s reality almost certainly doesn’t feel to her how it seems to me from the outside. But reminding myself of this still doesn’t quite take the sting out of my envy.

Anyway, the ball has bounced off again. I’ve swept the shards away to somewhere their edges can safely weather down once more.

And perhaps the box can continue expanding, putting even more space between the ball and the grief button; the next time. The next attack of the five foot ten woman.

P.S. I’m chairing a discussion about the future of miscarriage research next week, on Wednesday, October 15th, at The Exchange in Birmingham (UK) - it’s free and there will also be a candle lighting at 7pm to mark the end of baby loss awareness week. For more information or to register to come along, take a look here. It would be lovely to see some of you there.