It was nice to step through the allotment gates and feel as though I had escaped the city. So much lusher than I might have expected. This was because the hosepipe ban doesn’t apply if you have a blue badge, my cousin explained. She described her and her partner rocking up on their bikes from work every evening, pretty much the only ones having to carry heavy watering cans up and down the hill. Still their brussel sprouts were doing great and the summer had yielded a bumper crop of plums. She seemed happy. This year they had brewed their own mead and it won first prize in the drinks category at the summer show. Later, wandering between plots, I reached without thinking to pick a blackberry from what I had mistakenly identified as a patch of weeds. My cousin stopped me as she would a dog, arm outstretched: no! We continued walking in silence until we reached their patch, giggling only once we were safely hidden behind their shed. Poor allotment etiquette on my part.

Back home, still a little buzzed from the prizewinning mead, I recounted the day’s events to my husband. For some reason I wanted the afternoon to sound better and more fun than it had actually been – even though at the same time I was glad he hadn’t come. Strange mixture of impulses.

There seem to be infinite forms our separateness can take;

For instance, my indignation this week at discovering that he doesn’t – as I’ve always presumed – fall asleep at a similar time to me. Lately I’ve been so tired. It’s been a long summer. Isn’t it a bit early? he said this week as I reached for my eye mask at a redacted hour. What do you mean, I said, we go to sleep at the same time. Actually, he said, we don’t. He pulled up his Apple Watch stats. It was true: on average, he went to sleep 1.5 hours later than I did. This was unbelievable to me, and also, somehow, a betrayal. What do you do? I demanded. He shrugged. Read?

All this extra time we could have been spending together which I had been squandering by being unconscious! I made him promise that he would sleep train me so that I could start staying up later, and he agreed.

Who can blame me though for being tired. The thing with his mother continues, too boring really to write about – and private – but picture paperwork, hours on the phone, my husband pacing the kitchen to the tinny sound of hold music and me in the other room sifting through bank statements. Stultifying work.

In the evenings, when the boring work is done for the day, I switch things up and become existential, bemoaning – and not for the first time – the system. Our exploitation at its greedy hands. An undercurrent of suspicion runs through the family: trust no one. It is no surprise that we are not touching each other as much as we ought to.

What else? On Wednesday we woke to no water; another burst pipe outside, and barely any time had passed since the last time. We stood around cursing Thames Water for a while until eventually my husband shrugged and got on with his day. So then it was time to curse not Thames Water, but him – curse him for his irrepressible vitality while I just sat there, squalid, using our lack of water as an excuse not to do the things I didn’t want to do anyway. He kissed me on the cheek before he left for yoga and asked could he bring me anything. Just water I replied, despondent.

Oddly the last time it happened i was on the bus to Penge again, to feed the guinea pigs. You can use the shower, my cousin said, and I did though it was basically pointless because once I’d taken the bus back home I felt just as dirty as when I’d left. The guinea pigs have a whole room to themselves and live on a rotation of freshly-grown allotment vegetables. My cousin and her partner collect the poos to fertilise their crops. Circular economy. Theirs is a relationship I am desperate to know more about. But where to begin!

This time around the water outage lasted longer. I began to hallucinate the sound of a dripping tap, getting up from the kitchen table every few minutes to check. Still nothing. On day two it started raining. Water water everywhere, my husband murmured, heading to the front door to see whether they had finished digging the big hole.

Our friends and their two wild-haired girls with pockets full of sand. It was evening by the time they showed up, dirty and hungry. They had been out on the marshes all day doing a treasure hunt. My husband opened the rosé and the youngest one painted our nails – fingers and toes. I thought that was all of us but it transpired we were still missing granny, who arrived later still and giggling. Someone fetched an extra glass. She’d been on the whisky with uncle mike a few doors down. The sun was low in the sky by then and I envied everything but especially the children, their freedom. After dinner a hurried walk to the pub on the quay before they rang the bell for last orders, jackets on and our hair unwashed and thick with salt, the girls asleep by then and granny curled up on the couch with the news up loud.

When I spotted my ex-boyfriend’s parents across the pub car park it was both unsurprising – it being their home town – and surprising. How they had aged. But of course they had. Ten years or thereabouts! He was my university boyfriend. Not a great relationship, all things considered. I watched them for a while, wondering if I should go over and already knowing that I wouldn’t.

In the morning we sat in the garden drinking orange juice and recounting our dreams. My husband had dreamt that he was scooping fistfuls of the seven-year-old’s kinetic sand out of an enormous bucket. The seven-year-old dreamt that goats ate her hair. I wanted to contribute but had nothing: a dreamless sleep in the little twin bed, exhausted by the day’s events. Such that when the watery sun had mustered enough strength to wake us, I just lay there for a while, watching my husband in the second twin. Usually I’d go to him – and take great joy in it – but on that occasion it was enough just to watch him from across the room.

Back to the city on Sunday, lighter hearted and harbouring a mild UTI. I’d worn my still damp swimming costume the whole way home, for reasons beyond comprehension. Nostalgia or just laziness? My husband, thick with sea grime, had done the smarter thing and conceded he should wash. The Disney Princess Snow White Raspberry Body Wash made him irresistible to me. This delicious man! We should leave town more often, we agreed.

Tempting to consider what life would be like if you lived like that – but what would be the point. On the whole I’ve gotten better lately at avoiding grass-is-always-greener trains of thought. And yet. The weekend was almost over, and we weren’t ready for it to be. We ordered fish and chips for dinner (wanting to pretend) and kept drinking (wanting to prolong). Emboldened by the Neck Oil, I asked whether spending time with our friends’ kids made him question our decision not to have children ourselves. He said no, but that it brought him closer to the realisation that it wasn’t meant for him. Meant for him. I didn’t understand this, exactly, but shared the feeling of a certain acceptance. Lately a sense of peace in realising that there are many ways to live, and that any number of them might bring happiness.

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By mid-week we were fighting, but not about that. A work annoyance that would impact my husband’s plans for the rest of the year, and I the messenger. Trivial in comparison, but how we fought. We slept separately once again, this time through choice. I wanted to wake and feel as though I had metabolised it but it had only deepened. At the studio I locked the doors and jumped up and down on the spot and shook my hands and arms around in the air as a therapist had once advised me to do. It helped, but only a little.

Why do we fight like this? Just days earlier we had been flinging ourselves weightlessly into bodies of water; buoyant. But the air in London was heavy. Demolition outside the station and by this point in the summer no one in the park at all besides these flocks of giant crows, scratching around for scraps. My husband feels that my sensitivity forces him to self-censor.

Wanting to put off returning home, when I finished work I sat in the coffee shop typing manically into my notes app:

What if I accepted him as an ‘emoting man.’ Perhaps what stresses me is the gearing up to the fight, fear of not being heard or of being misunderstood. What if by backing down the fear of fight goes away, and so the fight does too? I get anxious because I am gathering my case, assembling the evidence, already afraid that I won’t ‘win.’ What if I genuinely wasn’t trying to win?

And then:

how nice it would have been for him to apologise

And lastly:

But if he thinks that actions speak louder than words, shouldn’t I have redeemed myself by now???

Not long after that, the rain arrived, about time, sluicing the dusty pavements and with it my brain. By nighttime we were back in the same bed, friends again, and this time I did dream.

How are you doing, my dream self asks my university boyfriend, are you happy? The university boyfriend nods.

It was gentle, I told my husband in the morning, no yelling. Good, he said; very mature of you.

—

Editor’s note - As an August Bank Holiday special, next week I’m publishing the first post in a new series of Marriage Dispatches; aka marriage diaries from people that aren’t me. My husband has agreed to do the first one <3

See you next week! x

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I was picking at my face in the mirror. Yes, I replied, not thinking really, and what I had meant to say was yes but – or better still: no! Of course by then it was already too late. So I carried on picking for a while, biding my time.

In bed, he told me that it had hurt his feelings that I hadn’t disagreed with him, or at least found some tactful way to offer reassurance. He argued that this is what he would have done had it been the other way round, and he was right.

I apologised as sincerely as I could. I really hadn’t meant it like that. Whether he believed me or not was unclear. Soon we were both asleep.

The evening had been long and a little fraught. That’s my excuse. Earlier, the two of them facing off across the kitchen table, disagreeing about something unimportant. He and his mother. Third glass of viognier. How many times have I been in this position; inadvertent mediator. This is the problem with gathering in threes. Does make me think that if we had children I would have an excuse to leave the room. Instead, I’d pretended I needed to pee. When I returned she was in the garage, fetching another bottle from the outside fridge. Baby, I said, turning to my husband: can we not? His brow furrowed then and he recoiled as though in shock, taking in my request, until he said, quietly: Sure. Good. Peace. So when his mother returned we changed the subject, gossiped about her neighbours for the rest of the evening until it was time to go upstairs to bed – proud of ourselves for swerving a pointless argument, or so we thought. That was when he said the thing about feeling puffy. So close!

We have run out of ways to describe the heat, squeezed every last drop from its available metaphors. But let the records show that still it stretches on, rendering most of us the absolute worst versions of ourselves. At Paddington, my husband collided with a woman who had approached from his left, meaning he wouldn’t have been able to see her. The look she gave him! In I jumped to his defence. Momentary visions of a fist fight on the concourse until my husband, ever so charmingly, cut across our yelling and said, simply: it’s very hot. The woman stopped shouting then, and smiled and disappeared into the crowd, pulling her suitcase behind her.

Back in London I crunch across the common every morning on my way to the studio, sun coming up behind the William Blake vision tree. Rizla tubes amongst the stubbly once-grass, bottle tops and half-empty buzz ballz. A juice bar opens on the corner opposite Khans. On the road outside, a wheelie bin filled to the brim with orange halves. At home I save the washing-up water for the herbs, but on closer inspection aren’t they already dead? Our shower sprang a leak and for a moment, watching the greyish water dripping through the ceiling, i felt almost refreshed. My husband, sighing, asked me not once but twice to call a plumber, presumably thinking that the first time I said yes I hadn’t meant it.

August is ripeness and decay, everywhere you look. His mother sent us home with a tupperware full of plums from her garden. Plums! she wrote on the lid. Exclamatory, we noted, approvingly. But by the time we got them home most of them were no longer plums but halfway on their way to becoming a jam. Slurp them down practically without chewing, just remember to spit out the stone.

I’ve been thinking about how every day is so different from the next. The diary seems to enact a push towards arc or cohesion: this week was good; this week was bad. Etcetc. But lately nothing makes any sense in that way. I feel delirious, my husband said when he woke up the other morning. Like my thoughts are not my own. I knew what he meant. In waking dreams during the night I’d struggled to tell the difference between him and the cat. Whose hand was I holding. It didn’t matter.

Sometimes we will check in with each other, like: but things are good, right? Or but we’re doing really well, aren’t we? An attempt to confer meaning onto what has otherwise been a strange and chaotic summer. Perhaps we’re just too tired for anything to stick. Arguments threaten, but never quite materialise. By Sunday morning he was in love with me again.

The weather has become our only consistent framing device. It is hot every day. Everything else is in constant flux.

And so to Ruskin Park, clutching our colanders. My husband, who had a class to teach that evening, was going to miss it. He texted the group chat no less than twice reminding us not to look at the sun, with a tone intended to be jovial but which belied a certain anxiety, as far as I could tell. Because of the eyes.

The parks have been empty for weeks, but when I arrived in Ruskin it was packed. O arrived sweating in his work clothes, stressed that he was going to miss it, saying: This is a once-in-a-generation celestial spectacle!

Earlier I had messaged my family to ask what they all remembered from the 1999 eclipse. That’s so weird, my brother replied, i was also thinking about that this morning! Well, I thought – perhaps not that weird? In the park, we did the maths to work out whether we’d see the next one. Maybe not, we concluded, except for the baby.

No hope, then, of a rerun. O was disappointed that his cardboard camera obscura hadn’t worked. But the colander cast wonky crescents onto S’s white tshirt, and across the baby’s chubby arms. The whole park clapped when the sun came back out, and off we all went on our way.

And so the days pass, more or less without meaning. I am happy.

Text from my husband: Rain! Minutes later it is over. I open the doors of the studio wide and smell the air, waiting for change. Nothing forthcoming, and now the BBC forecasts this summer’s seventh (?) heatwave. You have to laugh. Something happened on Lordship Lane, some sort of - butchery incident? Walking down the hill to my laser appointment I stepped over a string of sausages and a thick pink pork chop, glistening beneath the burning sun. A little further down, what looked to be a whole chicken rested alongside a parking bay of lime bikes. They have turned up the intensity of the laser, pain-wise; one can only lie there thinking one has made a terrible mistake. Too late now I suppose. Yes, everything has become ridiculous. On an early morning walk to the studio I passed a man in the middle of Peckham Rye spinning slowly in a swivel chair.

Nevertheless: August. At 9pm it is almost dark. Ignore the resulting melancholy. After all, surely it is time to make way for something new. At night the temps have dropped enough to allow some level of proximity. But when my husband reaches for me I brush him away. Even the cat has noticed the cooler evenings and rejoined us on the bed, craving affection. So what’s my excuse?

Fatigue of some sort? The parks aren’t even yellow now, but white. That’s not it. The stranger at the houseparty who had been so rude, caricaturing me as the smugly married type in front of my friends? My friends! The whole way home I just kept thinking - but I had complimented her on her dress!! The type of interaction that had me still thinking about her days later in the shower, devising ripostes. She had touched a nerve. It had seemed so important in that moment that i find some way of conveying that I was not that type of married, yet I had failed.

S, watching me squirm, had stepped in halfway to the rescue. They’re not really like that, she said, taking my hand. Say it again, I thought - and louder! Really wanting to ensure that this bitch in the nice dress heard her. But she didn’t. The conversation moved on.

Every day in July I read Helen Garner’s diaries, closing the door so as not to be disturbed. You watch the dissolution of a marriage and feel like jumping for joy as Helen finally gets her flat with a view of the ocean.

Friday

Teenagers pile onto the train carrying rucksacks and bags for life full of beer. A festival in Newquay. That used to be you, my husband says. Long time ago now. Big groups of us dancing in that enormous field above Watergate. Yes, but it will be so different now. Back then we would sleep in our cars in a layby. Buy tickets off a scalper at the gates. Head-to-toe Roxy and doing anything in my power to be kissed, though in truth I was more enamoured with the girls than the boys. Sara looked so good with her tanned skin and puka shell necklaces, cooler than the others because she longboarded. I was too scared to surf but I loved to paddle out and sit out back, dangling my feet in the water. Ten years later I tried again to learn and succeeded only in becoming more scared.

Still I packed my swimsuit for this trip; a dip in the Dart. Rejuvenating! At my mother-in-law’s we will sleep in a big white bed, crisp sheets, view of the river. This house and its narrow garden, overripe plums in the dry grass. Years ago I visited him here just as friends and emerged days later something else. His mother not batting an eyelid, and I loved her for that. That summer, both of us drifting between the city and the coast, long days lying on the warm ground and stroking each other’s limbs like creatures possessed.

Soon one of us will have to give in and touch the other again. But for now we hold out. For the first time I recognise a sort of divine abstinence. You can quite enjoy the separateness, knowing it is temporary.

When you hear a song of emotional significance played somewhere unexpected, you get to pretend that you hold some sort of claim to it. Never mind if a million other couples have had it played at their weddings. So for this reason we were smiling at each other as we gathered our things and readied ourselves to exit the cinema into another heatwave af…

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Leaving the memorial service I made my excuses and boarded a bus in the opposite direction to everybody else. By then I already knew that I no longer needed to go to the studio, but I pretended I did anyway. This was not exactly good wife behaviour. However I’d spent all day thinking about that moment of solitude on the top deck of the number 53, and wasn’t prepared to give it up so easily. By the time I got off the bus I was on the wrong side of Peckham. Almost New Cross. The light was golden; a perfect evening. I figured I was fairly unlikely to bump into anyone I knew. I drank half a pint of lager on a pavement and read some Helen Garner, justifying my detour as a means of using the bathroom to get changed, since I had spent most of the afternoon anxiety-sweating through my tank top.

I texted the group chat to ask if they needed me to pick anything up for the dinner. No, my brother-in-law text back. Just get yourself over here. This I misread as: just get over yourself. Fair!

On the rye, what once was grass now crunches underfoot. Halfway across, one of my fisherman sandals broke, the sole detaching almost completely from the strap. The ground was so hot that it must have melted the glue – a reminder in a heatwave to invest in sturdier footwear.

When I finally arrived at my husband’s brother’s place, the mood was nice enough. There were enough people that I could sit unobtrusively in the corner and try not to say too much, although I was tipsy from the beer, and from the wine I’d had at the memorial, so I kept forgetting my plan and chipping in with inane comments. Before long, somebody realised that there was not enough cutlery. We had picked up some stragglers and now everybody wanted to get drunk and eat lasagne. One works up an appetite at these things. By way of solution to the cutlery issue, my husband quickly volunteered to walk home to ours to get some. We live a short walk away – fifteen, twenty minutes. But my sister in law said he didn’t need to; they would just ask their neighbours. No need for him to go. But he insisted.

When he got back he smelled of cigarette smoke and he looked much happier. So then I felt less bad about pretending to go to work and lying about it.

Reading the Helen Garner these last few weeks has been a tonic, the diary entries requiring little in the way of attention span. It is satisfying to watch plot points emerge unannounced. Oh! Her lover must have left his wife! / But nobody warned me! Far more akin to the process of actual living. (I recently commented to my husband that I liked the idea of this substack adhering to similar principles. Yes, he said. So if we get divorced and you remarry, you should continue the project without mentioning it, and wait to see if anyone notices. Mmm, i said; chic!)

But I bristle every time Garner draws the ‘affair = passion; marriage = staid companionship’ binary, as she quite often does. It’s a touchy subject for me, on account of my a) refusal to believe that she is right, and b) deep-seated fear that she might be. We talked about this as we walked to the Ritzy on Sunday to watch The Odyssey. Obviously they’re not mutually exclusive, I said; Passion and marriage. I was trying to make the case that, far from passionate, it can actually become rather boring to have a lover. These arrangements become so one-note – their primary meaning deriving from that which you have done, or will do, to one another – that in the end there may be nothing left to get excited about. Marriage, on the other hand, appears to be full of surprises.

My husband made noises of agreement at the right places, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. It had been a long week. He was impatient to sit inside a dark room and not talk to anyone. (Three hours! He had murmured blissfully when we’d checked the timings.) He felt that it was impossible for there to be passion at all times in a long-term relationship. You’d never get anything done, he said. A meaningless statement. I mentally revised my when are we next gonna fuck timeline. I walked beside him quietly for the rest of the way, the two of us ducking and diving through the usual throng of bodies outside Brixton tube.

There are a couple of men in my life to whom I might reasonably have justified a you up adjacent text, under the pretence of talking about Christopher Nolan. The straight man’s siren song. For a few days after seeing the film, I toyed with the idea – surfacing it during moments of boredom, or stress (of which there have been many), mentally composing a text or two. In the end the window of opportunity closed, zero messages sent. I was relieved not because it would have been a bad idea, necessarily, to contact those men, but because I just couldn’t see the point.

This summer, he says, it’s the best it’s going to be. The best it’s going to be.

What? I say.

He repeats himself: The best it’s going to be.

What he means is this: that things are only going to get worse. Heat-wise.

He is talking now about finding a way to install black-out blinds for our dirty skylight, something about yogurt. You can put yogurt on the outside of the windows, he says, and it will keep the heat out. What? I say.

Baby, I say. Can we not do this. Like, can we not do this right now?

Right, he says, sorry. Kissing my shoulders. I got excited, he says.

About the yogurt?

About the yogurt.

Worth mentioning again here the lack of sleep, the bad news received just last week, ensuing anxiety – no, despair! – no, anxiety! Worrying our way through this unexpected problem, for which no situation has yet presented itself. A problem of bureaucracy and money and call reference numbers. We are wading through emails and listening to hold music for hours a day. My thoughts are no longer coherent.

You can cover the windows in yogurt, I tell him. Cover the whole house.

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We are doing pretty good, the two of us. We have galvanised in the face of this bad luck, or else just banged our heads together. It was about time. I feel closer to him than I have all year. Probably we have always been good in a crisis – though this is less a quality of our particular relationship than the norm, I think. Much easier to unite against a common enemy, especially when your enemy is: misfortune, or, perhaps: other people’s mistakes.

Anyway there is a softness between us. Good.

Example: when we are both at the studio, (him teaching, me on reception) we lock the door once everyone has left, hurry back inside and kiss in the big empty room up against the yoga blocks! Example: one evening while I’m at work he sends me a video of our cat, small ecstasies as he brushes her coat in the evening sunshine, great tufts of yellowing fur drifting across the kitchen table. There in the background, a pack of golden virginia which days earlier he had handed to me straight faced: hide this please. Reappearing contraband! I laugh at him for his carelessness, text him straight back; i guess my hiding place wasn’t good?! Busted, he replies. Other times I’d have been upset about the idea of someone poking around amongst my stuff, but these days I have little to hide. I conduct a yearly burning ceremony for most of the journals. Everything else is fair game.

Our texts are warm and sweet but afterwards I wish I hadn’t said anything. About the cigarettes. Now is not the time for giving something up, much less being teased for struggling to do so. When I get home I curl into him and he smells of smoke and beer and hot skin, and I am glad that we have something to laugh about. Our respective weaknesses.

As for me I have the sense that I have been especially annoying this week. I keep saying the same thing over and over in different ways. I am urgent when there is no reason to be. Doing things quickly and with a stern look on my face will not solve this problem any faster. But only once has he told me to shut up, and with a gentleness that was undeserved.

It is true that I become neurotic under pressure. No one in our extended family read my shared google doc - “NOTES!”, I called it - and at one point over dinner with said family members I took out my phone with every intention of resending it to the group chat right then and there. Perhaps they had missed it? I’m a circling back bitch and no mistake. Somehow sense intervened and I slid my phone back into my pocket, poured myself a glass of rosé, and more or less stayed quiet for the rest of the meal. You really can just choose not to do things, though I’m not sure I feel any better for it.

Still. The temperature dips, just a little, and the wind picks up. Tweens pool on lordship lane with felt-tip scrawled across their white school shirts. Nostalgia. In lieu of admin I have taken to pruning the scrubby olive tree in our back garden while balancing on a wobbly wooden chair. My husband reads, pausing every now and then to ask me to be careful. I ignore him.

When it arrives, the news is bad - clearly bad - but what is not clear is just how bad. Two paths for the recipient: optimism versus abject despair. In a strange turn of events I pick the former, my husband the latter. This is a role reversal, he the designated cheerleader of our relationship. It might have something to do with the fact that the bad news pertains to his family, not mine. And how else to support someone if not by insisting through gritted teeth that things cannot be as bad as they seem?

Monday

We’re back in London now and moving along with everybody else through this incessant heat, which already lends the days a quality of a sort of shared derangement? Putrid city streets, ants crawling across my bare feet and up my shins. Football supporters roam the streets at night, the pubs still open. At 4am we’re awoken by a howling on the street outside, which i would assume was animalistic if I didn’t at the back of my mind know it to be England fans. The cat, hearing us stir, takes this as an invitation to join us on the bed, pawing at our bare flesh with her tiny claws. Normally i would kick her away but it’s so hot that i just lie there and take it. Up at 5.30 to walk to the studio. More fans yet to go to bed, scattered in joyous little groups across the rye.

In the evening my husband meets up with a mutual friend. He pre-warns her via text; money, not illness. Lesser of two evils. He and I walk the long way through the park to the pub and when we get there he asks do I want to join and I say no, not having the energy to chat but also wanting my husband to talk to someone who isn’t me. When he gets home he seems lighter. He’s a little buzzed, making himself a cheese sandwich. The tennis is on, soothing background noise. We are both too sleepy to speak, making our own noises of love and reassurance at each other before trying to get an early night.

Wednesday

S lies on her back on the poured concrete, dress riding up around her armpits, no underwear on. Whatever. Desk fan blows warm air around the room. Cup of tea and a cornetto when I’d arrived, dusty and sweating from the walk through London Fields.

We talk about sex, a bit, which is what S always wants to talk about. But I seem to have become prudish of late, or perhaps just increasingly aware of the interesting and unexpected things that can happen when they are left unsaid. Normally S would push but today she is languid enough, bored enough, hot enough to be sated by the little i offer. I move the conversation along.

Curious though that my newfound taste for discretion seems to have coincided with my publishing details of my relationship for free on the internet? Albeit anonymously.

Thursday

Dinner with a dear friend. She lives in another country, though we manage to see her often enough. She brings news of mutual acquaintances: one marriage, one separation. The story of the separation almost bad enough to make you throw up your hands and stop believing in marriage altogether, if it weren’t for how desperately in love the soon-to-be married couple are.

There were people in the restaurant that we knew, or at least recognised, from the studio. For so long i craved a life that offered invisibility. I feel stupid for not realising sooner the narrow-mindedness of this impulse; it feels good to be known. It’s busy. After we’re done eating, R brings us free drinks and chats to us for a while. Pizza crusts and little pools of melted garlic butter. He is telling us about his quest to do a handstand. To my left, my husband sits there looking tired. He drank his first two pints quickly, his third more slowly. I touch his arm but i don’t think he wants me to.

Saturday

With my friends in the park. We are meeting some other friends of theirs, a couple and their baby. We linger by the bandstand for a long time, waiting. Eventually the woman arrives, red in the face and pushing the baby in its pram. We had a massive argument, she says, I sent him home. Him meaning her husband. She admits that she was going to come up with a white lie about why he hadn’t shown. But then I thought fuck it I’ll just be honest.

Later, we sit on a blanket under a tree and I am talking about our trip, and the hold-up in Paris. I tell them that me and my husband argued at the Hilma af Klint exhibition. What were you arguing about, someone asks, and I realise that now I am lying: we hadn’t really been arguing at all, I’d just said that to try and make the woman feel better about her earlier confession.

We finished the walk in Santander. Entering our serviced apartment building, we discovered a construction site. The lift was being installed, the owner told us over text: it wasn’t finished yet. This much was clear. The same could be said for the city, much of which had been destroyed by a fire in 1941. It seemed still to be in the process of becoming, which I suppose gave it a certain charm. I was unhappy to be there, because I wanted to keep walking.

That night we ate rabas in a street half-concealed by scaffolding. I brought up an ex boyfriend upon whom my husband and I have never been able to agree. Normally we are able to laugh about each other’s exes, or commiserate. Not so with this guy, who – speaking of fire – famously set some of my belongings alight the summer I left him, confessing the arson only once we had got back together. My husband has never quite been able to get the image of my burning clothes out of his mind. Or so he claims. Anyway, a few nights earlier this ex had sent me a series of unexpected and increasingly unhinged text messages. I hadn’t mentioned it at the time. We’d been sitting in a garden, resting our sore feet. I watched the texts trickle in. He called me manipulative, and accused me of abandoning him. Abandoning him to what, I wondered. We hadn’t spoken properly for years prior to this. I guessed he was drunk, or high, or both. It hadn’t bothered me at first, but recounting it to my husband that night over the rabas, and watching him get angry on my behalf, I wished I’d kept the whole thing to myself.

2

We took the train from Santander to Valencia. 7 and a half hours.

We had come to Valencia so that my husband could smoke and get pissed, as far as I could tell. This isn’t exactly fair. But I think he would admit there is something about this city which invokes a certain – permissiveness? Last year Valencia had been a tonic. We’d spent our days swimming naked at the wild beaches of L’Albufera National Park, our nights sitting in squares sinking free-poured vermouth and admiring how hot everyone was. A heady combination that broke a months-long marital dry spell and saw us fucking multiple times an afternoon beneath the wheezing AC unit of our El Carmen airbnb. We spoke of Valencia in hallowed terms after that. And now we were back, only this time knowingly.

I fear the pressure of re-creation made me bad company. The city smelled considerably worse this time around. It must have been the heat. At first I tried to escape the smell, insisting we move to a different pavement bar to drink our drinks, to smoke our cigarettes. My husband was unfazed, content simply to be here. Perhaps nowhere has he looked more at home than ambling those yellow streets, rollie tucked neatly behind his ear, eagerly awaiting his next cerveza.

The year before, it had taken a period of trial and error to seek out opportunities for – or, at least, indifference to – nudity. The first day we’d hired bikes and cycled southwards along the coast. I’d been so anxious that my husband find his nudist beach that I’d spent the whole time insisting we pull over so that I could check google maps. It wasn’t enjoyable then to live in this way, and it isn’t enjoyable now.

In other words: I had to get over the smell.

3

And finally home, or almost, and right when I was just about done with European train travel, the twist of the knife: an email from the Eurostar. I text my boss. The heatwave broke the trains. She is understanding. But I thought it had cooled down over there by now? I agreed, that part was odd. Eurostar were being unclear. Something about a fire in Rotterdam? Whatever. We were stranded, or soon to be stranded. The TGV sped through Provençal countryside. Blazing fields of sunflowers, a perfect butter yellow chateau perched on a hill. Our phones dipped in and out of service as we scrolled booking.com for a hotel that would be cheap but not too shit. The earliest train out of Paris would be two days later.

We were both in bad moods. My husband had his headphones in, catching up on two weeks worth of episodes of The Archers, but not in a way that suggested he was particularly enjoying it. Earlier that day we had been drinking coffee on the way to Barcelona Sants saying actually we are ready to go home now. Looking at my husband thinking – I could do with some alone time. Perhaps because the night before – the last night of our holiday, or so we thought – he had shouted at me to pay attention at the horchata place. It was my turn to order; a queue of overheating hipsters stretched behind me. To which I had said: it hurts my feelings when you yell at me. Two people, I claimed, had yelled at me – him and the horchata lady. But I hadn’t wanted horchata anyway, I had wanted ice cream. I regretted the whole endeavour.

This, the rabas, and a fight we had had a few nights earlier at a Catalan fire festival. Three fights. We agreed that wasn’t too bad, all things considered. Correfocs – or ‘fire run’ – in which performers dressed as devils dance through the streets carrying gigantic wooden sculptures of mythical creatures, loaded with firecrackers. As we watched, I thought, this would be cool to write about, but because we were fighting I wasn’t paying attention, and the noise of the firecrackers became annoying rather than spectacular.

In actual fact no one had yelled at me, I was just tired. Paris was fine, really, and the hold-up only sweetened our eventual return. It’s nice to be back.

My writing goals were no match for this level of smooth brainery, either. No camino diary, then, or not exactly.

SPITTING PRACTICE

In Laredo, a beautiful woman covered in tattoos sold me too many cherries. Not knowing how to say stop please that’s enough cherries thank you I paid and carried them all the way to Santander in a warm plastic bag. At first it was annoying but soon it was nice to feel the bag swinging against my bare thighs, the rhythm of it. Also it was a good opportunity to work on my long-distance spitting. My husband doesn’t like the taste of cherries, but didn’t want to miss out on the spitting practice. So from time to time he would hold out his hand in front of my mouth as we walked, and I would deposit a perfect pit into his dusty palm, so that he too could take a turn.

Quite often as we walked through remote farming villages there would be a dog on a chain lying on the side of the road. The dog would growl and bare its teeth and I would think well if the chain breaks I will just hit it with my bag of cherries. Some of the other pilgrims walked with hiking poles, or with a wooden staff fashioned into a point at one end - all the better for poking an angry dog in the eye.

As it transpired, no one was attacked by a dog, and when I spat my final cherry stone into a grassy verge somewhere outside Galizano on our last day of walking, I felt a little sad.

PAIN

A tiny stone chapel perched on the edge of a hill, almost hidden amongst the long grass. As we approached we saw someone sitting on the steps outside, head bowed. My husband said to hang back, thinking the man was praying, but as I got closer I saw that he was just looking sadly at his wounded feet, each toe bound and strapped. So in his own way maybe he was praying.

Me, my pain was manageable insofar as I suffered less than I had expected to, and complained only a little. This was not what others had imagined for me. I felt proud and strong, and the welts I had pictured on my shoulders, the blisters between my toes, never materialised. The first couple of days my husband assumed yoga teacher mode and escorted us through a sequence of morning stretching while we listened to the new Olivia Rodrigo on my portable speaker. But before long we stopped with the stretching, which was a shame since I’d found it quite hot, if - as it turned out - unnecessary.

On my birthday we met a man called Yano. He had brown eyes and patches of his dark beard had been bleached almost white in the sun. He had been walking for six weeks, he told us. He gave us each a magdalena. We asked him how his feet were holding up. He shrugged. Your body just gets used to it, he said.

REFRESHMENTS

Every afternoon we would reach our destination and shower and at least one of us would say this is the best shower I have ever taken. At a campsite near Islares I abandoned the trail and my husband and our bags and my clothes and swum in a still green bay. Somewhere overhead a highway roared. The day before we had reached Pobeña early and I had sat on the beach, watching my husband throw himself into the Playa de Arena surf over and over. You look like a dog, I told him. It was something in his facial expression.

Dinner came late that night and when it arrived it was ham egg and chips, and would be once more the following night, and the night after that. I chugged vermouth and tried not to feel weird about nutritional value. My husband, on his third or fourth estrella galicia, would listen patiently and express sympathy, then ask could he dunk a chip in my egg yolk.

Nevertheless; the sense that, somehow, we had never looked or felt better. Outside a locked chapel I took a picture of my husband sticking his head beneath a running tap. Golden droplets in his beard, his long eyelashes. It was so hot that day.

We had eschewed the 2L hydration bladder our hike-y friends lent us, finding it unwieldy and unaesthetic, taking instead a more hand-to-mouth approach to hydration. The camino proves a generous source of agua potable. Still, every time our small bottles of water threatened to run out, we fought, each blaming the other for - variously - carelessness; neurosis. All would be forgiven the moment the next water tap was spotted.

In Rioseco our coffees came with badly gone off milk. We were retching and laughing at the same time. The metal table was scattered with our supplies: compeed and electrolytes and antibacterial wipes. We played rock paper scissors to decide which of us would negotiate the coffees’ replacement. I was up. I took the cups and saucers to the counter. Leché, I said, shaking my head. The woman nodded as though unsurprised. We bought cold pollo picante empanadas from the Dia supermarket and ate them as we walked through a sprawling industrial estate of factories and car parks, bemoaning the ugliness of that day’s section of walk. We didn’t know then that it would get harder and uglier, but also better and more beautiful. The Dia was doing a promotion on a new line of mini Pringles and we ate them by the handful. Soon the path narrowed and we began climbing upwards into the eucalyptus forest.

Things have been busy. After the bank holiday was my husband’s birthday, and after that was our anniversary and on the whole we have been drinking too much tequila, though I don’t regret it. Now we are on our way to walk the Camino, or a very small portion of it – only six days, which we have agreed is Enough. Over drinks the other night my sister-in-law sipped her beer and said, well, [redacted] (meaning me) will cry every day, so…

We laughed about that, I didn’t feel annoyed or worried. So what if I cry every day! If the goal of this walk is to feel things then I can’t say I mind too much if doing so brings me to tears. Meanwhile I spent much of the last week staring at the pile of belongings accumulating on our bedroom floor, and wondering how many packs of compeed I could feasibly fit into the medium sized sandwich bag that has been designated our first aid kit.

Anyway, the playlist is in good shape, and last weekend we walked from Peckham to Hackney and nobody stubbed their toe or got a stone in their shoe – although I was so tired when we finally got home that I lay down on the bed in all my clothes and told my husband not to speak to me. Soon we were fighting, though not really about that, and the last thing he said before I rolled over and fell into a deep and aggrieved sleep was, quite simply: BABY (derogatory). The following morning we called a truce, agreeing that if he would not call me names then I would not be so rude. Also, I would try not to be so much of a baby.

I have done my best not to look too closely at the section of the route map which indicates altitude, preferring that the hills catch me unawares. It doesn’t do to anticipate hardship. [Redacted] doesn’t like walking up hills, our friend S said when we finally reached her place in Hackney. We were drinking earl grey and I was rolling around on the floor trying to do something about the crick in my neck. Then S caught herself and said that maybe that wasn’t fair, maybe she had just talked my dislike of hills into existence on account of that one weekend many moons ago, when i was hungover and, yes, being a baby. It had taken so long to ascend that particular ridge and I hadn’t stopped complaining the whole time, performatively at first, a little petulant a little ironic, but before long with complete sincerity, my voice dropping to a mutter about how unnecessary it was that everyone walk so goddamn quickly. Since then it’s been a running joke, even though it isn’t that funny. But it feels good to be teased by the people you love so you just let them say it.

Nevertheless, there is an abiding sense that my lack of cardiovascular fitness is kind of embarrassing, and I harbour notions of racing up camino foothills like a woman possessed, if only to prove a point.

I am looking forward to this trip – more so others we have taken. I keep feeling as though I am on the verge of a breakthrough with something, though of what I’m unsure. I’ve been having vivid dreams: of babies, of men, of people who have wronged me. I’ve been rereading old diary entries and tearing out the pages. As I get older I am starting to have this new idea of the kind of person I want to be – the kind of wife I want to be. But she is not here yet. We have now officially been married five years. It feels fraught to place too great an expectation on what is essentially just a Quite Long Walk. But still.

In 1988, Maria Abramović and her lover and collaborator, Ulay, trekked for 90 days from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China. They planned to meet in the middle, where they would marry, but by the time they had obtained permission from the Chinese authorities to do so, their circumstances had changed. Instead, they separated. For a long time I didn’t speak to the person who had told me this story, and in a way that made me like it even more. There’s only so much we can control.

On mile five or six of our walk to Hackney i was talking to my husband about my attachment to narrative. We had crossed over the river by then. I want everything to be a story and therefore intelligible, I surmised. He listened to me, and agreed: I do do that. Perhaps I have always believed that my life is only meaningful if it adheres to some sort of coherent arc. My husband on the other hand is not one to attach himself to a particular script. He shrugged; actions speak louder than words, he said. Soon we reached Spitalfields market, near the bottom end of Brick Lane. We would need to walk through Shoreditch, a neighbourhood heavy with lore for the both of us. We studied Google Maps to work out which areas to avoid. Then, content with our plan, we went to Tesco Express on the corner of Commercial Street, and bought a Twix Xtra to fortify ourselves for the final couple of miles.

In her new kitchen she cooks us dinner and i confess to her that me and my husband have struggled this year and that, at times, I have entertained thoughts of leaving. I am embarrassed to tell her this, as though i am admitting failure, and also as though I am being hysterical. I get these notions of escape but after the fact they feel overwrought and reactive. Things have settled now, anyway. We’re not yelling at each other!, my husband said the other day, proudly. He’s right, we’re not. In any case, my friend does not consider my confession any cause for alarm, much less embarrassment. She - single yet wise - suggests that marriage could be li…

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For my husband and I, there was no big story, no grand proposal. My husband came home from the pub a little drunk and basically said why not. The morning after, I had the distinct feeling that if I didn’t bring it up, it would go away – not because my husband would have forgotten, but because it might just as easily have been laughed off as a flight…

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My husband - a teacher at the studio, and social architect behind much of my assortment of odd jobs - has, I gather, been unabashed about his own plans for the weekend. Apparently he’s going

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I have been trying to write something longer, better, though of course the harder I try to make it Better the Worse it gets. Long story short I went to Miami with my brother, who won a competition to go there and watch the Grand Prix. Implausible but true! You never hear of anyone actually winning a prize like this, and then it happens to your little brother, a Formula 1 fan of the truest, purest variety. Sure I’ll go, I told him, knowing nothing about this sport and not caring to learn - simply wanting to spend the time with him.

My husband - not once implying that he envied my good fortune, or th…

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I’m not really a dog person, but my dad’s dog is the Perfect Dog; the kind of dog that will change your mind about not being a dog person. So when my Dad and stepmum go on holiday and they ask if we will go and stay at their place and look after the dog, we always say Yes. Solitude, wide open fields, bird song. It is Spring, still. This interminable April. I am done wondering when I will feel less weird and have begun begrudgingly to accept this unease as though it were here to stay - which indeed it might be. The promise of renewal. ‘Restorative!’ That is a word that people say when you tell them you are going to stay on Dartmoor for a week. At the pub they serve an ale called Thirsty Blonde, and another ale called Fursty Ferret. We too are thirsty (fursty?), drinking round after round on an empty stomach from thick beer glasses with handles. At a certain point we are asked, a little gruffly, to move tables, for soon the folk band will be setting up. We acquiesce. Folk band! My…

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Our friend is just back from Berlin. That she is smoking again is really the least surprising outcome of this trip. We haven’t seen her for many months and it is good to be back in her cosy flat, hearing her stories. All the same, on the way over I had to steel myself a little bit, remembering that this is a person so clear cut in her own value system as to bring my own into question. It’s a me thing, not a her thing: I both envy and resent the clarity.

Certain friends have the ability to bring one’s choices into sharper focus. This one is a friend who doesn’t believe in monogamy, much less matrimony. I have no interest in defen…

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Sadness makes you ugly. That, or the 5.30am studio starts are taking their toll. You look tired. Your face is puffy. Stand there poking and prodding at it all you like, but eventually you must accept that there is not much to be done about this - though from time to time you steal a ginger and turmeric shot from the fridge, or a can of expensive filtered water. You can’t help but feel virtuous when you drink a ginger and turmeric shot, as though it will only be a matter of time before your skin - nay, spirit - follows suit.

Wander into the reformer pilates room between classes under the pretense of checking that the equipment is set up properly. Assess your reflection in the enormous mirror. Wander back out again. Burn some sage, flip through the deck of moon cards. Time passes. There are no revelations forthcoming. There is nothing to do but wait. The sage smells like cooked onions. You try and stub it out; it carries on stubbornly burning. Now the whole place smells bad. Ope…

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Last week I wrote nothing and for this i tried to offer myself some grace, though mostly failed to do so, lying on the sofa staring at a blank google doc and picking at my skin. Something else I did last week was not get dressed or leave the house for almost 48 hours and this too I called grace, though there were other words that would have been more accurate. Whatever. March was a bad month and while most of the time I was putting it down to my difficulty reacclimatising after some time away, in truth it was only a little bit because of that and in fact due to lots of other things, as well.

Grief. When I wasn’t lying on the sofa I was crying in the shower, not wanting to have to talk about my tears. So to sum up last week: I was very clean, but also very sad.

Also I was taking much of this out on my husband…

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Perhaps March was just always going to be a difficult month. Is there something melancholic about the arrival of Spring? Let’s say there is. Everything so potent.

We search for answers wherever we might find them: Consult the stars, ask the Alexa when the next full moon is going to be, check our bodies for outward signs of disruption. In my twenties, I exited a relationship at such velocity that, in the quiet and unsettling aftermath, I literally broke out in hives. There was something almost gratifying about this, at least at first. We’ve all accepted by now that our bodies are keeping the score, but isn’t it so much more reassuring when their doing so does not go undetected? For now, no such luck.

I find a complete Rider Waite tarot deck on the street, take it home with me, realise it is in German. It doesn’t matter. I draw the nine of swords. I don’t really know anything about tarot yet. I want to learn. But also, I like the idea of going into it knowing basically nothing an…

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