The line of tail lights streamed out in front of us as the sky grew imperceptibly lighter. Our alarms had gone off at 6am - not early enough for serious NASA-nerds, but early enough for us space groupies. We were off to the beach to watch a rocket launch. Specifically, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which roared into the sky at 7.26am this morning.

Our last hurrah of summer cheapo weekend to Orlando, booked a few months ago, was not conceived around a space launch. We’d go to the Kennedy Space Center, we decided, but in our kids’ minds the trip was very definitely less about space and more about rollercoasters, at Universal Studios.

To be fair, I’m a bit ambivalent about the whole concept of space (travel) myself. One, it freaks me out, two, rockets etc appear to be the ultimate penis extensions and three, the proliferation of tech bro billionaires now investing in space tech strikes me as being less about pushing the boundaries of human discovery and more about hedging their bets on creating an intergalactic colony to escape to when Earth is truly screwed. Plus making money, of course.

HOWEVER, even as a space cynic, a) the Kennedy Space Centre is pretty cool and b) a launch was a pretty amazing thing to watch. There was something noble about those early 1970s and 80s missions to the moon; the sheer grind involved in developing something like the shuttle Atlantis, which took 12 years to finesse, and which now hangs, battered and glorious after 33 trips into orbit as the centrepiece of the main museum complex. It’s incredibly moving to see pictures of the astronauts who died in the failed Challenger and Columbia trips of 1986 and 2003. It’s inspiring to see just how much brain power goes into this stuff - a relief to know that there are still properly clever, wonkish geniuses working on incredibly complex projects and dedicating their working lives to it. And even though I still hate the thought of being trapped in a cramped spaceship, I would like to walk on the moon.

So obviously we set the alarm to get up and watch Nancy Grace being launched into orbit. Obviously everyone was grumpy about this fact; obviously there was then bickering on the beach, fuelled by Dunkin Donuts on empty stomachs; obviously people stomped off in huffs and the actual launch was as a result watched individually by the five of us in our own little spot of beach, rather than huddled together on a blanket as had been the scene in our imaginations.

But it was still a pretty cool thing to do. Both part of the collective nature of it - hundreds of people on a random beach at dawn to watch a big firework go off - as well as to watch the takeoff itself. I was actually looking in the wrong place (of course) and suddenly realised this big bright thing was sailing through the sky off to my left. I watched it trace its way across the sky, getting brighter and brighter, then giving a roar as it hit some sort of atmospheric barrier (I presume - as mentioned I am not a space nerd) and then eventually disappearing. A few minutes later there was an enormous sonic boom as the first of the side boosters returned to land, looking just like one of those stomp rockets the boys used to play with when they were little; then we heard a second boom as the second booster landed.

And then it was all over, and I went for a swim in the sea as a helicopter flew overhead which my husband reckoned was Elon, on his way home from watching his latest penis extension soar, and we got back in the car, still bickering, and came back to our Airbnb. And Nancy Grace Roman is in space and on her way to her final orbit, which according to Google will take about 100 days. I wish her well.

That time now seems impossibly long ago: a muddle of unfamiliar heat, food and ways of doing things. It felt as if we were on a weird, semi-permanent holiday: nothing seemed real, from going to the supermarket to trying to furnish our home with secondhand Facebook Marketplace finds. I remember feeling a strange mix of urgency - to sort ourselves out; turn our house into a home - matched by a corresponding feeling of swimming through mud, overwhelmed and finding it impossible to complete even the most mundane of small tasks.

That feeling lasted a long time, and some days is still very much there. Living in America still doesn’t seem real, even though I now have a job, know where to buy my groceries, have actual friends and am staring down the barrel of a new school year with actual working knowledge of what it looks and feels like in practice. 

Going back to the UK exacerbated the feeling - even though, by the end of our trip, I was ready to come ‘home’, I was also really sad to do so. As has been pointed out many times, you can’t make old friends quickly: while we were in England I saw some of my real old friends, the ones who have known me since we were gawky 10-year olds with braces on our teeth; the ones who have held my hand while I ugly-cried; the ones who held my children when they were newborn babies. I know they’re not going anywhere, but I miss them - I miss their regular presence in my life and I miss the fact that a different continent and a different timezone can make our friendship seem dreamlike when it’s not in front of my face. 

My Dad is also sick and old, and I feel frustrated and helpless being so far away from him and my Mum. 

But none of this really addresses how I feel about America itself, except by what it’s not - not home, still not really familiar, still foreign and strange in lots of ways. 

There’s lots I do love though. Air conditioning, for example (the absence of which was very pronounced in Britain). Easy access to public, outdoor swimming pools. My ten year old scuffing around the neighbourhood with his gang of football buddies, who have embraced him like a brother. The parents of those football buddies, whom I am enjoying getting to know, and who are happily willing to come and sit on my porch and drink rose and discuss the state of the world even while the goshdarned mosquitoes suck all the blood from our ankles. The two book clubs I am in with different groups of funny, clever, interesting women who have enhanced my life 100%. The rowing club I’ve joined and somehow mysteriously become women’s captain of, even though I HATE getting up at 5am to row (Americans love to do exercise stupidly early). The choir I sing in. 

Stupid, materialistic things I have access to out here because they’re cheap and easy and make my life more fun: a monthly subscription to a facial service; a well priced clothing rental service that means I can scratch the itch to change up my wardrobe and try out new things without dropping a fortune (I really do want to bring the latter to the UK; it’s been a game changer and has totally addressed that horrible dissatisfaction you can get when you read fashion pieces and want to buy everything but can’t).  

A certain ease to life that’s lacking in bigger, more crowded cities like London or even smaller, older, still crowded ones like York - it’s hard to put your finger on and I know I write as a privileged one percenter blah blah blah, but it’s about getting around the city more easily and not having to wait in endless queues and things being generally cleaner and it being actually acceptable to leave your desk at 5pm and go home to your family. Life feels like less of a grind - but perhaps that’s because I’m still, to a degree, in holiday mode: I know it’s not going to be like this forever and so I’m enjoying it while I can.

I’m not going to go into American politics here, which make me feel unmoored and existentially terrified and very depressed a lot of the time. That’s a separate post, but they do hang over everything, especially in a city like DC, which inevitably clouds the experience. But again, it is possible to put them into that limbo-land box: not my politics; not my country. Perhaps a rather childish way of doing it, but it’s effective on the days when the politics threatens to overwhelm and so I focus, instead, on the little things that are good: fresh figs from the tree in our backyard for breakfast; delightful colleagues; scoring the really good cheese from Trader Joe’s. 

Obviously there are also things here that drive me NUTS: the endless bloody bureaucracy; the lack of healthy food available when you’re on the run; the utter mystery of why you can’t get a decent cup of coffee in a city that runs on early mornings. 

More as I have it. I’m typing this from holiday in Mexico, the easy access to which has been a JOY. My current view:

Fellow expats, what do you love or loathe about your life abroad? Answers in the box please 

Things I’ve read and enjoyed recently 

I loved Krissi Murison’s memories of editing Rod Liddle. Hard relate as someone who has dealt with their fair share of larger than life columnists (Boris Johnson, I’m talking about you). 

Twig Hutchinson as well as being one of my best friends (and one of the most stylish people I know) is also one of my favourite writers. This is joyful and funny and well worth your time. 

This was depressing reading that really rang true. I am definitely in the older (technically geriatric) millennial camp of people who prefer to read something than watch a video, but I only have to look at my Gen Alpha kids to know I’m a dinosaur. 

Since moving to America I have got weirdly into going to baseball games, even though I still don’t really understand the scoring. And I REALLY love baseball movies (A League of Their Own is still one of my top 10 faves of all time). Inspiration for the winter months. 

Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was two very different weekends and America on its 250th birthday and what I saw and have been thinking about.

Last weekend I went to Charleston for a work trip, and think it may now have become my favourite American city, a title held, until now, by Seattle. Charleston is charming. I was there for Carolina Day celebrations, which are a big deal in that part of the world and an especially big deal this year, as Carolina Day marks the successful defence of Sullivan’s Island against the British in 1776: the first naval victory of the Revolutionary War and the moment the Americans (or patriots, as they were back then) realised they might actually have a chance.

I was there with some military colleagues to represent the beaten Brits, and we could not have been made to feel more welcome. The whole thing kicked off with a church service where we sat in high-sided wooden pews and sang some lusty hymns, my favourite. The organist was playing God Save the King during his opening welcoming twiddly bits, or so I thought, and I leaned forward to mention this to the charming lady who was one of our hosts. She nodded and smiled and said there was a strong English connection here - graciously omitting the fact that of course, for Americans, it’s not God Save the King at all, but the hymn My Country T’is of Thee, which we sang later on in the service, at which point I felt incredibly crass.

Afterwards we all trooped out and joined in a big parade from the church to a war memorial, with bagpipers and drums and flags and almost everybody (or all the men anyway) wearing the unofficial uniform of Charleston which is seersucker. The most dapper seersucker suits everywhere, worn with bow ties and pale shoes. I immediately wanted to go and buy my husband a seersucker suit and maybe a boater to go with it, although possibly it might look a bit ridic in DC. SO tempting though, and all the women were in red, white and blue, and all the children in darling little seersucker shorts and sailor dresses. It was like being in a Patrizia Wigan catalogue, if anybody remembers that company, which I’ve just looked up and which looks as if it still exists! Here if you too are a child of the 80s and fancy a trip down memory lane. I was completely entranced.

I carried on being entranced for the whole weekend, through a trip to actual Sullivan’s Island, where some re-enactors fired on some faux Brits, to an amazing drone show on the Saturday evening, to a baseball game where we watched two rival local teams battling it out. I also spent an extremely pleasurable few hours wandering around Charleston, admiring the houses and streets and dipping in and out of little boutique-y shops having decided that I, too, needed to dress like a Charlestonian, which basically means glamming up a bit but in a low key way i.e. pretty cotton dresses and sandals and nice jewellery and perfect skin and looking very put together despite the sweaty heat. Everybody I saw, male or female, seemed to be incredibly good looking and catalogue-esque, but maybe it was just because they all made an effort. One evening I saw the most chic older lady, probably in her 70s, walking majestically along on her way to dinner wearing a hot pink dress with matching earrings and bag looking like an absolute queen. Talk about style goals.

I left Charleston vowing to come back for longer, but also cheered by the Charlestonian’s love for their city and their country on the anniversary of its founding. It wasn’t gung ho or flag waving - Charleston is too genteel for that - but it appeared deep and sincere and rooted in thankfulness, which was refreshing. These were people who knew exactly what they were celebrating and why, who could point to the sandbank where it happened and who marked it with hymns. Also liberal shouts of Huzzah!, which I very much enjoyed. It made me wish I could be there for this weekend of the 4th, which was kicking off with another hymn-singing session before breaking out into BBQ and all the rest.

Instead, I was here in DC, under the extremely warm heat dome which has moved over from Europe to us here in America. I am currently changing my clothes at least twice a day and extremely grateful for air conditioning almost everywhere.

No grateful hymn-singing here. Instead we had the State Fair, which we tried to visit but didn’t quite make as we were thwarted by a) extreme heat/a melting situation and b) endless metal barriers to circumnavigate. I wasn’t too bothered, as according to one friend it was basically 50 tourist booths with a lot of pamphlets and not a butter cow in sight. Instead we went to watch the Palisades Parade, just up the road from our neighbourhood, which was delightful in an entirely different way to Charleston - no bagpipes or seersucker here, but South American dancers, skateboarders, the local fire brigade and lots of colour, noise, sweets being chucked about and general happy neighbourliness of all colours, shapes and sizes. We’d parked ourselves on the sidewalk in front of someone’s house and five minutes later they were offering us cheese sandwiches and drinks from their cooler. Nobody was making a theological point about the founding (although I did enjoy one float exhorting everyone to ‘Make America Grateful Again’) - they were just out on the street together, being neighbours. It was lovely.

Later on in the day we went out for dinner at the Wharf and watched various fighter jets displaying their prowess, then trotted home and caught the (extremely late) fireworks from the slopes of the cathedral with some mates. It was busy and dizzy and diverse and fun in a totally different way from Charleston (and to be honest, a little bit underwhelming overall, given the 250th nature of things).

I’m glad I was here in DC to watch America turn 250. But I’m also glad I got to see a different part of the country celebrate. DC’s relationship with patriotism is more complicated than Charleston’s: it’s a federal city, with politics around every corner, and right now a lot of Washingtonians feel a bit ambivalent about what, exactly, they’re being asked to celebrate. For every Trump t-shirt I saw on Saturday I saw an anti-Trump one; it’s messy and scrappy and strange.

But DC feels more like what America more broadly actually looks like now - people of all shapes and sizes and colours and creeds rubbing along together. I adored Charleston, which was ravishing, and it was lovely to be there and have an all-American experience, in the most traditional red, white and blue sense. But it was also a portrait of a very particular America, celebrating a very particular part of its past - the Revolutionary bit, rather than what came after during the Civil War, which i couldn’t help remembering, at intervals, between all the Huzzahs.

But it would be too easy to hold one up as the real thing and dismiss the other - because both can be true at once: the memory and the mixture, the pews and the parade. I’m so glad I got to see and be a part of both.

*England just scored TWICE in about five minutes and now I’m dearly hoping I’m very wrong.

I know, I know. It’s disgustingly smug and best life-ish, but I promise this is I think the first (but I hope not the last) of this sort of day I have had since we moved to DC and I am LOVING it. Call me basic but a day to myself, shopping and moving and writing and reading and eating and hanging out (and getting my face massaged) feels like a) the biggest treat ever but also b) as if it could be fairly transformative. Not only because it will be a rest and a balm and an energiser but because I think if I actually allow myself to take a whole day to myself, doing the things I would actually like to do instead of the things I feel I should do, that maybe I will start to chip away at this thing in my head that says I must be productive at all times, and not only that but I must be seen to be productive. To be killing it. To be achieving and yes, living my best life etc etc.

I did not intend to write a post about this - I intended to write about how Americans are, for all their self-striving and individualism, very good at community in a lot of ways. I will write that post, but now I’ve embarked on this one, so on we go.

I have always been very bad at not leaving any gaps. If I have an empty day in my diary, it feels like a wasted opportunity. I should be filling that day! With useful things! Seeing friends! Exercising! Working! Pitching editors! Achieving! The result is that I overfill my schedule and quite often feel exhausted and wrung out and snappy and as if life is just one long to-do list. Even just now when I realised that there was a gap of one hour between exiting Barry’s and the consignment store opening I wondered how I could best fill that time. Then I decided to sit in this chair and the I decided to write this Substack. Baby steps.

Earlier this year when I was having a bit of a career crisis I went on a women’s coaching day run by a dear friend who to me is the epitome of a woman who is killing it. She has four children, runs her own successful business, is a spiritual powerhouse, works out, eats healthily, is an excellent parent and one of the kindest and also most organized people I know. As part of the coaching day we had to work out our values - not what we would like them to be but what they actually are. And I realised that one of mine was productivity - or some bastardised version of it anyway. The need to fill my time with useful things; to be busy, always.

This week, that same dear friend challenged me. ‘You always tell me you’re exhausted - and quite often it’s because you’ve got up at 5am to go rowing or something,’ she said in a voice note. ‘Perhaps you need to reassess your priorities’.

Oof. That was a hard thing to hear. But it has really made me think. I don’t want to be one of those people who just lolls around (except on holiday when I turn lolling into an art form -‘I literally do nothing but read books, sunbathe, sleep and eat). But it made me realise that it’s also ok to build in rest. That maybe NOT filling every second of every day is ok. That maybe if I do allow myself breaks I may, in fact, be more productive. And so today, instead of sitting at my desk and working through the interminable list of emails (which never, ever ends), or pitching editors or getting started on the next project, I decided to give myself a day off. Not to lounge entirely - I wanted to work out; I need to sort myself an outfit for a wedding we’re going to next month; I must do some administrative tasks. But I was going to leave the house and build in some fun stuff. So here I am in my Adirondack chair in the sunshine.

It’s my birthday next week, and tomorrow I am having birthday drinks, and earlier this week I was slightly dreading it as I felt so tired, and felt as if I was only organising/hosting because I should. But I am now trying to give myself permission to let it hang. To get some wine and snacks in but not stress if my house isn’t perfectly tidy. To enjoy talking - really talking - to whoever turns up. To rest today and for some of tomorrow so I have energy. To walk purposefully towards the evening rather than crash exhausted into it.

Gah this whole post sounds like the most disgusting self help drivel. Feel free to hit delete if none of this resonates. But if it does, here’s to letting yourself chill sometimes. Now, I’m off to fit in all the things I need to do before school pickup and buy some steak. And try not to check my emails.

Just think about the implications of this for a second. Not for the smooth runnings of government, but for what it must be like to be a person in Danly’s position. Not to get email! No clicking of the inbox every day, heart sinking at the number of unread messages to wade through! No overwhelm at that list of bolded up headings! Just… a nice coffee first thing, maybe a flick through the papers (hard copy, I presume), and then a stroll to work, where your paperwork is waiting.

Ok, so I can understand why this might drive his staffers mad (although they do concede that “he’s a really smart guy”. Might the two be related?). It’s deeply frustrating when you just want to get hold of someone quickly and, well, you can’t.

But the phone, guys! Or maybe just a pause to consider: does that person really actually need to be cc’d on that email chain?

When I left my last job, and my work email, behind, it was a relief to cut in half the number of emails I had to plough through each day. Then, as I built up my freelance career, my personal email started to get overloaded with all the press releases that used to go to my work inbox. In theory, I have two email addresses and one is for all that boring, usually totally irrelevant stuff, but in reality, most of it goes through the same old email address I’ve had for years.

Since we moved to America, said email has been groaning under a new weight of correspondence. First I joined our local neighbourhood listserve. Useful in many ways (I’ve just bought a very well-priced e-bike off one of my neighbours via it), but also SO MANY EMAILS. Would anyone like this sofa? Who would like to come to a coffee morning for cat lovers on Friday? Does anybody know what those very loud helicopter noises meant last night? (We live close to JD Vance, so he’s usually the answer to that one).

Then there are the various bits and pieces I’ve bought since we got here, often online, or if not, from companies who promise me a discount if I hand over my email (this is what the spam one is for but I tend to forget that in the moment). Cue another vast swathe of incoming.

Buried within the rubble are the gems - either of genuinely urgent information I need to know e.g from my kids’ schools, or, for example, the more pleasurable reads I enjoy via Substack. The trouble is, faced with the constant buildup, I often either miss the urgent ones or can’t settle to enjoying the good ones. Clearing the inbox becomes more of a priority than actually reading the emails.

In an ideal world, I’d love to have an inbox with no unread emails whatsoever. In practice, if that number remains under 50 I’m ok; under 30 and I feel like I’m killing it (the number currently stands at exactly 30: a good day). I have noodled around with various labelling systems; starring things etc etc - but in reality, I find marking emails unread is the best method of knowing I’ve got stuff to deal with. Until they move so far down the list I’ve missed the boat.

The time difference doesn’t help either. Every morning, one of the first things I do is check my email (I know this is not healthy) in case I’ve missed something from, e.g. an editor in London asking me to do something who is five hours behind me. I need to answer that email first thing, or else I’ve missed my chance. Then of course once I’m in there I start dealing with all the other stuff.

Last week was really full on - lots going on, various family crises. I let it all build up. On Friday I did not check my email at all. When I came back to my email I had 200+ unread ones to deal with. Which of course sent my blood pressure soaring again.

Truly, James Danly has got the right idea. Email is nothing if not the bane of modern life. Please put that on a postcard and send it to me.

This time last week I’d just made it back to DC after a short trip back to the UK. My return flight on Sunday was cancelled because of the mega-storm heading towards the east coast of America. I’ve been meaning to write about it all ever since, but as ever, life has got in the way of the things I want to do.

I’d started to get a bit uneasy about the storm not long after landing in England, when a colleague sent over a news story about what was about to hit. Sure enough, on Friday I got an email from BA telling me I wouldn’t be flying back on Sunday after all. That was followed up by a call from a friend back in DC, who informed me he’d bought the last eggs available in the city. People were prepping hard, he told me. Supermarket shelves were bare. You couldn’t get your hands on de-icing kit for love nor money. There were no shovels available in hardware stores.

I sent my husband everything I could find on how to handle the impending disaster. Shovel as it’s snowing, I advised him. Don’t forget we’re responsible for clearing the sidewalk (pavement) in front of our house. Make sure the pipes don’t freeze! Also, there was going to be a massive snowball fight on the Mall on Sunday - he should definitely take the boys.

I’ll be honest, I had major storm FOMO. An exciting thing was happening and I wasn’t there to witness it! I got over that pretty quickly.

I made it back 24 hours after I was supposed to, via Iceland, with a whole load of other grumpy Americans. My husband couldn’t pick me up from the airport, he informed me, because the car was iced in. Snowball fight on the Mall? As if. You couldn’t get out of the neighbourhood. The air when I stepped out into the night from Dulles was face-achingly cold. It was chaos - snow and slush everywhere, a dearth of Uber drivers. Mine had to drop me at the end of our road, which was impassable. I hobbled over the snow, bumping my wheelie case behind me.

Next day, school was cancelled. Then again the next day. My kids were delighted. Plonking them in front of the TV and dialling into meetings was giving me Covid trauma. I went for a rage walk with a friend that evening, stomping and slipping on the ice, where she reminded me that this was when you remember DC is essentially a southern, not a northern city - normally, it snows here and then melts a couple of days later, and the city is simply not set up for this sort of situation. By Tuesday, Mamdani in New York had got all the kids back to school and plowed the streets. DC only owns 20 snow plows, and on the little interactive map where you can see where they were operating, North West DC where we live was completely untouched. Emails went round suggesting neighbours club together to hire private contractors to plow.

On Thursday, school reopened but on a two-hour delay. More dialling into meetings. Same again on Friday. On Saturday, I spent two hours chipping our car out of the ice block that had formed around it. By yesterday, neighbours on our local listserve were grumbling about people holding parking spaces with chairs and outdoor furniture. Sod that - I’d spent 120 minutes chipping away to get my car out, and I’m damned if someone’s going to nick my space.

At this point in time, it’s being referred to as ‘snowcrete’. Which is basically shorthand for solid blocks of ice. The kids can’t even sledge on it any more - it’s too hard. And also too cold. I tried to kick the boys out on Sunday - it was a beautiful blue sky, sunny day - but it was also minus 15. Too cold, they said.

Today I am grateful that schools started at the normal time. Grateful, too, that I don’t live in Virginia, where schools are still closed because all the school bus stops are unreachable, because they’re all piled with snow. Grateful that even though it’s bloody freezing, the sky is blue and it’s beautiful: the Potomac is a sheet of shimmering ice. Slightly worried about the forecast tomorrow, which is showing as more snow. No FOMO this time.

I hopped on the Subway uptown for a couple of stops to meet a friend for a quick lunch- we went to Urban Hawker, a sort of indoor street market, which was perfect for both our wallets and my waistline, as I have recently embarked on the Human Being Diet (on which I will doubtless post separately soon). UH allowed me to eat the salmon and vegetables I am currently permitted without feeling hard done by, and my pal and I chewed the fat, quite like the old days.

Then it was uptown to Washington Heights for an interview in an enormous beautiful loft where the sun went down as we talked and the lights of the city came on and I was ready to chuck it all in and move immediately to the Big Apple and feed on its energy and bustle and incredible mix of all humanity. But then I had to go back downtown, to Brooklyn, and I nearly got my foot chopped off squeezing onto the subway (with my long years of Tube-attained skills) and reconsidered my imminent move. Although that night in Dumbo as I was lulled to sleep by the endless traffic noise the thought was in my mind.

My alarm went off at 6am for the next part of my work adventure: heading to Indiana for another, different interview (again, coming soon). HOWEVER my slight smugness at being at the airport well on time (an hour and a half early no less), having chatted to and tipped my Uber driver, in my zhuzy work clothes, was massively dashed when I actually MISSED my flight because I was so deep in emails I missed the fact they’d changed the gate. MEGA FAIL. Thank God for American Airlines who just let you get on the next flight for free, and thank God for the fast-flying pilot who got us there earlier than anticipated - although not thank God for my second fail of the day when I literally managed to throw black coffee all over myself as I got in the Uber. Ugh.

Anyway, the afternoon proceeded with no more major mishaps and then I flew back to DC. From which I have several conclusions:

• That catching an internal flight in the US is more akin to catching a bus and actually if you’re not checking bags it’s not worth arriving tooooo early or else you’ll lose track of everything

• That you should never try and strap yourself into a vehicle while trying to hold a McDonalds coffee

• That I am definitely happier, and feel more alive, when I have slightly too much to do (although I’m aware that can also tip into a bad place, and there is also a possibility that the business is displacement therapy but naturally I don’t really want to think about that)

• That coming back made me realise that DC is starting to become home. In the taxi back (after my delayed flight) as we travelled alongside the Potomac on the Arlington side and I looked over at the beautiful Washington Monument lit up, and the Kennedy (which we must now call Trump) Centre twinkling over the wide, flat waters of the river, it felt familiar and peaceful.

Now this was quite strange, given that only yesterday an ICE agent shot dead a woman who’d just dropped her six year old son at school and America feels like a very febrile, strange place right now. And yes DC is the heart of the madness. I can’t even really bear to think about what happened in Minneapolis and that’s a whole other subject for another time. And not one I’m shying away from thinking about but I’m doing that privately, not here.

But separately and in no way to be dismissive of all the huge things that are happening all around us, there is the placewhere I now find myself - both DC itself and more broadly, ‘Merica. It’s easy when you live here to spend all your time thinking about politics, in the same way that if you work for a newspaper like I used to and cover a beat that’s even vaguely political, like I used to, the Westminster Bubble will grow and try and catch you.

But spending a couple of days out of the city in different places, meeting Americans doing their very different, non-political jobs, and chatting to the Uber driver who moved here from Georgia 10 years ago and the other Uber driver who used to live in Southall and now lives in Indiana because it’s good for kids and nothing much happens there, and being helped by American Airlines staff who didn’t even so much as eye roll at my fail but just put me on the next flight, and meeting people who are renowned in their field of expertise and are smart and funny and patient and kind reminded me that a) America is more than its politicians and b) that for all that goes on there around the edges (or the centre, really, but my edges), the District of Columbia is now where I live. Maybe not home home, in the deep sense, but home-for-now. My kids go to school here; I see people I know as I walk the streets where we live; I have people I can text when I need help - like the gorgeous pal who came and stayed for the night to be childcare as of course my husband also had a work trip exactly when I did. And getting home to her, and my house, which feels peaceful and quiet and smells gorgeous from the hyacinths I bought in Whole Foods the other day made me feel peaceful too, despite the maelstrom around me. Strange times indeed.

Other stuff to note

I’ve been using this deodorant since Christmas a year ago when I got a tube of it in my stocking. Smells gorgeous, isn’t full of chemicals and ACTUALLY WORKS.

Along with the HBD, the New Year has seen me embark on a multi-step Korean beauty routine, as per The Trowel, in an attempt to deal with the madness of my skin (which I think is stress rosacea from moving). So far it seems to be working I.e the spots have stayed at bay. Let’s see.

I raced through this book which India Knight recommended, and which I have since seen mentioned by multiple others. It’s a total joy. Strong recommend.

I bought these shoes from cult brand Rothys and plan to wear them tomorrow. They’re made of recycled bottles! Thank you, in laws, for your contribution!

A question for other Substackers

Can anyone teach me how to make posts more simply on my phone? I find the process SO glitchy (I actually find Substack itself generally not that intuitive if you dislike tech like I do) but I know if I learnt I would post more regularly as I do everything on my phone, even write whole articles. Any advice gratefully received!

I’m writing this from a cosy little cabin in Vermont, to which we have retreated for the Twixmas (horrible but useful word) period. We drove up here from DC over two days, leaving on Boxing Day after an extremely fraught Christmas Day on which one of our children decided to run away, which will definitely not go down in the pantheon of great Christmases. Turns out I underestimated my children’s capacity for tolerating social mingling on the big day; also how much hunger affects their mood; also just how weird everyone was feeling about celebrating miles away from our extended family. We ended up canning the big Christmas meal and going out for dumplings, which was strange and a bit sad but not altogether terrible, which is about the best that can be said about the 25th.

But here we are in snowy Vermont, which is charming and festive and deliciously removed from all the demands of everyday life, which is actually just what we need. Right now the boys are downstairs in the basement watching Back To The Future, still a bit sweaty in their ski gear; my husband is snoozing while listening to some sort of political podcast and I am on my pyjamas stretched out on the sofa. After I write this I will cook some half price steak we found in the supermarket yesterday; the adults will drink red wine out of a box, then we will probably play a round of Monopoly Deal and retire to bed at about 8pm. Tomorrow there’s supposed to be an ice storm so no rush to get out of bed and hit the first lifts. Apart from the two work-related books I have to read this week (no mega hardship), it is all rather relaxing.

So, here are my answers to Francesca’s questions (which for the record were bloody hard to answer), followed by my own Substack recommendations, and my questions for them. Yes it’s like a 90s chain letter. But rather than bad luck, hopefully you will be introduced to lots of lovely new writers to consume in 2026. So without further ado…

What do you admire about your younger self?

That she was a loser but didn’t care (ok so she did, but not enough to change). She read old-fashioned books and used the long words that she read in them, and wore dungarees and her hair in pigtails because she liked it.

When were you right to ignore a piece of advice?

A friend once told me she thought my now-husband was boring. Not advice per se, but a hurtful observation. But she was wrong; he’s not.

When do you feel most like an outsider?

I think I’ve got so used to feeling like an outsider as an expat I can’t quite remember what it feels like to be on the inside.

Which emotion are you most familiar with?

Tragically, right now it’s probably sadness. But I’m ok with feeling sad. I think you think more deeply when things are hard.

Who do you owe a thank you / apology?

My first newspaper editor, who taught me how to structure an article, and was so patient and kind.

If you were able to live to 90 and either keep the mind or the body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

So vain, but probably the body. I had my first child just before I turned 30, and my mind wasn’t up to much, but I went to the gym a LOT. I’m probably in the last 60 now and my mind seems ok. Definitely more on it than when I was 30.

How did you rebel as a teenager?

Swearing in front of my parents.

What do you think about differently now, compared to ten years ago?

Parenting. My youngest is nine now and then, when my children were small and exhausting, I thought it was the hardest it could ever be. I was wrong. Parenting teenagers is much, much harder.

What’s the biggest sacrifice you’ve ever made?

My husband says it’s marrying him. I think it was probably giving up on our travelling dreams to follow him to America the first time. But it was worth it.

Do you find it weirder if someone has zero emotional response to a dog, or a baby?

Depends on the age of the baby. And the type of dog.

What are you most grateful for in your own life?

My boys (all four of them, including my husband). They drive me crazy, but I’d be lost without them.

And now my 11 nominated Substacks:

Elena Bridgers - writes about the science, evolution and culture of motherhood. Totally fascinating

Lisa Dawson - writes about renovating her house in York; has some wicked chips and dips recipes

Eliza Filby - all the social and cultural forces that govern our lives. Makes you think

Francesca Hornak - yes she nominated me so she doesn’t have to repeat this again but I just love her writing, especially when she compares having a third child to being like ordering pudding. Also has three boys

India Knight - journalist, homemaker and author. Full of joyful everyday inspirations

Helen Lewis - bills herself as reading the internet so you don’t have to. Links to all the essays I ever want to read

James Marriott - writes about ideas, literature and the arts. Often makes me feel qute stupid, but in an inspiring way

Fraser Nelson - deeper dives on his Times column, plus I have a soft spot for him from when we worked together at the Tel

Sophia Money-Coutts - journalist, dog-owner and author; funny and clever and interesting

Debora Robertson - writes about food and life in France. Warning: reading her will make you hungry

Clover Stroud - writer and memoirist who is also DC-based; brilliant on all the deep, agonising, amazing feelings of life

Some questions for the above, if they feel like answering (with some thanks to the late great John Burningham, IYKYK):

1. What do you love doing most in the world?

2. What do you look back on and wish you’d done differently?

3. What did you want to be growing up?

4. Who would you grab a coffee with?

5. Who’s your modern-day guru?

6. Would you rather jump in the nettles for £5, swallow a dead frog for £20 or stay all night in a creepy house for £50?

7. What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever bought?

8. What’s your go-to karaoke song?

9. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?

10. If you could live anywhere in the world for a year, where would it be?

11. What’s your favourite children’s book?

It does take time to make friends, whatever age you are. When my kids started school over here they immediately reverted to type: the youngest was swiftly gathered up into a gang of football (sorry, soccer)-loving 9-year-old boys who have become his wolfpack: at weekends now one or two of them can often be found in our basement, or else he’s round at theirs. My middle son, always a little more cautious, has slowly built himself a small, close group with one particularly good friend, a sweet, geeky, lovable child who’s often round at ours and whom I’m becoming extremely fond of.

As for me, I am still building my friendships (when you don’t get to spend all day at school with the same crowd, it takes longer to build in the proximity that friendships need), but I have found a handful of likeminded souls who I really enjoy spending time with: the wine and cold sausages friend mentioned below, with whom I have both done more cultural things, talked for endless hours, laughed and nearly cried with; a couple of similarly trailing spouses who are witty, funny and excellent company in a bar over a few cocktails; a pal who immediately overshared in our very first coffee together (my kind of gal); a couple of school moms whom I know will always respond enthusiastically to a suggestion of wine. And in the meantime, I know my old pals in the UK - the ones to whom I have bared my innermost soul; bawled my eyes out to; who have seen me in no makeup and pyjamas looking like s**t are still there and still love me even though I’m thousands of miles away.

Still, I wanted to publish this post that I’d drafted three months ago now - if only to show myself how far I’ve got since. I hope you enjoy it.

*******

One month in, and it feels simultaneously as if we’ve been here forever and only arrived yesterday. After a frenzied week or so of furniture acquisition, then our stuff FINALLY arriving from England (a pleasure/pain experience - exciting to see my things and hang pictures and make our house feel like home; heartbreaking when I discovered how many things had got broken en route; frustrating when I realised what I had inexplicably sent to storage and now need to re-purchase), then somehow wading through a week where all my children had well and truly had enough of each other, and I had had enough of them, we made it to the end of August. I’m writing this at my new desk (found on FBM, of course), looking out at a beautiful blue sky: the weather here is still warm and sunny, which makes me feel slightly as if I’m in a Truman Show-style scenario: things have changed and shifted, but the backdrop remains the same. I keep finding myself reaching for jumpers and jeans in the morning, because now it’s September, it feels as if it should be autumnal, which it sort of it, but also very much isn’t. Monday was Labor Day - a public holiday that marks the official end of summer out here: the outdoor pools are all now closed and Halloween decorations are starting to arrive in shops, so I’m not the only one feeling the autumnal vibes. But it still hits the mid-20s in the afternoons, and I end up stripping off the layers I put on, and pulling out my sandals and t-shirts again. Most odd.

ANYWAY, enough about the weather; could I demonstrate I was British without telling you I’m British in a more obvious way? This week has also marked the full return to school of all my children: two started at school here in the States last week and my eldest flew back to England on Monday (which was as horrible and sad as I knew it would be, although he is cheery and happy which is comforting). Suddenly, the time to myself I was desperately longing for all summer is here, and now that it is I’m not entirely sure what to do with it. There are all my unread emails to go through, yes, and some bits of work I need to attend to, and various boring, administrative tasks that need wading through, so it’s not as if I’m short of potential activity, and yet I find myself drifting and loose end-ish; weirdly lethargic but with an underlying anxiety at the same time. I seem to spend most of my time thinking about food, and what we’re going to eat for dinner.

I think what I need more than ever right now is friends; specifically female ones with whom to have a coffee or a drink and chew the fat and talk about whatever random shit pops into our brains. I have had two such encounters in the past 24 hours, the first last night at an author event Politics and Prose, a treasure-trove of a bookshop a little north of where I am, to which I was invited quite last minute by a new-ish friend, to whose house we repaired afterwards to drink wine, chat and eat cold sausages into the small hours. Most satisfying. The second was this morning, actually again at Politics and Prose, with Clover Stroud, whom I knew a little bit professionally and who I also follow here. We talked frantically at each other for about an hour about the weirdness of moving/ how hard it is/ forging identity out here/ raising our kids etc etc. Equally profoundly satisfying. An excellent start.

It is actually quite hard in DC to meet Americans, particularly as an expat like me arriving into a relatively ready-made community, of sorts. There are people to socialise with both voluntarily and officially via my husband’s work; there are the friends of those people, who also tend often to be expats; there are the trailing spouses like me. The encounters I have had so far at the school gates have been minimal: the only extended chat was with a fellow Brit, another expat.

HOWEVER I have had some random, and less random encounters which inspired me to come up with a bit of a list of ways of meeting people, tried, tested and in some cases, found wanting.

1. Dress well

“People have no fashion sense in DC,” confided one chic globetrotting friend to me a few months ago. “They wear scrunchies unironically.” Her suggestion was that, should I choose to strut my sartorial stuff, denizens would come flocking to my feet to worship at the altar of mode. But, while it’s true that I did purchase a couple of glamorous items to deploy at official parties out here, it is also true that those items have not yet seen the light of day, as I have mostly been donning shorts and t shirts and the odd floaty sundress, a) because it’s been boiling, b) because I have had no occasion to dress up and c) because after just a month of American hormone-infused food, I am already packing at least half a stone more in weight. Dressing well may henceforth become about skimming the additional rolls subtly, as opposed to something more flamboyant. An ongoing project.

Friendmaking score: 1/10 - because a random stranger did compliment me on my cute shoes the other day, but I don’t think it was an overture of undying BFF love.

2. Cry on a rock

This one is, admittedly, niche. But during the penultimate week of the summer holidays, when I had finally managed to drag my recalcitrant offspring off their screens and out of the house to go down to the pool (not exactly a hardship), and was already feeling quite frazzled and jangled by said dragging, when they then proceeded to have an enormous fight halfway down the road which ended in actual punching, I just sat down on a nearby rock and burst into tears. It was all just Too Much and I felt as if I was failing in every direction. At which point a lovely woman who had been putting her bins out came over and put her arms around me and gave me the most enormous hug and handed me a tissue, before introducing herself as Meg, and informing me she had Fortnum & Mason tea in her kitchen cupboard and would I like a cup? I declined, because children, but she gave me her number and I plan to follow up. I have high hopes.

Friendmaking score: 5/10. It would possibly be higher if I’d texted Meg and arranged to go and have a cup of tea. But, she might also have given me a false number given how incredibly shitty my children were being. Could go either way.

3. Take up an extracurricular activity

Despite having achieved the ripe old age of 44, I often give what we might call eldest child boarding school energy, i.e. I am big on extracurricular activity, or hobbies if you prefer. In York I sang in a choir and joined a rowing club; in London I painted and sang; when we last lived in the US I joined a choir and took up quilting (with mixed results). We have also always joined a church wherever we live and found friends there. Doing extra stuff makes me feel as if I’m achieving something and yes, this is probably something to bring up in therapy, but it’s also a great way to meet people. In DC I have auditioned for and got into a smallish chamber choir that sings early music; I have yet to rehearse with them but I’m excited for Monday evenings with a different set of people. I have also joined Rock Creek Rowing, a Masters club which gets on the water at the ungodly hour of 5.30 IN THE MORNING which is utterly hideous when the alarm goes off but pretty amazing when you’re watching the sky turn pink behind the Washington Monument as the sun rises over the Potomac. The women I’ve met so far seem ballsy and fun and interesting; I am looking forward to getting to know them better, possibly in a bar as well as in a boat.

Friendmaking score: 8/10. I just need to ensure actual social activity occurs around the activity itself, otherwise it’s just singing and rowing.

4. Have kids

Ok, so this is quite an extreme option if you don’t have children, and having had my first child Stateside 14 years ago I would not necessarily advocate it as a way of making friends - it tended more towards the utter isolation and mild postpartum depression end of things. But if you already have them, they need to go to school, and they too can join extracurricular clubs, and via these mediums they can meet new friends and so, hopefully, can you. At least that is my sincere prayer or else membership of a thousand new WhatsApp groups that are even more mental than the ones I was in in the UK is just going to be the most enormous timesuck.

Friendmaking score: 9/10. 4th Grade Moms are class acts, I am discovering.

Something to save up for

2025 was finally the year when I acquired a leather jacket - very behind the curve of me I know, but I’d never quite been able to find one I liked that I could justify the £ on before. But this one from The Jacket Maker, I can confidently report, is a cracker: super-soft, really flattering and you can also customise it to tweak the hardware etc. On sale right now, and I see TJM has also just introduced a men’s collection to. TBH I’m not much of a fan of leather jackets on men (unless they look like James Dean), but I quite like the idea of trying to persuade my husband into something like this.

As soon as I landed, under grey, dreary skies and into the packed and frankly quite grim chaos of Heathrow, something sort of lifted that I hadn’t even realise was there: I suddenly didn’t feel like a foreigner any more. Even as I wrestled my way onto the Elizabeth Line, and then sat on it for nearly 2 hours after a train ahead broke down, and subsequently missed my train north, and then had to pay an extra £20 on the train towards my ticket because I hadn’t realised my railcard had expired I just sort of accepted these things as arsey annoyingness, but they didn’t spin me out as they might have done in America because they were things that have happened to me before, many times, and I know what to do in those situations. Conversely, I actually nearly missed my flight out thanks to a combination of emotional exhaustion, a dental appointment that went on longer than I’d anticipated, getting on a Metro line the wrong way and going to the wrong terminal in DC because I’d read the board wrong, all of which basically happened because I’d never done them before and threw me into a terrible state (tbh, they would have put me in a terrible state in the UK too, but it would have been less existential).

Anyway, the whole thing made me realise how foreign I’d actually been feeling here, without even noticing it. Because the other thing that I have noticed is how life can feel simultaneously completely weird and different, and also exactly the same, and this disguises the foreign-ness after a short time, because unlike a holiday where you can soak it up and just sort of waft around happily in the limbo, when you move somewhere you just have to crack on with life. The whole time we’ve been here I’ve been doing all the normal things: going to the supermarket; cooking dinner; trying not to procrastinate from doing work; wrangling my kids; attempting to have some sort of social life etc. Having young-ish children, particularly, makes it feel as if everything’s still the same as you still have to get them out of the house on time for school and organise playdates and feed them dinner every day that they’ll eat and make sure they have clean pants. The other day I went to pick up the nine year old from a birthday party at a laser tag place out of town and it was EXACTLY like all the party pickups I’ve ever done in the past, with the adults standing round smiling at each other and making small talk while silently and fervently wishing that their child would finish playing whatever game they’re playing/finish their hotdog/get their party bag and you can just get the hell out of there.

And yet these things have all felt quite dreamlike at times, and strangely hard, and I realised, after getting away from it for a bit, that it’s because we are foreigners in a strange land and so of course it’s just harder than it is than somewhere you’re familiar with. It’s not just because I haven’t yet quite worked out where to do my regular supermarket shop (our nearest options is Whole Foods, aka whole pay cheque: lovely but makes you want to weep when you get to pay; Safeway has all the things but is less lovely than Whole Foods but always turns out to be equally eye wateringly expensive; I think Trader Joes is probably going to end up being my go-to but there’s always one thing I need on the list that it just doesn’t have); or keep forgetting how awful DC drivers are and that here if you indicate to change lanes it’s an aggressive signal that means the person behind you will go faster so you can’t get in; or haven’t yet got used to the fact that standard shot measures are double the size so if you go out for a quiet drink you WILL have a hangover the next day.

It’s that when you move to a new country you just don’t have the cultural background of life that you have when you’ve lived somewhere for a long time. In England, for example, you know that pickled onion Monster Munch are the best crisps and a great big slab of Dairy Milk is what you need when life’s a bit shitty and everyone remembers that mad craze of elastic tied round your legs so you could do complicated skipping things when you were about 11, if you’re a girl and grew up somewhere where there wasn’t a lot to do, and these things exist in our collective cultural consciousness which means there’s always a commonality. Even when I moved to York for quite a short time (2 years in all) I made new friends quickly that I know will stay friends with these people (I know this as I went and spent a night there when I was back and saw them all and it felt like home), and this is partly because you just have all these historic things as part of the collective cultural psyche that everyone taps into to some degree. Here I just don’t have any of that back catalogue. I don’t know if my kids will get some of it as they’re spending some of their formative years here. I hope so. I love going to new countries and learning things and feeling like you’re part of the culture, but it’s just harder as an adult, a bit like learning to ski when you’re 30 instead of when you’re 3.

Then, as well as and as part of that cultural background, it’s making friends. I started, and didn’t finish, a post about making friends - I might actually post it separately, with a note about its delay as I have moved on from that time. But you need friends, in life, and you need good ones who you can have a drink and a whinge with - but making those friends takes time. As my fellow writer Debora Robertson once wisely said, you can’t make old friends quickly - and when you move to a foreign country, although you can still call your old friends and chat on the phone, you can’t jump on a train to go and catch up with them so easily, so the obviousness of the friendship lack is more stark.

Since I started that friend post I have, in fact, made some friends who I think will remain good friends for life - mostly, actually, Brits, including one dear pal who is fast becoming a soul sister, so similar are we. But that stuff takes time and is part of the weirdness and the emotional rollercoaster.

I have more thoughts. I’m going to try and start writing them more regularly, now that I have broken my writers block with this one, but it’s 7.17am and I can hear my alarm going off to go and wake the kids up and start the morning wrangle. Apologies for the silence. Watch this space!

I will publish them, at some point, but right now I want to write about something that happened this morning, which comes on top of a very strange week here in DC.

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We moved into the Cosy Home last week which has been both joyful and depressing. Joyful because, after weeks of being on the move it’s lovely to be in one fixed place. I am loving pottering around the neighbourhood, working out the quickest way to walk to the pool, joining the library, trying to find the best coffee etc. Depressing because we have been living with one set of camping cutlery, 5 paper plates and two insulated mugs between five of us, the furniture is still as nasty as it ever was and our shipping from the UK doesn’t arrive until next week. My impatience (and discomfort) levels are high but my husband’s bothered levels are low - he’s perfectly happy as he is, as (mostly) are the kids, who when I haven’t dragged them out of the house are bingeing on episodes of Bluey - their go-to when everything around them is strange despite them all being quite old for Bluey now (sweet) - interspersed with short bursts of frenetic energy which usually involves fighting.

As ever at this point in the summer holidays I am Over It - a month off for the summer is plenty long enough, IMO, and even more so if you happen to have moved countries and find yourself in a place where your kids have no friends yet and so even a basic playdate is not an option. We have all absolutely had enough of each other; I feel frustrated and unable to settle or stick to anything when my day is broken up by demands for more food/to find a charger for an electronic item/by the need to get everyone out of the house; I am more than ever reminded of how Other I am to three sons (not to mention my husband) whose makeup and interests are entirely divergent from my own.

This Otherness really came home to me this week - first, on a long and lovely phone call with a friend back in England who has two sons, and commented on how she, too, increasingly finds she has very little in common with her children, who don’t want to, for example, come shopping with her, or chat generally over a coffee or come and get their nails done, but mostly want to either be on a screen or talk about their golf scores. We agreed that, particularly as our children become older, more independent and more keen on hanging out with their mates than us, it can be really difficult to connect with them - we long for them to be around, and then when they are, feel a bit baffled by their hulking enormousness, their moods and their ability to ‘lock in’ (technical term) to an activity that is utterly alien to us, a space to which we are not really invited.

The second jolt of realisation came when we spent the afternoon with some British friends who were on their way home after a US holiday. These friends have three absolutely gorgeous daughters, all older than my boys, and spending time with them made me realise how much I have missed the company of women in the last few weeks and months. It was just so different being with girls. They sat and chatted with us, just noodling around different conversational topics. Nobody interrupted one another, or got heated and emotional when somebody disagreed with them. When we went to the supermarket and the girls’ mum needed to do a multi reverse and turn situation, a la Austin Powers, she remained calm, the girls sat in silence while she manoeuvred this enormous American beast of a car back and forth, and then when she’d achieved the move, they all cheered and congratulated her.

It was genuinely mind-blowing: in my household, I would have been snapping at the boys to shut up so I could concentrate, and then I might get a ‘finally’ once I’d actually done it, if I were lucky. Not because my boys don’t appreciate me driving or think I’m rubbish, more that they notice less what’s going on around them; they are deeply, intensely invested in the to and fro between the three of them at all times when together, so that the slightest spark of anything can ignite within seconds and turn a normal interaction into a roasting session, which turns into a furious row and will often end in casual violence. Having to be quiet for a couple of minutes while someone executes a driving manoeuvre genuinely does not even occur to them.

Most of the time, I’m ok with this. My children are pretty good kids, overall - they’re funny and sweet and interesting and often kind too. But at the moment - I think because everything is strange and new and we all feel freshly skinned and vulnerable to everything - things can spiral very quickly, including my own emotions. I got chatting to the couple in their sixties from whom I went to collect a pair of twin headboards the other day, and mentioned my boys, and we got talking about the loooong summer holidays (even longer here than in the UK: the schools all broke up at the beginning of JUNE) and how to fill them, especially if you’re trying to work. I laughed about how my kids were watching a LOT of telly, and he looked faintly disapproving and immediately started talking about the children next door, five of them, who have no devices whatsoever in their house and spend all their time outside building dens and going down to the creek and generally being wild and outdoorsy “just like when I was a kid!” laughed this man, who was probably in his late sixties. I smiled and nodded and then got in my car and drove away feeling utterly rubbish. Why aren’t my children outdoors building dens and damming creeks? Why have I left them on screens to go and collect a pair of headboards that they probably won’t even notice?

The reason, of course, is that my children have just moved country, we don’t have a garden in which to build a treehouse (or a handy nearby creek, as we live in the city) and they’re generally pretty discombobulated by recent life changes, so I probably need to cut myself some slack. But on top of all the otherness thoughts it didn’t really help. In that moment I felt very alone, and as if I was - am - failing. I feel like this a lot at the moment. Even right now, writing this at 7am, contemplating another day of trying to motivate everyone (we have planned a morning at the library and an afternoon at a museum) and stopping them all fighting, and trying, desperately, to galvanise everyone into having a good time, I feel like crying. I miss home; I miss my friends (especially my girlfriends) and my kids’ friends; I miss knowing what life looks like and what to expect. I miss having someone - anyone - around who does not have a penis and who understands what it feels like to want to make a home and who won’t judge me for feeling emotional about it all. I suppose that in itself is to be expected, but it’s hard.

On the topic of three sons I absolutely loved this by Francesca Hornak. So, so true and funny.

Purchase (?) of the week

We did not actually purchase any of the below, but can we just talk about the American supermarket cereal aisle? Which is less breakfast, more dessert, or even sweet shop. I cannot deny that if I were 10 years old I would 100% want to eat these for breakfast every day but seriously, who buys this stuff?

Although if you’re feeling guilty, there is always BIBLICAL CEREAL to set things right.

And finally, actual sweets look like this over here. Is it wrong to that the name is reminiscent of… quite a gritty sanitary product? Not sure I’ll be buying Gushers any time soon.

We’ve been in Washington for eight days now, and I am slowly, gradually, starting to acclimatise. When we first landed last week it was ragingly hot - 39 degrees, but with intense humidity, which meant that I spent my time mostly in air conditioned inside, then got to the point where I thought ‘I’m freezing’ and went outside, at which point I could almost feel myself physically wilting. It’s cooler this week, which is nice, although I am getting far too used to air con which I dislike as it’s really too jarring. I’m writing this with a jumper on, for goodness sake, and my right hand (I have terrible circulatory issues down the right side of my body) is practically blue.

ANYWAY. On Tuesday last week, we went to see the house we have rented, which I had only ever seen in pictures and on a video tour, after my husband had already agreed to rent it, and at which point I had a major panic that it was going to be far too small, and we were going to all drive each other mad living in it, and weren’t we supposed to be living the American dream with a massive house?

Luckily it turns out I’m married to a man who is more similar to me in matters of home aesthetics than I always remember (it was the same when we were doing up our house in London and I would worry that he wouldn’t have the aesthetic appreciation for something and then it turned out that he liked the same things as I did and had an extremely good eye for paint colours), and also knows me better than I know myself, and the house is charming. It’s on a one-way street in a cosy, neighbourhood-y part of the city just north of Georgetown; it has a pretty front porch and a fig tree in the yard at the back which already has budding fruits on it; it has gorgeous wooden floors the whole way through (no more gross hallway carpet, which we had in our last rental house and which was utterly impractical with three boys and a dog) and the master bedroom has a high ceiling that looks almost as if it belongs in a church and a Murano glass chandelier. My youngest’s school is a stone’s throw away and my middle one’s is a bit further in the other direction and round a few corners, which means they can both walk to school and will hopefully make local friends whom they can bring round for tea. I, meanwhile, can walk out of my door and go and get a coffee, or stroll to Georgetown library to work if I need a change of scene.

The decoration and furnishing of said house is then a bit of a mish-mash of things. It comes unfurnished, but we get basic beds, sofas etc via my husband’s work. Unfortunately these are of the useful-but-in-no-way-beautiful variety. The furniture is, not to put too fine a point on it, revolting: grey sofas made of cheap manmade fibres; shiny, dog-poo coloured faux wood dressers; ugly upholstered dining chairs and so on. Additionally unfortunately, we were only allowed to ship 15 cubic metres of our own things, which meant bringing furniture was a no-go. Instead I stuffed in as many cushions, throws, blankets and rugs as I could fit (I actually had a total panic as obviously I am unable to conceive of what 15 cubic metres actually looks like, but it turns out I could have brought more rugs etc etc but there we go), as well as various sets of curtains as the house doesn’t come with them. We would then, I decided, sprinkle some aesthetic joy over the place via DC’s second hand furniture stores/ Facebook Marketplace/ the odd bit of Ikea.

My problem is that a) I am impatient, b) I am not made of infinite money and c) that when I have a shopping list of things I either want or need to buy, I get quite overwhelmed, very distracted and a bit ratty. As previously mentioned, I love home - creating one, inviting people in and so on - and I think at the moment I’m experiencing an extreme form of the need to nest, exacerbated by having lived out of a bag for the past six weeks and as previously discussed, not having had a home at all - but I also want to basically click my fingers and for it to happen, especially when, as now, I have limited time to do it because we’re only here for a short time. I am ridiculously affected by the aesthetics of my surroundings: interior spaces where the inhabitants don’t really care about what they look like make me feel a bit sick. It’s not a great trait, to be honest, and makes me feel incredibly shallow, but it is what it is.

Consequently, I have become OBSESSED with FB Marketplace. Like, properly, truly obsessed. Every morning when I wake up it’s the first app I check, to see if anyone has uploaded anything new or beautiful or useful that I might be able to get my grubby little paws on. I have to physically restrain myself from checking it at every opportunity (I now hide my phone guiltily when my husband comes into the room as he’s obviously noted how out of control my use of it has become and keeps threatening to delete it). My saved searches are ridiculous: ‘Anthropologie accent chair’; ‘Anglepoise Type 75’; ‘Free King headboard’; ‘Round side table’; ‘Loft bed with desk’; ‘Fiddle Leaf Fig’; ‘Pottery Barn plates’ (I have plates; they arrive in our shipping next week; I do not need any more plates). Yesterday at lunchtime I was noodling around on it and actually contemplated getting in an Uber XL and heading over the river to Arlington to nab a free, down-filled and extremely comfy-looking sofa that the seller noted would take 2-3 people to lift down at least 20 steps and that they would need a truck to transport it, but it was going on a first come, first served basis. I was flying solo with my 3 kids under the age of 15. (Luckily for me the seller saved me from myself by telling me someone was on their way to get it already).

Despite this clearly unhealthy obsession, however, I have a) managed to pick up a few nice things already and b) am enjoying the side effect of going to collect said things as it’s enabling me to learn the basic geography of DC. On Sunday I drove all the way out to Clinton, Maryland, to collect these beauties:

A few days before that I had the pleasure of checking out the Capitol Hill neighbourhood when I went to grab two of these bar stools for our kitchen counter:

And at the weekend I noodled around the suburbs of Arlington when I grabbed this excellently large (in fact, possibly too large) laundry hamper for the boys’ bathroom:

All these trips are making me feel a bit more anchored, and also have the bonus of enabling me to interact with people who are not my family, whom I love, but whom I have been spending exclusive time with for a looong time now. The lady I bought the hamper from is moving to NYC in four weeks and has promised me she has more to sell, and I should just message her for anything. I’m hoping for some nice porch furniture so that when the mosquitoes stop biting quite so crazily come about September that I can sit out there, perhaps in a rocking chair, and watch the world go by and judge people.

As I hand over actual money for things and hone my searches, I’ve also come up with a few rules for myself: 1. that if I love something reasonably priced (i.e. much less than it would cost new) and it’s staying in my head overnight then I’d better snap it up before it goes, like the $150 yellow Anglepoise for my desk (the one I’m planning to buy) which I missed out on; 2. that really, I don’t need to drive all over the city for some secondhand IKEA and 3. I do not need to buy secondhand stuff that isn’t nice just because I need something to fill the space, and that actually, it’s better to wait. Watch this space!

Watch of the week

Last week I went to see the film Materialists as the Telegraph had asked me to write a piece about it. It’s not out in the UK yet I don’t think, but I urge you when it is to go and see it. It’s billed as a romantic comedy but it’s not THAT funny tbh, which to my mind is all for the good as it’s actually making some interesting and thoughtful points about dating and love and why we end up with or choose the people we do. I went with my husband and we both enjoyed it equally, so a good date night option, I reckon.

Shop of the week

Given that my exploration so far has largely been confined to the digital perusal of other people’s goods, I was delighted to come across the most wondrous IRL discovery when my husband was looking for a new notebook. Being the consummate researcher that he is, he’d marched straight to Jenni Bick Custom Journals, and oh my goodness. Aside from all things home, I cannot resist a good stationery shop, and this one delivered in SPADES. I mean:

I bought (or rather my husband bought for me) a single item: a Blackwing pencil. If you haven’t come across them, they’re the absolute best. If you’re not in DC, you can buy them here.

That’s all for this week folks, I’m off to drive around the suburbs of the Greater DC area in search of coffee tables.

We are on holiday at the moment. In Greece. It’s lovely: hot, blue skies. The most difficult decision is beach or pool, and what to read next.

Despite the loveliness however, I appear to be having some sort of internal meltdown.

“This last month, l've been travelling so much, going home for just about long enough to do laundry and repack my case. It's been so much fun, and I've spent time with so many of my favourite people, but tomorrow I'm going home and I'm going to be there all summer and the thought makes me giddy,” wrote Debora Robertson recently on her Substack.

“This may be controversial, but one of the best parts of travel is that week you get home and the appreciation you have for being back in your house. There's nothing better than drinking my coffee, sleeping in my bed with my favorite pillow, puttering around my house... soaking up the little life l've built for myself.

Adventures are great, but home is the best,” wrote Grace Atwood on hers.

I’m happy for them, really I am. I adore reading about Debora’s adventures in her French house, and I get exactly where Grace is coming from when she writes about the appreciation for your own home.

The trouble is that right now, I don’t have my own home. I am literally living out of a several suitcases. We moved out of our home in York a couple of weeks ago, having returned it to its bland, magnolia-walled rental state, spent a week with my Mum and Dad, and now we’re having a brief holiday before we get on a plane and move to DC. We have, in theory, a home there - an address; someone picked up the keys for us this week; I’ve been in touch with the lady who’s going to clean for us; we have furniture due to arrive when we arrive and our shipping shortly after that (hopefully).

But I have never seen this house in the flesh. It is currently empty. The bed I will sleep in when we live there is not my own; I don’t yet know what my preferred coffee will be; I don’t even have a washing machine to do my laundry as it’s broken (although will hopefully have been replaced by the time we get there). I don’t know where my pictures will hang on the walls, or what the air will smell like when I step out in the morning, or what the sounds will be like, or what my favourite little nook of the house will be.

It’s most discombobulating, and it’s making me feel utterly untethered, and a bit stressed, and a tiny bit down.

Because the thing is, I LOVE home. I love making a home - always have, from boarding school days where I would decorate whatever room I’d been assigned immediately, making it mine with pictures and small decorations and little tchotchkes, through a brief period of owning my own flat where I took down walls and turned it into my own grown-up space, through to our most recent rental home where I painted the sitting room walls Edward Bulmer’s Invisible Green and made the rank kitchen bearable with some Setting Plaster. I cart enormous amounts of stuff with me wherever I go - books and pictures and endless cushions that drive my husband crazy, but make whenever we are cosy and welcoming.

All these things (or the most crucial of them) are currently in a shipping container halfway across the Atlantic, and I know that once they arrive and I place them I will feel tethered again. But in the meantime I feel stuck in a weird sort of limbo. I miss York desperately - not our house, which was functional and boring, but my life there and the friends I made and the way it felt real and purposeful and busy and fun. Last night I found myself noodling around on Rightmove hovering over houses for sale in the city and knowing exactly what living there would look like: what my path would be each morning to school, for a coffee, to the butcher.

I can’t allow myself to think about our actual home (the one that we own); the house we bought and renovated from top to bottom and lived in for one glorious year before having to move out of it (husband’s job) and rent it out. To a lovely family, but whose stuff in it suddenly made it feel not like my own any more (quite correctly) and who are now themselves moving on which means we need to find new tenants among this maelstrom of madness. The whole time we lived in York if I wanted to buy a piece of furniture, or a lamp, I would work out where it would go in our home home, which would accordingly direct whether I thought the item was worth it, or how much it was worth paying (why we ended up with crappy bookshelves but a nice coffee table), but with this next move even that is sort of fading away. I can’t even let myself imagine living there any more as I don’t know where that will be.

And so I find myself homesick for a home that doesn’t exist. Which is weird and strange and sad. I’m trying to sit with the feeling and work out what it is. For a place with my own pillows and coffee? For the people that make up a neighbourhood around your home? Or maybe just for something known. Right now, I know nothing. It’s exciting and terrifying and very unsettling. How strange life can be sometimes.

Next month my family and I are moving from York to Washington DC. We have known about this for a long time, and we also always knew we would only be in York for a limited period of time. But this transition time is hard.

On the one hand, I’m up for it now. I’ve started selling stuff on Facebook Marketplace and Vinted like a loon; I’m handing out possessions willy nilly to anyone who wants them (tumble dryer anyone?); I’m ok now with holes in the walls where my husband’s taken down shelves, and the fact that my 11 year old is sleeping on a mattress on the floor because I sold his bed today, and that each room has a growing pile of boxes in it.

I’ve drawn up a colour coded key and started sticking pieces of tape on everything - green for coming with us; blue for going into storage; yellow for the charity shop; orange for the dump (I am writing a big piece for the Telegraph about everything I’m learning from this decluttering so keep an eye out). Every day I try and sort out another drawer, or a cupboard, or that awful place under the stairs.

It’s liberating in some ways but also exhausting, and emotionally draining: we can only take 15 cubic metres of stuff with us (what does 15 cubic metres even look like I hear you cry - me neither -), and the rest will go into storage, which means I basically have to give an emotional value to every single item that I own.

At the same time I’m also trying to work, and get the kids up every day and take them to school, and walk the dog, and cook the meals, and do the laundry, and see my friends.

The latter I’m finding the hardest to do - because although I really, really want to see all the friends I’ve made up here, doing so is hard because a) all the packing admin and b) because each plan becomes emotionally loaded because it’s basically a goodbye. Which I don’t want to think about - I’d rather just stick my head in the sand and pretend we’re going to meet up for a coffee like normal in about 3 weeks or so - except in three weeks, I won’t be here any more.

Last night I sang my last concert with the Yorkshire Bach Choir, the choir I’ve been singing with up here. This morning in church I was in floods of tears feeling so so sad about saying goodbye to all of this. And I mean all of it, from the coffee shop on Bishy Road where Molly behind the counter starts prepping my coffee when she sees me crossing the road, to the smell of the dog roses by the path on my daily walk, to my pals at the school gate (and even the class WhatsApp) to the milkman delivering my pints of milk in glass bottles twice a week, to the fact I can park my car to do an errand and be walking streets that have been around since medieval times, to having my Mum and Dad up the road, to spending time with girlfriends I’ve known since we were at school when we were 10 because this is where I grew up. My little green roots which are just beginning to anchor themselves into the earth of Yorkshire are being torn out of the ground and I don’t like it, even though I always knew it was coming, and even though I’m excited for the next new adventure.

Our lives will be like this for a while now; my husband’s job basically means we’re going to be on the move every few years for about the next nine or 10. It’s a big challenge for me as I find change hard and I don’t like uncertainty. I also like to put down those roots: to make my house a home; to befriend people for wine-y, coffee-y, gossipy chats; to feel as if I’m part of the community. There’s no point living somewhere if you don’t throw yourself into the place, in my opinion, but there’s never enough time.

But it’s exciting too. And when I feel sad about it, like today, I remind myself that in every place we live, I will take a little bit of it with me and leave a little bit of myself behind.

I am going to miss York. I am so grateful to have lived here, even for just a short time. I know I will come back - if only to visit my parents. I hope it remembers me when I do.

Then suddenly the sun comes out and I become conscious of my ragged nails, my pasty, prickly legs and what my unclothed arms look like. And as I embark on doing something about all of these things, I realise my body has changed.

It’s happened slowly and gradually, and probably to the naked (excuse the pun) eye, is unnoticeable. But, looking back at pictures of myself from just a few years ago, trying on various clothes in my wardrobe and finally, horribly, getting on the scales (and then getting straight off again), it’s undeniable. I am about a stone heavier than I was before we moved north. My waist is thicker, my thighs are broader and my face is fuller.

Why? I eat probably more healthily now than I did when I worked in an office, where chocolate was always available from the vending machine and 4pm pretty much every day would see me prowling the newsroom looking for biscuits and cake. I mostly skip breakfast and confine my eating into a daily 6-8 hour window - partly because I’ve been convinced of the benefits of intermittent fasting and partly because that pattern just fits into my life now: there’s no time to eat breakfast anyway, black coffee staves off any morning hunger pangs and I just eat with the kids in the evening; job done.

I barely drink - for me, drinking is a social activity, and currently my evenings mostly consist of getting the children to bed then going back to my desk; my husband is away during the week at the moment and it just never occurs to me to open a bottle of wine on my own. And besides, I notice the effects of alcohol far, far more these days - even a single glass has a knock-on effect on my general feeling of awareness the next day, so it seems a bit pointless to waste that on a weeknight.

Since starting rowing again I am both stronger and have more cardio stamina than I did. I don’t walk to get to places like I did in London, but I do walk the dog every day, which probably amounts to the same time/number of steps.

And yet jeans that once did up easily are now too tight; my calves have thickened (rowing muscles I think) and my waist, which has always been my slimmest part, is no longer as defined as it was. I suspect that much of this change is hormone-related and inevitable. But I still don’t like it.

I feel in something of a dilemma. On the one hand, I know I am still a healthy weight and don’t appear large. I also enjoy food, and eating, and cooking, and the thought of the effort required to rein all that in feels a bit much on top of everything else that’s going on in my life at the moment.

On the other, I would like to be a bit thinner. I also weirdly enjoy the process of becoming so - I found Esther Walker’s recent Substack post on this topic v.interesting. After my second son was born and I was the heaviest I’d been until that point, I did the 5:2 diet and steadily lost about a stone in six months. I then went down to one day a week of fasting just because I enjoyed the discipline it brought; when I became pregnant with my third child and decided that on balance fasting a day a week probably wasn’t the healthiest approach to pregnancy I felt strangely disappointed.

Ever since I read it I can’t stop thinking about Harriet Walker’s utterly fascinating piece on Ozempic microdosing, in which she related her own swift loss of the few pounds she’d always wanted to lose but just hadn’t got around to doing. Like me, she didn’t need to lose the pounds per se, and it wasn’t urgent enough to really focus on - her clothes still fit, she still looked pretty good etc. I also quite like the idea of the increased focus and control that these drugs appear to bring with them - I found this piece about the entire economic knock-on effects of the weight loss drug boom (courtesy of James Marriott) completely fascinating. That said, the pen is not for me.

In the meantime, however, there’s the specific issue of Spring, and clothes, and general wardrobe paralysis, and the necessity of not bankrupting myself just buying more clothes I can’t actually afford.

Enter Alice Holland-Lu, who got in touch recently to tell me about her new business, The Female Archetypes. After having her second baby and losing the weight, Alice found that her absolute favourite, not cheap, pair of jeans just didn’t fit any more. And, rather than just going and buying a new pair in a bigger size, she decided to do something about it. Having a background in fashion helped - and so she has designed a core collection of four pieces that are one size fits all - not in a baggy, shapeless way, but via the clever use of panels and poppers so you can adjust the clothes to fit you. I had intended to just mention The Female Archetypes as part of a bigger post, but I found our conversation fascinating - not least because it covered quite a few of these issues, as well as some other interesting conundrums - so I have reproduced some of it here.

Why did you start The Female Archetypes?

The whole thing started with jeans. I was a size 6 before my daughter was born, but she was 9lb 11 and my hips widened, which meant all the lovely jeans in my wardrobe didn’t fit. Once I started to get back into shape a year after she was born I thought I’d go and buy a really nice pair of jeans that were always going to fit me and got a lovely, limited edition, beautiful pair from Frame. Then after my son was born they didn’t fit either. I’d essentially had two kids and suddenly had a wardrobe full of clothes that didn’t fit me any more. I’ve worked in fashion for a while, and I've always known how to dress myself, but my body changing so much really affected my self-esteem. All I wanted was a pair of jeans that fit me. So I decided to design some myself. I came up with a system where you have adjustable poppers which are then hidden by a waistband that goes over the top. And anyone can wear them. You can have a big lunch and just let the poppers out.

Are your clothes just designed for postpartum women?

No! My experience was around motherhoods but I had friends going through menopause and their weight was fluctuating too. I feel really strongly that I don’t want the brand to be a Mummy brand - because lots of women don’t have children or don’t want them. For my first ad campaign, one of my models is in her mid-60s; one is 58 and going through ovarian cancer and the jeans are the only thing that fit her. I once read a Vogue article that said women change size 31 times in their life. I feel really passionate about creating pieces that suit all women at all stages of life. My shirt has popper closures rather than buttons, so if you’re having dexterity issues it maintains independence. The blazer has breathable eyelets in the arms so that if you’re in a meeting you can let some air in. I really want women when they wake up in the morning, whether they are struggling with sleep deprivation or brain fog or hormonal changes to be able to say ok I have this pair of jeans and I know they’re going to fit me regardless of what else is going on.

Tell me about the clothes themselves

I wanted to keep the collection as tight as possible - I could have developed 50 garments but only did four - because first of all I need to know if this is a concept people can get their heads around. Honestly one of the greatest challenges was just explaining it to people. Also, from a sustainability perspective, this whole fast-fashion ecosystem is ridiculous. We simply don’t need to consume as much. So there’s the jeans, the shirt, a blazer and a trench: all wardrobe staples you can weave other stuff around. Everything is adjustable - the trench, shirt and blazer all have different sized panels you can snap in to make them bigger or smaller. everything is made from quality deadstock, in London at a factory I visit once a week. The denim is from Tokyo, via an eco-friendly buying process. It’s so soft but it feels like jogging bottoms. They’re a wide leg fit because I wanted something to fit all types of body shapes, but they’re a wide leg at the ankle but not the thighs and hips, as that’s where we hold our weight. There’s no point buying a nice pair of jeans and then your thighs rub and they wear through. I’m obsessed with deep pockets, so everything has them*. My clothes are investment pieces but they’re sustainable - and I’ve worn the jeans every single day for six months and they look brand new.

What about if you like new clothes and want more than four things in your wardrobe?

I’m a sucker for newness myself - I’m very much a reformed shopper and have an extremely bad eBay habit. (Once I found out all the charity shops have all their stock on eBay = dangerous. I was in hospital with my son and bought loads of stuff I don't even remember buying.) My idea is - and I’ve already worked with an artist - is to offer the panels with different prints and artist collaborations. That way people can also customise the clothes. And there are more innovations in the pipeline.

* Alice kindly sent me a trench and a pair of jeans to try, and I can confirm that they are both supremely comfortable, super flattering and have the BEST deep pockets I have ever come across.

Something to save up for

I was recently sent some hair cleanser called New Wash to try after I wrote this piece for the Sunday Times Magazine about whether it’s all over for soap. I have to say I was a bit sceptical, but having used it twice now, I can highly recommend - even on day two my hair is bouncy and looks clean and healthy (I wash it every other day and normally by the evening of day 2 my hair is very definitely not fit for public consumption). It goes on like a conditioner (it doesn’t lather): you comb it through with your fingers then rinse out v. thoroughly - you don’t need to use actual conditioner. That’s it, job done. Super-clean bouncy hair, no chemical crap, easy peasy. I will definitely be buying this with my own money.

Service of the week

On the theme of fashion sustainability, I recently listened to this BBC R4 programme about how companies can make money from fixing things, and heard about M&S’s new clothing repair service. I had a couple of jumpers I loved that the foul beast moths had got their teeth into, so I packaged them up, sent them off, and £60 later, back they came, good as new - I swear this is the best invisible mending service I have ever come across. They can do all sorts of things, from fixing a zip to mending a rip, and the clothes don’t even have to be from M&S - my two jumpers came from Navy Grey and Theory respectively (why do the bastard moths always go for the good stuff?) Absolutely well worth the money.

The sun has started shining - thank God - but life feels pretty full-on at the moment. Not just the everyday, juggling work and life and kids and domestic admin full-on, but next-level full-on.

This summer, we are moving to America. It’s for my husband’s job; we are going to Washington DC, but only for two years. I am trying to get my head around the American schooling system, work out the best options for my kids knowing that they are going to have to come back into the British system in two years’ time (they start school a year later in the US) and figure out where the best place for us to live is going to be that covers commutability, a decent education and is within budget. My husband is away during the week at the moment, training for the new job, which means during the week I am chief schoolrun driver, laundress, chef, dog walker, homework chivvier, emotion-mopper and after-school activity coordinator. I also have to fit my own work into the day, as I have bills to pay. Lately, this has meant setting my alarm half an hour earlier, for 6am, and working until 10 or 11pm to get it all done.

I am really, really tired. Not just physically, but emotionally. My youngest son is being increasingly shitty in the mornings, throwing tantrums pretty much every day, which makes me cross and shouty and then sad and tearful when I’ve calmed down. The rational part of me knows that it’s probably because he, too, is anxious about what the future holds. The real part of me needs him to co-operate in the morning, as that’s the only way we can get out of the house on time, with everyone dressed and their teeth brushed. Yesterday, he changed out of his pyjamas into his school uniform and ate toast in the car. When I ask him what we can do about this and why he’s so grumpy in the morning he tells me it’s because he’s hungry.

I’m hungry too. Not for food, but for some sort of sustenance that I don’t have to provide for myself. I listen to hymns when I walk the dog. I pray. I talk to my friends. Sometimes, I cry. It all helps. But there’s nobody to contain my emotions.

“You are the linchpin of your family, and that’s really important, but really hard,” a friend said to me this morning as she put her arms around my weeping self outside the empty school playground as I mopped my eyes with a rank and crumpled tissue I’d found in my coat pocket.

But I don’t want to be the linchpin! Was what I wanted to shout. I just want to have a normal family life, with two parents to juggle the load, which isn’t having to change countries and move somewhere that right now seems a frankly quite terrifying place. It’s TOO MUCH.

Except, it can’t be too much. I don’t have any choice. I can’t - much as I’d like to - just lie down in the road and be run over by it; by life.

So tomorrow, I’m flying to Washington DC for five days, to look at schools, and walk around neighbourhoods, and try not to get shot or lose my mind. Pray for me.

Yorkshire excellence of the week

I had been meaning to check out this cafe for ages, as it’s a social enterprise that supports vulnerable people in the community, but like everything in York it closes too early to work for my life; I swear if any cafe stayed open after 4pm in this city they would CLEAN UP.

Anyway, I finally got there the other day to meet a friend and what I was not expecting was for the hot chocolate to be SO DAMN GOOD. Seriously, like food of the Gods cacao from heaven. Like something from Narnia. I can highly recommend the 60% Colombian dark chocolate with added chilli, hold the whipped cream. It actually feels like a health food. I think after this morning I need one right now.

Something to save up for

How on earth am I going to get the bloody dog across the Atlantic?

Hello and Happy New Year - if we’re allowed to say that at this point in time. I reckon we’re good for the first half of the month, and I’m just squeezing in there, so greetings of the New Year etc etc.

That said, I bloody hate January. It is simply the worst month: cold; dark; financially stricken. I had just finished paying my Christmas credit card bill and various school invoices (music lessons etc etc) and was feeling reasonably financially smug when I checked exactly how much I need to pay HMRC by the end of the month and OH MY GOD. It is an obscene amount of money. Which means I really need to pull my finger out and work bloody hard to afford everything else, although January as we all know is mostly conducive to hibernating under the covers, not working. So that’s minor (major) irritation number one.

Anyway, January makes me grumpy, to the extent that I started making a list of all the small things that are annoying me lately (which of course I now can’t find) thinking I would make a Substack post about them to see how many fellow grinches I have out there. In all seriousness though, I would really like to spend less of my life feeling irritated. India Knight wrote a post recently which was a list of all the things she knows about herself, one of which is that she basically doesn’t sweat the small stuff, and I thought ‘Oh! I wish I was like that’. I am actually quite good in a crisis or a massive life change: I have handled juggling two small children and being pregnant with a third while my husband was deployed for nine months (yes, the exact length of a pregnancy); I have negotiated moving 200 miles and finding schools for my children; I am in the middle of logistics for another big move (to be revealed). I can do this stuff, but if I lose my keys or drop something on the floor or forget an appointment it feels like the world is exploding. I am simply unable to just shrug and smile about it; instead I rant and scream and swear, in an exceptionally childlike and unedifying manner.

There are also things that just excessively annoy me even though I really shouldn’t allow them the headspace/ability to affect my mood, but they do. Some are obvious external ones like the weather, or bad news; some are stupid irrational personal bugbears, like the sound of a metal water bottle rolling around in the car (this is such a trigger for me that my children now instantly know when they need locate, and anchor, said water bottle). Other things are external but specific. Here are some of the things that have really pissed me off lately:

Weather warnings.

It’s been exceptionally cold up here recently; minus 4 last week, with all the attendant ice, snow etc etc. It’s winter, it’s January, not entirely surprising. And yet the hysteria! The warnings to stay inside/stock up on food/turn the heating on. What on earth have we become, if we haven’t worked out those entirely sensible responses for ourselves? Surely someone who doesn’t realise you need to put a hat and gloves and an extra layer on when it’s cold is either a) a child or b) an idiot who probably isn’t going to listen to the news anyway. The rest of us are perfectly capable, thanks v much. I keep thinking about things like the Great Frost of 1683. They didn’t have alarmists all over the news then. Admittedly, many people also died, so maybe I should be grateful for modern mollycoddling. Just as long as I don’t have to listen to it.

Theatre bookings.

We went to the theatre over the Christmas holidays, to see The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the Leeds Playhouse, which was excellent. HOWEVER when I was booking the tickets online, despite the fact that we are a family of five the website wouldn’t let me book five seats in a row because, it informed me, this would leave a single seat on the end of the row. Instead it forced me to book four seats, and a single seat which on the theatre plan looked as if it was the other side of the aisle. I grumpily conceded - no other choice (no other tickets available; I’d left it quite late) and then, lo and behold when we got there it turned out the other other side of the aisle was actually the other side of the massive sound/light desk which meant I couldn’t see the rest of my family AT ALL. I was actually feeling a bit grumpy with their general ungratefulness at the time, so it was quite peaceful, but it did really annoy me that the website had been all prissy about leaving one single seat unbooked and then split me up from my entire family, and the tickets weren’t that cheap either. Anyway, I fired off a cross email and to their credit they emailed back apologising and saying they needed to make it clearer on their website. Yes they do - but at least they acknowledge that fact; well done the Leeds Playhouse.

Changes to the bus timetable.

My children start school at two different times, and neither of their schools are within walking distance (I wrote about my nightmare school run here, if anyone’s interested) which means the mornings take ages. Until last term we would quite often take the bus, with my elder son catching a slightly earlier bus and me and the eight year old getting on the 8.07 which got us to near school for 8.30; time for a leisurely stroll down to the playground in plenty of time. Then for reasons unknown, First Bus cancelled the 8.07 service and now we have to choose between the 7.55 or the 8.20 which is just impossible: 7.55 is psychologically impossible and the 8.20 gets us there too late. So of course we pile in the car, sitting in traffic for ages and killing the environment. Not cool, First Bus.

Aldi getting rid of its weighing scales.

I now do quite a lot of my supermarket shopping in Aldi, and anything they don’t have I get by nipping to the big M&S round the corner. It’s a situation that suits me down to the ground, as I love Aldi (and Aldi’s prices) but they don’t always have things like e.g. preserved lemons. Anyway, I was in there before Christmas buying bits to make my red cabbage, and it turns out Aldi has got rid of the weighing scales it used to have in the fruit and veg section, which pissed me off no end, because I needed to work out how many Bramley apples was 600g. I searched around and couldn’t make the shop assistant understand that it wasn’t because I was concerned about the price, but because I wanted to make sure I got enough/not too many. I registered my displeasure, but I’m not sure he got it.

But seriously, Aldi, if you’re trying to appeal to your increasingly middle class customer base, taking away the scales is the wrong way to go about it. If you cook from scratch, like I mostly try and do, you need to know what things weigh, especially if you also prefer to buy them loose if possible. Taking away the scales is literally the worst thing you can do for cook from scratch customers.

I still have about six Bramley apples in my fridge, and keep meaning to make them into apple puree or sauce, but obviously haven’t got round to it.

What’s been yanking your chain recently? Let me know in the handy box below.

*I was going to include what to do about these irritations within each point BUT I have just started an excellent new course which I believe might solve my minor irritation once and for all - we shall see. I will report back.

Yorkshire excellence of the week

How do we feel about Sunday lunch? For me, it’s something I generally prefer to make and eat at home, and when I’m in the right mood I love doing it with all the trimmings: a really decent piece of meat/chicken from the butcher; Yorkshire pudding; roast potatoes; maybe a cauliflower cheese; a proper pudding with custard; red wine, Sunday papers; a nice snooze on the sofa after. I also like being invited to other people’s houses to follow much the same pattern. But generally, although I LOVE going out for lunch, ordering a roast is not something I will do in e.g. a pub or restaurant, as I usually feel I can make it better at home.

HOWEVER, just before Christmas I was given the chance to test out the Sunday Feast menu at Roots in York, and I have to say, it was rather splendid. I took my husband as a bit of a birthday treat, we sent the kids off to the school fair with a fiver each and bus money home and settled in for a couple of hours, that started off very nicely with a couple of cocktails - something whisky-based for him and a sort of modern kir for me - ran through a selection of appetisers, then some roast pork with all the bits, then pudding. For me, the best bit was the cocktails and the appetisers as those are things I’d never bother to do for my own Sunday lunch at home; I also dearly loved the fact that everything got cleared away and I didn’t have to do the washing up. Will it replace the joy of a really good roast? Not sure. But I can’t say I’m not tempted to do it again.

Conundrum of the week: is swanky dog food worth it?

We acquired a dog last year; our first family hound. I’m not really a dog person and never wanted a dog until suddenly, it felt very urgent that we get one, so I did some research and decided I wanted first, a whippet, as they’re low maintenance and don’t need loads of exercise, and then that morphed into wanting a Bedlington Whippet which are similarly low maintenance but a bit less shivery. Serendipitously, a friend of a friend was about to produce a litter, and so into our lives came our sweet Juno, companion and thief supreme. She’s basically pretty good, except from when she sees a squirrel which she’s convinced she’s going to catch.

Of course Instagram etc now know this about me and spam me with loads of dog related stuff, one of which I was suckered into recently, filling in a questionnaire for a company called Butternut Box that makes fresh dog food that gets delivered frozen, in pouches. The man who rang me up after I’d filled in the form told me he had a whippet, although I’m not sure I believed him and surely he’d just pretend he had whatever dog the person on the other end of the phone has? Perhaps I’m being cynical.

Anyway, I wouldn’t usually have bothered but last time we went to the vet she said Juno could do with a bit of fattening up (prior to this I was still basking in the previous vet visit when the vet had remarked on how lovely it was to see a dog who wasn’t overweight for a change), and it has been very cold, so I thought I’d sign up to the trial scheme. Juno of course loves it as it’s very much more exciting than her usual dry kibble. But the question is, does she now need it forevermore? Or am I signing myself up for a whole lot of financial pain and further hassle with fridge space? Answers on a postcard please.

The piece went on to say that if you try, you can control your genetic propensity towards morning larkdom or night owlishness and that you want to be aiming for the former.

I find myself conflicted on this. On the one hand, yes. Now that my alarm goes off daily at 6.30am (and I in turn try if I can to be in bed by 10 at the latest) I can see there are some benefits, although I also still find if I really want to concentrate on being able to write a piece, say, it’s often easier to do it late in the evening as then I 100% know I won’t be disturbed.

I no longer have any truck with lying about in bed until after about 9am at the most. HOWEVER I still consider anything before 6am still The Night, hence my rage a few months ago.

At the time, I was really knackered (never good for an even keel) - partly because I was regularly waking up at about 2am then lying there for a few hours, mind racing, before eventually dozing off and then being woken up by my alarm, which left me feeling as if I’d been run over. But also because my husband had taken it upon himself to start rising at 5am, ostensibly to get a head start on the day. Since having children I have become the world’s lightest sleeper, and even though he was extremely quiet, I would always wake up when he got up, and then lie there trying to get back to sleep, with the added stress of knowing the alarm could go off any minute. AWFUL. So generally, I was walking round like a total zombie, even grumpier than usual and basically struggling to function.

The whole thing put me in a general rage about the moral superiority lots of people - particularly men, I find, - assume about waking up early (I think lots of women wake up early to get a head start on the day too, but tend to talk about it less). For days I chuntered on about how selfish it was/why would he prefer to lose some hours of sleep AND piss off his darling wife etc. And then one morning I picked up the book that had sparked all this off and totally lost it.

It’s called The 5Am Club (subtitle: Own your morning; elevate your life), by a man called Robin Sharma, who is supposedly a ‘globally respected humanitarian.’ This book has also supposedly sold 15 million copies worldwide.

I will bet you any money that they were all bought by midlife men having some kind of small crisis. They are definitely the target market - as far as I could see the book does not mention a single female voice, or hold up a woman as any sort of example as to how to live. Instead it promises to share ‘how great geniuses, business titans and the world’s wisest people (yeah right, I thought) start their mornings to produce astonishing achievements’, as well as ‘insider-only tactics to defend (!) your gifts, talents and dreams against digital distraction and trivial diversions so you enjoy fortune, influence and a magnificent impact on the world.’ Excuse me while I’m a little bit sick in my mouth. The format is that it is a supposedly ‘enchanting - and often amusing - story about two struggling strangers who meet an eccentric tycoon who becomes their secret mentor’. I mean, gosh. It’s A Little Princess all over again right?

But no. Because this book was not, I found, charming, or enchanting, and it will not transport you to another world and leave you with a feeling of warmth and a renewed faith in the innate goodness of humanity. If you don’t believe me, turn to page 235, which contains a handy table about what your morning should look like. Remember that Mark Whalberg schedule that had everyone reeling/laughing/weeping a few years ago? It’s like that, but with no actual humanity.

At 4.45am, for example, you will rise for ‘personal care’. This includes hydrating ‘as it fuels the mitochondria of your cells to release ATP, which elevates your energy’. WTF? Do you mean ‘have a glass of water as you’ve just been asleep for about 8 hours and your body needs it’? Between 5am and 5.20am you Must Sweat. Maybe with terror from reading this awful book. 5.20am-5.40am is for scripting your ‘Pre-performance Blueprint’ - what the actual fuck is this and what does it mean - then you get to read for a bit. At 6am you get to make family connection - although again, not sure what this means, as apparently it’s supposed to elevate the tone of your morning and promote joy and calm but I can guarantee that in my house if you try and make family connection at 6am you will generally get a few grunts and possibly an elbow in the face as the duvet is pulled up tighter. The whole thing goes on through the day with work, meetings, reading etc etc.

NOWHERE in this table is anything vaguely domestic mentioned. Where is ‘empty the dishwasher and let the dog out for a wee’? Or ‘plan what you’re going to feed the kids for dinner’? Or even ‘eat’? Between 1 and 5pm you’re supposed to ‘break-fast’ and ‘family mealtime’ is between 6 and 7.30pm, but there’s no mention of who is preparing this family mealtime, or when that is being done. Presumably in super-successful man world there are slaves to do that for you and you don’t need to bother yourself with the domestic minutiae of chopping an onion or washing up - and those sorts of things can’t be in any way bonding or companionable or fun anyway.

I just thought it was so totally and appallingly full of assumptions, and lacking in any sort of compassion or humour or awareness of what a good life well-loved looks like. And more than anything else, it’s unbelievably self-centered. Between 6 and 7.30pm, for example, you’re supposed to take a nature walk with your family (ha!) but only because the positives of that are ‘social connection, adventure and community service’. Community service! Spending time with your family is community service?! Is this guy actually joking?

I was slightly reeling that my husband - an intelligent, kind, humorous man - had been taken in by it. And it is SO appallingly written to boot. Listen to this: “It’s not the old ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog’ insight,” declared the billionaire as he rubbed his chiselled abdominals absentmindedly and put on a new pair of sunglasses, the kind you’d see on a surfer in California. I mean! It’s like EL James has gone trans and taken acid, or something. It’s just SO BAD.

I am generally not that big a fan of self-help books anyway. I find that mostly they are pretty badly written, a bit ‘live, laugh, love’ (for the female ones) and a bit ‘maximise your best most successful self’ (for the male ones). I also think the genuinely wise, interesting people I’d like to learn some life tips from are usually too busy, not enough up their own arses and have enough integrity to waste their time pumping this shit out there in a cynical attempt to take cash off people. And yes I do have a few of these books on my shelves but mostly I start to read them and get bored with their awfulness and the fact that they don’t transport me to somewhere nicer or more interesting, and so I stick them back on the shelf and read a novel instead. The only self-help book I have ever read the whole way through is one called How to Not Hate Your Husband After Kids. And the reason I read it through was that it was funny and moving and useful and thoughtful - it wasn’t about the author, a journalist per se - or at least it was, but it was about all of her, warts and all, and it was about her marriage and her husband and her child and their relationship and the things that pissed her off and why some of it was her fault and how they could make them better together - and WHY IT MATTERED because she didn’t want to get divorced, she wanted to have a healthy relationship with the person she;’d chosen to spend her life with. Crucially, she wasn’t holding herself up as some sort of guru of how to do this stuff, and she had an actual sense of humour, because she is an actual human and didn’t need to invent some weird strangers and an eccentric tycoon to get her point across. I loved it and it made me laugh out loud. And I’m damn sure she wouldn’t have mooted getting up 2 hours earlier than her husband as a way of making their marriage better either - she seemed much more likely to be the sort to snuggle in a bit more, possibly have some sleepy morning sex then go and make him a cup of tea.

I actually have no problem with people who get up early. When we lived in America (in the midwest) we had lots of friends who would go to bed at about 9pm because they’d then get up at 4am to go to the gym. I will never go that far, but as previously stated, I’ve got earlier as I’ve got older. If I didn’t have to set the damn alarm I think my preferred routine would be to have a martini, see friends for dinner or watch some good telly, turn in about 10pm and read my book for a bit then wake up at about 7am. Sometimes yes, I do get up before 6.30 because I have a deadline to finish or I need to potter about for a bit before everyone wakes up or, in times gone by, I needed to get to the office for an early shift.

But the point is, getting up early to do this stuff - or, yes, to meditate or whatever might yes make you a bit healthier, but it does not make you a better person. It might mean you get more done, or you get a bit of personal time; it might also make you less fun in the evenings (my husband during this time took to going to bed at 8pm; it was like living with a pensioner) or not a person to share a bed with if the person you live with is not rising at that hour every day. I go to the gym, I’m just more likely to do it in the middle of the day or in the evening. And I pray and meditate, but I do it on a walk with the dog, or a friend over the phone.

What I don’t do is treat my life like a project that’s independent of all other beings, and when I am given advice by a man who writes as badly as this one it makes me want to do the exact opposite. I certainly don’t think going on a walk with my kids is community service. (Well, sometimes it is. )

Anyway, happily, now, my husband does occasionally get up at 5am, although not every day, and mostly I now seem to have trained myself to roll over and go back to sleep - either that or he’s got even more mouse-like. So all is well.

What about you? What time do you get up in the morning? Answers in the box below please.

For well over a week now, emails have been landing daily in my inbox promising all manner of tempting bargains, discounts and huge savings from any brand I’ve ever bought anything from, ever, plus any company that wants me to write about it. I delete most of them. But also, among the sales pitches, are all the gift guides compiled by the Substack newsletters I subscribe to, which I feel compelled to read, even if I have no babies in my life to buy for and have zero plans to compile a Christmas stocking for my dog, as well as the Which? guides as to what really is a bargain on Black Friday which make me stressed when I see the subject line in the email even if I’m not planning on investing in an Air Fryer now, or ever. On top of this, my relatives all start bombarding me with questions: what do I want for Christmas? What do the boys want for Christmas? Do you think they’d like this thing?

Honestly? I have no idea. My children are no longer tiny, so I can no longer dictate what clothes I would like them to wear, toys I would like them to play with, or Christmas items that are sorely needed, rather than desired, e.g. a new pair of swimming goggles or some new wellies. Mostly, they like cash - but they also like a pile of presents under the tree to unwrap, so there’s that. As for me, I haven’t really had time to sit and ponder what my ultimate wishlist would be.

But also - it’s STILL NOVEMBER people! And I have donations to find for the school Christmas fair, raffle tickets to buy, teacher gifts to contribute towards, concerts to attend, plays to watch and three packed lunches to remember to make for the days they go to the panto/to swimming/on that school trip. Not to mention the small matter of deadlines literally coming out of my ears thanks to all the work I have foolishly said yes to in order to pay for it all. But no, because of effing Black Friday, everyone wants to buy all the Christmas gifts right now, in order to get 20% off. If there’s a single thing that makes me feel less festive it is this.

Advent used to be the time to start building up to Christmas. Last Sunday, Stir Up Sunday, I made my Christmas cake. This Sunday we will go and buy our Christmas tree. Next weekend I am going to go and make a wreath with a group of my rowing buddies. When my eldest breaks up from boarding school I’ll get him to help me truss up the twig/branch situation I hang over our dining table and festoon with baubles. Gradually I will wind down on work and hopefully, feel suitably prepared and festive by the time Christmas week rolls around.

Except this year - and frankly, for about the last three years - that hasn’t been able to happen because of FUCKING BLACK FRIDAY. This absolutely obscene call to spend, spend, spend, which tips me into a weird sort of frenzied madness and just serves as a trigger for all the other stress that starts to conspire around this time of year. So of course I’ve succumbed - but for myself, because I can’t get my head around Christmas yet. Which makes me feel bad and guilty that I’m a horrible selfish pig who only thinks about herself (although I did manage to buy my husband’s present, which will hopefully be a success rather than a slightly desperate, Black Friday-induced moment of madness).

So tomorrow I have this arriving from Wyse:

And also this, which I foolishly decided I might as well chuck in my virtual bag and I could send one back, although of course I ended up buying them in two separate lots so had to pay shipping DURRR.

I can’t hope to look as glamorous as either of these women and I will definitely not be wearing my gilet with shorts, but I’m hoping one of them will add a much-needed and vaguely glamorous layer to my currently freezing cold WFH situation.

I have also recently written a piece about plug-in wearable tech and am now seriously considering this very much less glamorous but seriously toasty-looking number.

Anything you have bought this Black Friday that you’re super excited about? Let me know in the box.

Something to Save up For

Nothing this week, because, Black Friday.

Yorkshire excellence of the week

This is something I am going to go to this weekend and may very well buy something there.

Iona is a potter who was my mother’s student back in the day then came to live with us for a while and help us with our boys, and now makes the most gorgeous ceramics from her studio up here in Yorkshire. Check out her work here. I have one of her ceramic mugs and it’s most pleasing to drink my morning coffee out of. I am now contemplating another: