I had quite a few plans for July. I was going to slow down a little, go swimming with my husband in the mornings, read, write and work on a new project I’ve been quietly putting together which I was hoping to launch in September. I had even brought almost ten books with me to Çeşme because I genuinely thought I was going to have all this time to read. Of the ten books, I read two.

And then I got vertigo.

And it wasn't just feeling a little dizzy and carrying on. For a while I couldn't really look at a screen without feeling sick, I couldn't read properly and driving was completely out of the question. Swimming, something I look forward to all year, became more of a cautious dip in the sea and get back out again. No freestyle. Just a dip and out.

It’s funny because I write so much about slowing down and noticing the ordinary. I love slow mornings, long walks, sitting somewhere with a coffee longer than necessary and looking at things other people walk past. But I realised this summer that apparently I’m very good at slowing down when it’s my choice. When I’m forced to do it, not so much.

This was different. There was nothing particularly romantic about being forced to stop. Mostly, I found it frustrating. I kept thinking about everything I wasn’t doing. I hadn't written anything here since the 19th of June and I was barely posting on Instagram either. I tried to keep up with Notes when I could, even if sometimes it was just a photograph and a few words. Partly because I didn't want to abandon either completely and, if I'm being truthful, partly because of the algorithm.

Unfortunately when your work is online, disappearing for six weeks has consequences. The algorithm doesn't know you've got vertigo or that life has got in the way. So I tried to show up a little when I could, even when I didn't really have the energy to engage properly.

Then there was Greece

We had two weeks planned in August, to Syros and then Samos, with different groups of friends. As the date got closer, I genuinely wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I was still on medication for the vertigo. I was anxious about flying, about swimming, about the wind and about feeling disoriented somewhere unfamiliar.

And there was another, slightly ridiculous layer to it: I felt guilty about going on holiday when I hadn’t been productive at all. Which sounds even more ridiculous written down.

But my husband had planned those two weeks off, and our friends had planned this for a long time. I didn’t want my vertigo to ruin everybody else’s holiday, so off we went.

I honestly can’t remember the last time I travelled somewhere I’d never been without doing any research beforehand, but that’s exactly how I arrived in Syros. I hadn’t read a single thing about it. I knew we were going to Syros. That was about it. Normally I’d have read about the history, saved restaurants, worked out what was worth seeing and had a map covered in little pins before I’d even packed. I’d assumed I would do all of that in July, but July had disappeared. We were staying with friends, so this time I decided to rely on them and see what happened.

The first few days we didn’t do very much beyond spending time together. The views were incredible, the food was wonderful, and it was exactly the relaxing holiday my husband needed. Slowly, I got braver about the vertigo too. I came off the medication, and my husband and I started going for a morning swim. That was how we found a local bakery: good coffee, good pastries, nothing revolutionary, but we liked it enough that the next morning we talked our friends into coming with us.

Then one evening, walking to a restaurant our friends had booked, we passed a garden. It looked interesting, so we walked in. We started talking to someone at the reception and somehow ended up on a rooftop overlooking one of the main churches on the island just as the sun was going down. If we’d planned it, it wouldn’t have been more perfect. We only realised on the way out, through a different door from the one we’d come in, that it was a Michelin Key hotel with a real history behind it.

We hadn't been told about it and I hadn't saved it somewhere on my phone or seen it on Instagram. We literally just walked past the garden, thought it looked interesting and decided to go in.

I think when you’ve travelled a lot, you develop a kind of gut feeling for these things. Not always right, of course, but often enough to make you follow it.

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A few days later, from that same terrace, we noticed a church at the top of the hill. My husband, not me, because I still wasn’t doing much on screens worked out there was an old part of the island up there, so the next afternoon we decided to explore it.

From a distance it looked tiny. Once we got there, it was all steps, little streets and turns, and I proceeded to make everyone’s life difficult on the way back down. This is basically how I explore anywhere. I'll see a house that looks interesting and suddenly we're turning right. Then I'll see a cat on the left and behind it there's a church dome, so obviously I want to go that way. Then we pass a little coffee shop I didn't even know was there and I want to stop again. I did feel slightly sorry for everyone with me because it took us forever to get back down. We were late for dinner. I felt slightly guilty. But I could have stayed for hours.

Then the wind picked up, the ferries stopped, and we were stuck on Syros for an extra night. That’s probably an essay of its own.

That evening, after dinner at a local taverna, we walked past the same church we’d seen from the terrace a couple of nights before and this time it was open. Inside was one of the most beautiful Greek Orthodox churches I’ve ever seen, with colourful chandeliers unlike anything I’ve come across on any Greek island, and I’ve been to a fair few.

We started reading about Syros properly afterwards. All the research I would normally have done before arriving, I was now doing because of things we had stumbled across. What struck me most was how local the island felt. Mykonos was only a short ferry ride away, yet Syros felt like an entirely different kind of place.

On the walk back to the car I spotted yet another open church. Shall we just look? There was an evening service happening. The church was full of locals and we were handed holy bread.

None of it was planned. I think that’s exactly why I loved it.

I make lists for a living, in a way

Places to go. Streets to walk. Things to see in London this month. Where the magnolias are blooming, where to find the wisteria, what’s worth getting up early for. I love doing that, and I know that many of you come here precisely for those lists and guides.

But wandering around Syros with no research, no pins and no plan reminded me of how we used to travel before we had everybody else’s recommendations sitting in our pockets at all times. It reminded me of how we used to travel before we had all this information available to us. You'd arrive somewhere and walk around, ask people where they went, or just go into a restaurant because it looked nice. Of course sometimes you got it completely wrong, but sometimes you found somewhere extraordinary.

Our plans changed again after Syros. We were meant to carry on to Samos, but our friends’ plans shifted at the last minute, so instead we ended up with an unplanned night in Athens. We booked our hotel on the ferry crossing over, on a friend’s recommendation, and it turned out to be right beside the Acropolis, with a terrace looking straight towards it. We dropped our bags, went upstairs and had a drink and something small to eat as the light changed over the city. And again I remember thinking, if I had actually researched Athens and spent hours trying to find the perfect rooftop for sunset, would I really have found somewhere better? Probably not.

The next morning we had breakfast, walked to the Acropolis and the museum and then simply wandered. We found a Greek frozen yoghurt place with a queue around the corner. We walked into other places because they looked interesting. We found somewhere that reminded me of a Greek version of Whole Foods, with fresh produce and a restaurant under the same roof. There was no itinerary to work through and no pressure to see the places somebody had told us we had to see.

And it made me think about London.

Some of my favourite things I’ve ever found there haven’t come from a list either. They’ve come from turning down a street, noticing a door, wondering what was happening behind a garden gate, or seeing the top of something over the buildings and deciding to find out what it was.

Maybe that’s one of the things we’re slowly losing: the ability to arrive somewhere without already knowing what everybody else thinks is worth seeing.

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Maybe I needed the summer I didn’t plan

I don’t think every difficult stretch needs to hand you a lesson. I certainly wasn’t lying there with vertigo thinking, what a wonderful opportunity for growth. I wanted the room to stop spinning. I wanted my summer back.

There are still things I wish I’d managed. The project I wanted ready for September isn’t quite there. My daughter asked me the other day whether I shouldn’t already be promoting it if I want to launch next month. She’s probably right. I have an inbox full of September invitations I haven’t replied to yet, and London is waiting for me with rather a lot on the to-do list.

I’ll be back in London in a week and September is going to be full-on in every sense. Perhaps I’ll launch the project before it’s quite as perfect as I’d imagined. Perhaps September becomes October. I don’t know yet, and strangely, I’m starting to be all right with that.

For most of the last six weeks, I thought I was doing nothing. I wasn’t writing much or creating much. I wasn’t reading. I wasn’t working on the project. I was barely even swimming properly. For someone who tends to measure her days by what she has done, that took some getting used to.

But maybe doing nothing and noticing are not opposites.

Because when I think about this summer now, I remember the garden and the rooftop. The cat with the church dome behind it. The chandeliers through a door I almost didn’t open. Being handed holy bread in a church I didn’t know existed an hour earlier. Arriving in Athens by accident and watching the Acropolis change colour with a drink in my hand. None of it was supposed to happen.

Perhaps the summer wasn’t as unproductive as it felt at the time.

I’m sure I’ll make another list the moment I land. I am still me, after all. But maybe I’ll leave a little more room in it this time; room to turn right because a street looks interesting, to walk through an open door, to follow a church dome, or a cat, or nothing in particular.

And maybe that’s what I’ll try to bring back here too. Not only lists of things worth seeing, but a reason to keep looking.

Collect moments. Notice beauty. Live slowly.

Rita x

If you’re new here, welcome. Rita Farhi Finds is my corner of the internet for noticing London, travelling slowly and finding beauty in ordinary days. You can subscribe below to receive the next one.

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The Day I Solved a Murder on the British Pullman

I’ve been a little quieter than usual here lately. Not because I’ve run out of stories, but because life has been moving rather quickly. Summer arrived. My desk disappeared beneath half-finished projects. Days filled up with walks, photographs, family plans and the sort of practical tasks that never seem to make particularly good reading. All the while, a collection of unwritten stories has been piling up beside me. This is one of them.

Not in a sad way. More in the way you do when life suddenly becomes very full. I don’t remember the last time the four of us sat down for dinner together, or took a holiday together. Everyone seems to be exactly where they’re supposed to be. Busy, growing, building their own lives, yet somehow our calendars no longer overlap. One daughter is here, the other is there. My husband is rushing between meetings. I’m rushing between projects. We pass through the same flat like travellers changing trains at a station. The strange thing is that nothing is wrong. In fact, everything is quite right. And perhaps that’s what makes it feel so unexpected.

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A few days ago, while scrolling through old photographs, I came across a folder from last summer. There were hundreds of images from a day aboard the British Pullman, Belmond’s beautifully restored Art Deco train. I’d almost forgotten about it. It was almost exactly a year ago, and I’m only writing about it now. What I remembered wasn’t the champagne, the polished silver or even the murder mystery that unfolded throughout the afternoon. What I remembered was that my daughter was with me. For one entire day, there was nowhere else either of us needed to be. And suddenly, a train journey I took a year ago felt worth writing about.

What Is the British Pullman Murder Mystery?

The British Pullman is a luxury train that departs from London Victoria and offers a variety of themed journeys through the English countryside. The experience I booked was One Way Ticket, an immersive murder mystery created in partnership with Private Drama Events. Think Agatha Christie meets fine dining. A cast of actors moves through the train's vintage carriages, performing a 1930s-set mystery around you while guests enjoy a multi-course lunch, champagne and wine. The train leaves Victoria Station and eventually returns to Victoria Station. The destination isn't really the point. The journey is.

The Platform

At 10.15am, Victoria Station stopped feeling like Victoria Station. Two men in impeccably tailored suits stood deep in conversation beside the train. One wore a vivid green checked suit that would have looked perfectly at home in 1930s Mayfair; the other looked as though he had stepped straight out of a detective novel. A glamorous red-haired woman swept through the crowd. A politician-looking gentleman appeared to be arguing with somebody, and the train hadn’t even left the station.

A singer stood on a small red carpet crooning into a vintage microphone while guests arrived dressed for the occasion, photographing themselves beside piles of vintage luggage. I posed for my daughter, suitcase in hand, pretending to be embarking on some grand European adventure.

At first, I assumed these characters were simply part of the welcome. Then I realised they were already in character. The mystery had already begun, and the atmosphere felt somewhere between a film set and a theatre production before any of us had yet boarded.

Stepping Into Another Era

By 10.30am, we were invited aboard, and the moment you step onto the British Pullman, London disappears. Polished marquetry panels glow in the sunlight. Tiny lamps sit beside fresh flowers on crisp white tablecloths. Velvet curtains frame the windows. Every detail feels considered.

The train doesn’t feel old. It feels timeless. I had wanted to travel on a Belmond train for years, not because I needed to get anywhere, but because there is something romantic about train travel that modern life rarely allows. The journey itself becomes the destination. At 10.50am, the first glass of champagne arrived. A few moments later, so did our first suspect.

Every so often I wandered between the carriages, partly to gather clues, partly to admire the craftsmanship, and partly because there was something wonderfully nostalgic about standing in the corridor, drink in hand, watching England pass by through the open windows. Each carriage felt like its own little world, with different fabrics, different light, different conversations unfolding around every corner. For a few hours, time seemed to operate differently aboard the British Pullman. Nobody appeared to be in a hurry.

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The Murder Mystery Experience

One of the cleverest things about the experience is that nobody explains anything. There is no neat introduction, no programme telling you who everybody is. Instead, the story unfolds around you. A character appears, says something suspicious and disappears. Another rushes through the carriage. Two people begin arguing. Someone whispers a secret.

At first it feels almost impossible to follow, and that is entirely the point. Slowly, between conversations, clues and courses of food, relationships begin to emerge. You start understanding who likes whom, who is hiding something, who has a motive, who might be lying. By lunchtime, complete strangers were comparing theories across the carriage. Somewhere between the soup course and the second glass of wine, everyone had become a detective.

The actors were exceptional. Every question had an answer, every interaction felt natural, and the story never felt forced. It felt as though we had accidentally stepped into somebody else’s world.

Lunch, Champagne & Investigation

The food wasn't trying to steal the show. It was supporting the experience. You weren't sitting there analysing textures and sauces. You were trying to solve a murder. That said, the cooking was excellent, not because it was elaborate but because it was beautifully executed.

A delicate starter, soup, a perfectly cooked salmon course, cheese, dessert, coffee and tea arrived throughout the afternoon, accompanied by generous pours of wine and service that was polished without ever feeling formal.

What impressed me most was how seamlessly the dining and storytelling worked together. At one moment you're discussing whether somebody has a motive for murder; the next you're admiring the English countryside drifting past the window; then a waiter appears with another course; then a suspect enters the carriage and says something that changes your entire theory. When I first saw the itinerary, I wondered whether six hours on a train might feel long. It didn't. Not even slightly.

Why I’d Choose the Carriage Again

Before boarding, I found myself admiring the private compartments. They looked exactly as you'd imagine a Belmond train should look - intimate, elegant and impossibly glamorous. Perfect for an anniversary, a romantic journey, a special celebration. But as the day unfolded, I found myself unexpectedly grateful for our seats in the main carriage.

The mystery wasn't happening in one place. It was unfolding throughout the train. Characters moved constantly between carriages, passengers exchanged theories, conversations overlapped, and the atmosphere became increasingly lively as strangers compared clues and debated suspects. For a romantic journey, I would happily choose one of the private compartments. For a murder mystery? Give me the carriage every time.

The Moment I Knew

About halfway through the journey, I became convinced I knew who had done it. A small inconsistency in one character’s story refused to leave me alone, and the more I listened, the more certain I became. I leaned across the table and confidently shared my theory with my daughter. She was unconvinced. I spent the next two hours gathering evidence like a woman with entirely too much confidence in her detective skills.

At one point I found myself following a suspect through several carriages, my phone still in my hand. Technically, I was there for content. But somewhere between the second carriage and the third, I stopped filming. I simply wanted to know what happened next.

Fortunately, confidence was justified. When the final reveal came, I was right. To my daughter’s great amusement.

The View Outside

Every so often, I would remember to look out of the window. Outside, July was unfolding in shades of green rolling fields, tall grasses, summer clouds. Nothing dramatic, nothing Alpine, nothing designed to compete with the story happening inside. Just beautiful English countryside slipping quietly past.

The rhythm of the train, the clink of glasses, the murmur of conversation. It felt wonderfully old-fashioned, and perhaps that was the point.

Is the British Pullman Murder Mystery Worth It?

This is the question most people ask, and my answer is yes, but perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. The train is beautiful. The food is excellent. The service is impeccable. The actors are brilliant. But what stayed with me wasn’t any one of those things. It was the feeling. For six hours, a train full of adults collectively agreed to play, to suspend disbelief, to become detectives, to care deeply about a murder that never actually happened. Nobody was rushing. Nobody was checking emails. Nobody was trying to fit five things into one day. For a few hours, everyone was completely present. That feels surprisingly rare. And surprisingly luxurious.

The Real Mystery

We arrived back at Victoria shortly after 4pm. The murderer had been revealed, the mystery solved, the final applause given. Neither of us was quite ready for the day to end, so we walked past Big Ben, along the South Bank, through central London on a warm summer afternoon. I took more photographs. More videos. More pictures of my daughter.

A year later, while looking through them all, I noticed something extraordinary. I have hundreds of photographs from that day. The train, the actors, the food, the countryside, the clues, the champagne, and my daughter. And not a single photograph of the two of us together. For someone whose job revolves around documenting experiences, it feels slightly ridiculous. At the time, I was busy capturing the day. Following suspects. Filming characters. Trying not to miss anything. Except, perhaps, the obvious thing.

And yet, somehow, it doesn’t make me sad. Because what stayed with me wasn’t the photograph. It was the memory. A day aboard a beautiful train. A fictional murder. A daughter sitting opposite me. And six uninterrupted hours together before life sped up once again. Sometimes the things we remember most aren’t the photographs we took. They’re the moments we were too busy enjoying to capture properly. And perhaps that’s the best souvenir of all. ✨

By Saturday morning, London already felt exhausted.

Thirty-five degrees in May. Tube platforms too hot to stand on. Curtains closed against the afternoon sun. Everyone suddenly outside at once, trying to make the most of it before the weather changed its mind again.

The city had that strange heatwave energy where people seemed both giddy and slightly irritable at the same time.

Since the girls left home, we no longer think in school holidays anymore. Half terms appear without warning now. Long weekends sneak up on us. There are no colour-coded calendars or frantic planning spreadsheets pinned to the fridge.

Life has become quieter in ways I’m still learning how to understand.

So although we knew it was Bank Holiday weekend, we hadn’t planned anything at all.

And then sometime around midday on Saturday, my husband texted a friend who has been asking us for years to come and visit them in North Norfolk.

“Any chance you’re around this weekend?”

By 3pm, we were in the car.

No itinerary. No restaurant bookings. No carefully researched guide. Just two slightly overheated Londoners driving north in search of air.

And somewhere after the motorways gave way to open fields and stretches of green so wide they felt almost theatrical, I could feel something inside me beginning to unclench.

Cows grazing in the evening light. Roads lined with wild grasses moving in the wind. Big skies replacing buildings.

It’s always surprising how quickly the body notices space.

The strange thing about this stage of life is that travel used to be something I needed.

An escape from the beautiful chaos of a full house. The noise, the tidying, the constant motion of other people’s needs. I planned trips the way some people plan meals: with urgency, with love, with the knowledge that it was feeding something essential in all of us.

My children have travelled so much already at twenty-two and nineteen, they’ve seen more of the world than many people twice their age. I wanted that for them. I believed, and still believe, that travel teaches you things about other cultures, other histories, other ways of being human that nothing else quite can.

But I also needed it. The planning was as much for me as for them. The escape was mutual.

Now the house is quiet. And I find I actually love it. I sit in my living room without being disturbed, look out of the window, and feel for the first time in years genuinely at peace in my own home. I don’t need to escape the housework or the chaos, because neither exists anymore.

So what do you travel for, when you no longer need to escape?

I’m still learning the answer to that question.

But this weekend felt like the beginning of one.

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We arrived just before sunset and headed straight to a pub near the coast.

The seafood was the entire point of the menu. Crab, mussels, fish brought in that morning. Glasses of cold rosé appearing on tables as quickly as people sat down.

Sitting outside in the evening heat, I could almost have been somewhere in the Mediterranean. And then I’d look up and see open fields, grazing cows and enormous Norfolk skies instead of olive trees.

England, but softened somehow.

Everyone was outside, not in the frantic London heatwave way, where people are trying to squeeze every possible second out of sunshine before the clouds return. But calmly. Slowly. As though nobody had anywhere more important to be.

We sat there for hours watching the light change over the fields while geese flew overhead in loose formation, their calls echoing across the evening sky.

No rushing. No checking the time. No plans beyond staying exactly where we were.

Later, we wandered to another pub in the village. A band had been due to play that evening but never made it. There’d been an accident on the road and strangely, nobody seemed particularly disappointed.

The pub was full of teenagers and university students home for half term, spilling outside in groups, loud and easy with each other in the way only people who’ve known each other since childhood can be.

The pub owner told us he’d known almost all of them since they were born. That tomorrow morning, without exception, they’d all be down at the water by seven, waterskiing before the rest of the world had finished breakfast.

There was one boy — Henri, I think — who kept being ambushed by his friends every time he tried to sit next to a girl. They had a song. Stamping feet, the whole table joining in, and poor Henri obligingly downing whatever was in front of him to roars of laughter. Then trying again. Then the song starting up once more.

I had my back to them for most of it, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

It reminded me of my own summers on the islands outside Istanbul. The friends you only saw in summer, the rhythms of those months that felt entirely separate from city life. My children have their version of the same thing. Summer friends. Places they return to. People who know them in a different register than their London lives.

I asked the group about windsurfing, half thinking: would my daughters love it here?

And then the quieter thought beneath it: if we moved here, would they actually come and visit?

Probably not. Not yet. Not at this stage of their lives, when everything is still accelerating forward.

The next morning, we walked their dog by the bay.

Children played barefoot by the water while dogs ran in and out of the sea. Horses crossed the beach slowly in the distance. The car park had been overflowing when we arrived, but the beach itself was so vast that the crowds simply dissolved into it.

Later we drove to Holkham Hall, one of those grand Norfolk estates that sits in the landscape as though it has always been there and always will be. It was Bank Holiday busy, so we didn’t go in. But we didn’t need to. We stood at the edge of the gardens and watched a herd of deer moving slowly between the ancient trees, completely unbothered by any of it.

Sometimes the detour is the thing.

At Wells-next-the-Sea, the ice cream queue stretched halfway down the harbour. My husband contemplated it briefly. We looked at each other and kept walking.

If the girls had been with us, we’d have joined it without question probably arguing about flavours before we’d even reached the front. But that’s the quiet difference of this chapter. Nobody needed the ice cream desperately enough. And somehow that small moment, the queue we didn’t join felt like its own kind of freedom.

We drove through Fakenham, stopped at the Binham Priory ruins, a roofless medieval priory standing open to the sky in the middle of flat Norfolk farmland, the kind of place that makes you feel the weight of centuries without trying to and wandered through Holt before heading towards Blakeney.

In Blakeney, Two Magpies Bakery had drawn its usual crowd. Families, dogs, children spilling out onto the street, the particular cheerful chaos of a place that has become the place since opening on the bay. We watched it from a slight distance, content simply to take in the scene.

The pub owner from the night before had mentioned that November was the time to come back when the beaches fill with seals, the light turns silver and the crowds disappear entirely.

I’ve already made a mental note.

We talked about moving, the way we always do when we’re somewhere like this.

My husband has always romanticised the countryside. And when you’re actually standing in it, the endless fields, the cows moving slowly across the horizon, the sound of birds loud enough to hear properly for the first time in weeks. It’s almost impossible to argue with him.

There are certain places in the world that make you forget everything for a moment. The sea is perhaps the most powerful that endless water dissolving into sky, the gentle sound of waves, your heart rate dropping almost before you’ve noticed. Mountains do it too. And the countryside, on the right day, does something very similar.

Nature doesn’t ask anything of you.

It just quietly lowers something inside you that city life keeps permanently raised.

I think that’s why I’m always escaping into Hyde Park or Richmond Park or Kew Gardens, even in London. Searching for that same feeling in smaller doses. It’s the same impulse just compressed into what the city allows.

But on a Bank Holiday heatwave, even the parks belong to the crowds.

So yes, we talked about moving. We romanticised it over dinner.

And then we looked at each other and asked: but what would we actually do?

Because the countryside isn’t without its own richness, The history, the land, the communities rooted in place across generations, the knowledge of tides and seasons and which morning the seals arrive. It has a culture entirely its own. Just a quieter one. A slower one. One that runs on different rhythms than we’re built for, at least at this stage of our lives.

We are, the two of us, city people to our bones. We need the pace of it, the texture of it. The particular electricity of a place that is always, always doing something.

And honestly, the most truthful argument against the countryside dream isn’t practical at all.

It’s that the people you most want to share the space with aren’t ready to slow down yet.

In an ideal world, what I actually want, I think, is both.

A place in the countryside I can disappear to. Fields visible from every window, a garden, the kind of silence that isn’t empty but full. And London to come back to every week, loud and complete and entirely itself.

Not an escape from one life into another.

Just enough space, occasionally, to remember who you are when nobody needs anything from you.

Here is what we did in two days: dinner at a harbour pub, drinks in a village local, a morning walk by the bay, a beach so wide it swallowed the Bank Holiday crowds, a grand estate and a herd of deer, medieval ruins open to the sky, a harbour town, a famous bakery, a drive through villages so quiet they felt like secrets.

By any London measure, that’s nothing.

By every other measure, it was everything.

And maybe that’s exactly the point.

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Every May, London briefly loses its mind in the most wonderful way.

Suddenly there are foxgloves being wheeled through Sloane Square before breakfast. Men in linen suits discussing delphiniums over coffee. Florists carrying branches taller than themselves down King’s Road. Taxi drivers trapped behind vans full of peonies. Someone in a beautiful linen suit carrying an actual shrub through the champagne tent.

And somewhere between the Chelsea Pensioners, the champagne bars and the impossibly beautiful planting schemes, the city starts behaving as though flowers might genuinely save us.

This year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show felt different though.

Less theatrical perfection.
Less “look what we built.”
More: how do we live better?

Again and again, the gardens returned to the same quiet themes:
restoration,
community,
healing,
slowness,
nature not as luxury, but necessity.

Even the largest show gardens somehow felt more intimate this year. Spaces designed not simply to impress, but to soothe.

And perhaps after the past few years, that makes complete sense.

The Gardens Everyone Will Talk About

The garden I kept returning to in my mind afterwards was On the Edge for the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Not because it was the grandest.
But because it felt emotionally true.

The garden explored overlooked landscapes on the fringes of towns and cities — the forgotten places people pass every day without noticing. Edgelands. Wild corners. Unmanicured spaces where nature quietly persists beside roads, fences and housing estates.

At its centre lay a fallen guardian figure woven into the landscape itself. Part Gaia, part sleeping Mother Nature. Her willow hair became part of a dry-stone wall snaking through the garden.

It felt ancient and modern at once.

What moved me most was the idea behind it:
that neglected places still hold beauty.
That restoration is possible.
That nature does not need perfection to survive.

In a city where so much is constantly being redeveloped, polished and monetised, there was something deeply touching about a garden celebrating the overlooked.

And honestly, it felt strangely symbolic of this moment in general.

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The Garden About Curiosity

One of the gardens people lingered in longest was The Curious Garden for The King’s Foundation and the RHS.

Designed to be explored slowly, it unfolded through hidden pathways and smaller moments rather than one dramatic reveal. Delphiniums grown at Wisley in honour of The King, references to Highgrove, raised beds inspired by David Beckham — there was a sense of storytelling woven quietly throughout.

But what stayed with me most was the philosophy behind it.

The idea that gardening begins not with expertise, but curiosity.

Children crouching to inspect planting.
People stopping unexpectedly at tiny details.
Conversations beginning between strangers.

It reminded me that gardens are one of the few places left where adults still allow themselves to wonder out loud.

Tokonoma and the Beauty of Restraint

Among all the exuberance, Tokonoma felt almost meditative.

Quiet.
Minimal.
Intentional.

Inspired by the Japanese alcove traditionally designed for contemplation, it stood in complete contrast to some of the louder Chelsea moments surrounding it.

And that’s exactly why people kept stopping.

There is something increasingly luxurious now about restraint.
About silence.
About space left intentionally empty.

The planting felt sculptural rather than decorative. Every branch and shadow seemed carefully considered. It didn’t ask for attention. It simply held it.

In a week full of spectacle, Tokonoma felt like an exhale.

The Gardens About Healing

One of the strongest themes throughout Chelsea this year was healing.

Not metaphorically.
Literally.

The Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space Garden was designed as a restorative woodland-edge retreat for people living with lung conditions, with therapeutic planting and quiet spaces intended for breath-focused practices.

It was calm in the truest sense of the word.

Soft greens.
Filtered light.
Gentle movement.
Nothing shouting for attention.

You could feel people instinctively slowing down as they walked through it.

Nearby, the Parkinson’s UK garden carried a similar emotional weight. Curved pathways, sheltering forms and flowing water designed around comfort, accessibility and movement.

At one point Rachel Duffy, winner of The Traitors, spoke movingly about her mother’s experience with Parkinson’s while standing inside the garden. And suddenly the space became about much more than design.

Chelsea has always been visually beautiful.
But this year many gardens seemed more interested in how people feel inside them.

And I think that’s why so many stayed with me.

Silent No More

The Lady Garden Foundation: Silent No More Garden was one of the most emotionally powerful spaces at the show.

Bold yet deeply vulnerable, it explored women’s health through planting, structure and symbolism opening conversations around subjects that have historically been hidden away or dismissed.

Chelsea has always reflected broader cultural conversations in subtle ways, but this garden did not whisper.

It stood unapologetically in the middle of one of the world’s most prestigious flower shows saying: women’s pain deserves visibility too.

And perhaps that is part of what Chelsea is becoming now.
Not simply a place about flowers.
But a place where gardens become emotional language.

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The Garden That Felt Like London

The Tate Britain Garden immediately caught my attention because it felt less like a formal show garden and more like a hidden London space you accidentally discover behind an old gallery or Georgian square.

Designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, it explored the relationship between art, nature and community with pathways inspired by woodland gardens and resilient planting shaped for urban life.

Soft yellows.
Dappled pathways.
Woodland textures.
A planting palette that felt painterly rather than performative.

It reminded me of those rare corners of London where the city briefly softens.

You could easily imagine someone reading there for hours.

The Most Romantic Garden

The Boodles Garden felt impossibly elegant.

Inspired by Historic Royal Palaces, it blended symbolic planting, sculptural forms and architectural references into a space that felt intimate rather than grand.

But what I loved most was how quietly romantic it was.

A shaded dining table beneath sweeping curved structures.
Deep burgundy irises.
Soft planting moving around stone and metal.

It felt like the sort of garden where conversations stretch into evening.

There was also something distinctly British about it.
Not Mediterranean extravagance.
Not maximalism.

Just restraint, craftsmanship and beauty layered slowly together.

And Tessa Newall’s hand-painted florals throughout the pavilion added another layer of artistry entirely — delicate, nostalgic and deeply English in spirit.

The Garden That Captured This Moment Best

If one garden reflected the emotional mood of 2026, I think it may have been The Eden Project: Bring Me Sunshine Garden.

Inspired by Morecambe Bay and younger generations navigating uncertain futures, the garden focused on opportunity, resilience and optimism.

But what stayed with me was not simply the design.

It was the atmosphere around it.

At one point Angela Rippon recreated her famous 1976 dance there, half nostalgia, half joyful defiance while quoting:

“There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance… let’s face the music and dance.”

And somehow that felt like the unofficial theme of Chelsea this year.

Not escapism exactly.
But beauty as endurance.

The Great Pavilion

And then there is the Great Pavilion.
Always the beating heart of Chelsea.

Outside, the show gardens may shift with trends and headlines, but inside the Pavilion, time behaves differently.

The smell hits you first.

Tomato vines.
Fresh basil.
Earth after rain.
Sweet peas.
Roses so fragrant they stop people mid-sentence.

Growers standing proudly beside plants they’ve spent years nurturing.
Visitors debating peony varieties with alarming seriousness.
Entire crowds gathering around a particularly beautiful foxglove.

This year, the Pavilion felt especially joyful.

Less polished.
More human.

Perhaps because gardening itself has changed. People are no longer simply gardening for aesthetics. They are gardening for wellbeing, for pollinators, for food, for sanity, for slowness.

And somehow you could feel all of that inside the Pavilion air.

The Return of the Gnomes

Possibly the most important Chelsea news of all:
the garden gnome ban has officially been lifted.

For years, the famously strict Chelsea rules kept them away from the grounds. But inspired by the hidden gnomes at Highgrove, tiny mischievous figures quietly returned this year.

And honestly?
People adored them.

Children searched for them like treasure hunts.
Adults photographed them with alarming enthusiasm.
Even the most elegant gardens suddenly carried flashes of humour and irreverence.

Which felt strangely symbolic too.

After years of immaculate perfection online, perhaps people are craving charm again.
Whimsy.
Imperfection.
Tiny ridiculous things hiding amongst the roses.

The Human Moments

What I’ll remember most though are not necessarily the gardens themselves.

The designer nervously fixing stems moments before judging.

Chelsea Pensioners chatting and posing to everyone.

Two strangers debating whether a rose was blush pink or apricot for nearly ten minutes.

The smell of rain hitting warm soil after a sudden downpour.

A woman crouching beside a foxglove to photograph a bee as though nothing else in the world existed for that moment.

For all its prestige, Chelsea is still ultimately about people.
About what nature does to us emotionally.
How it softens us.
Slows us.
Reconnects us to something quieter.

No one talks enough about how Chelsea smells either.

Tomato vines warming inside the Pavilion.
Fresh earth after sudden rain.
Espresso drifting through the avenues at 8am.
The green smell of crushed stems underfoot.

For one week every year, London smells like the beginning of summer.

And perhaps that’s why Chelsea still matters so much.

Not because the gardens are perfect.

But because for one week every May, London becomes a city that believes beauty might genuinely help hold things together.

If You’re Going This Week

Go early if you can.

Chelsea before the crowds is a completely different experience.

The light is softer.
The air still smells of watered soil and fresh coffee.
Florists are making last-minute adjustments while photographers crouch beside foxgloves trying to capture the morning sun before the avenues fill.

Allow far more time than you think you’ll need for the Great Pavilion.

Find Tokonoma when you need stillness.

Stand properly inside On the Edge and let your eyes adjust slowly to all its quieter details.

Spend time in the Project Giving Back gardens too. This is the initiative’s final year after funding more than sixty gardens over the past five years — all later relocated to schools, hospices, hospitals and charities across the UK.

That legacy quietly changed Chelsea.

Let Silent No More do what it was designed to do.

Walk through The Curious Garden slowly enough to notice the smaller moments hidden inside it.

And if you spot a gnome hidden among the roses, stop for a second.

There’s something rather lovely about Chelsea allowing itself to become playful again.

Chelsea Flower Show runs until 23 May.

And just outside the showground, Chelsea in Bloom has transformed the surrounding streets into floral theatre once again — this year themed Out of This World.

Planets suspended above doorways.
Constellations across Sloane Square.
Dragons, Pegasus sculptures, floral moons and enormous globes appearing between cafés and boutiques.

London becoming slightly ridiculous in the best possible way.

I’ll share my full Chelsea in Bloom guide separately this week.

London, lately

My daughters have left home.
So I said yes to everything.

Two weeks. Mountain. Bar de Près. Martino’s. The Dover Street counter. Carbone’s summer terrace. China Tang at the Dorchester. A rooftop at Raffles. Lunch at a new Thai restaurant in Mayfair. A food market in Mare Street. At Sloane. A coffee on Lower Sloane Street I almost skipped and then didn’t. A Condé Nast Traveller dinner in Bayswater. A Marrakech anniversary. A David Bowie archive on a Sunday morning I finally walked into without a booking because the hype had gone and London had quietly handed it over, the way it does when you stop chasing it.

Two weeks.

Then one week of nothing. Curtains. Quiet. Refusing everything. Sick in bed.

Then it starts again.

I am not sure this is a strategy. I think it might just be what happens when the house goes silent and you haven’t quite worked out what to do with the silence yet.

The calendar fills up because I let it. Because a full diary feels like proof of something, even when I’m not entirely sure what.

I should tell you something about these evenings.

I am not good at walking into a room of strangers alone.

I will talk to anyone. Put me next to someone and I will find the thread, follow it, stay with it. But I won’t approach. I hover. I wait. I look for a face I recognise.

My husband is so much smoother than I am at all of this. He moves through a room like he’s been there before. Finds the person worth talking to in thirty seconds flat. Makes everyone feel like the most interesting person in the room.

I try to bring him everywhere.

But not every invitation allows it. Depends on the night. Depends on the room.

So sometimes I stand there, champagne in hand, the best view in London spread out behind me, and think where is everyone I actually know?

In Rome, probably. Miami. Madrid. Monaco. Somewhere that isn’t here.

And here I am, moving through London evenings, meeting all kinds of new people. Sometimes wishing I was just having a simple dinner with a friend, someone who already knows the story and doesn’t need the context.

Other times I sit next to a stranger and we talk for two hours and I leave thinking, well. That was unexpected.

I float somewhere in between. Most evenings I can’t tell you in advance which kind it will be.

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Photo: By Mooez for Conde Nast Traveller & Abercrombie & Kent curated trips launch party

At 52, I find myself less interested in fixing my life and more interested in enjoying it. Not in a dramatic, sell-everything-and-move-to-Italy way (though sometimes I do think, why not?), but in smaller, quieter decisions. The good coffee. The extra five minutes. The walk that wasn’t strictly necessary.

Nothing has changed overnight. But something has shifted.

These are the things that, somewhere along the way, I’ve decided are actually worth it.

1. The long coffee in bed

After years of 5am rowing training and driving to the river before dawn, this is not laziness. This is knowing what you’ve earned.

2. A second coffee

Because sometimes one simply isn’t enough.

3. The 5.45pm dinner reservation

I resisted this for years. Then I got the best seat at the Dover Street counter, ate without rushing, was home by 8.30. I will never book an 8pm table again and I refuse to be embarrassed about it.

4. Not attending everything

Energy is a currency. I spend it differently now. Recently declined a Gordon Ramsay breakfast. My 20-year-old self would have been dressed and out the door in minutes. My 52-year-old self thought: do I really want to face a film crew at 9.30am when I haven’t slept properly all week? I stayed in bed. Made coffee. Zero regrets. This isn’t becoming boring. It’s becoming yourself.

5. The cinnamon bun

I don’t have a sweet tooth, except for this. A bad one is an insult. A good one is worth crossing the city for. First discovered in Boston as a student and never recovered. May have spent a considerable amount at Cedric Grolet during his seasonal window. Almost relieved it’s gone. Hjem is my current answer.

6. The Basque cheesecake from Le Maritxu

Ordered. Delivered. Presented to guests as if the morning involved effort. I don’t bake. I curate. This is after twenty years of baking. I think I deserve the break.

7. Ice cream, but only when stressed

I barely touch it under normal circumstances. But apparently my body has its own coping strategy. Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough or Oddono’s salted caramel and hazelnut. Nothing else qualifies. I don’t make the rules.

8. The empty fridge problem

Twenty years of meal planning. Twenty years of making sure there was always something to eat, always enough, always more than enough. And now. Nothing. An almost empty fridge that I keep meaning to fill and somehow never do. The girls arrive unannounced and are furious. I find this funnier than I should. I am working on keeping snacks. I am not working very hard on it. Twenty years of feeding everyone is apparently followed by a period of feeding almost no one, and the adjustment, it turns out, is stranger than anyone warned me.

9. The sneakers

I own heels. Many heels. Beautiful, expensive, carefully chosen heels that I have not worn in longer than I care to admit. Every time I open the wardrobe they look at me. I look at them. We have an understanding. One day I will wear them again. One day. In the meantime, I am walking everywhere in London in sneakers and I have never been happier or covered more ground. The heels are not going anywhere. Neither am I. We are simply in different chapters right now.

10. Jeans, a t-shirt and a blazer

There was a time when it was all about dressing up. The outfit. The heels. The full effort. Now I walk into rooms full of women in beautiful clothes and feel underdressed — hair done, nails done, everything else resolutely simple and I find I don’t mind. I have nothing to prove anymore. I am happy for the photographer to pretend I wasn’t there. To be clear: I will dress up for the right occasion. But for lunch when I want to walk home afterwards? Sorry. The walk takes priority. The alternative is an Uber, and the walk always wins. This is not giving up. This is knowing yourself well enough to plan your outfit around your feet.

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11. Walking everywhere in London

Still, always, my favourite thing. London never runs out of surprises. You just have to keep showing up on foot. A magnolia exploding pink overnight. St Paul’s framed by cherry blossom when you turned a corner expecting nothing. Wisteria hanging indifferent to your Monday mood. You cannot see any of this from a taxi.

Love the fact he is journaling in the middle of the crowds - Columbia Road Flower Market

12. A market, most weekends

Non-negotiable. If lazy, Bute Street or Duke of York Square. Close, calm, familiar. If I want to feel properly alive, Broadway Market on a Saturday or Columbia Road on a Sunday morning. I’ve never once regretted going. I’ve occasionally regretted not.

13. Fresh flowers by Monday

Columbia Road flower market when I want abundance. Marks & Spencer when I don’t. Either way, fresh flowers in the house by Monday morning. Keeps the house happy for the rest of the week.

14. The countryside pub lunch

A 1.5 hour drive each way, a walk nearby, back home by early evening. Some people think this is excessive for a lunch. Those people are wrong.

15. Hiding in the Lanesborough library

More often than I should probably admit. The Caesar salad from the library kitchen — not the garden kitchen, there is a difference and it matters — a quiet corner, and Lilibet the cat draped across the fireplace overlooking Hyde Park Corner as if she owns the place. She does, really. Every time I see her I think: she has worked out something about life that most of us are still trying to figure out. I want her spot. I want her energy. I want her complete and utter indifference to having to be anywhere else.

16. Ladurée at Burlington Arcade

More often than is strictly necessary. A coffee, a macaroon, a window seat and absolutely nowhere to be. The people watching alone is worth the price of the macaroon. I have ended up there with no plan more times than I can count. I have never once wished I had gone somewhere else instead. Some places just know how to hold you.

I’ll take a good cheese platter over any dinner nowadays….

17. The summer evening ritual

A glass of rosé. A cheese plate. Olives and nuts. Pistachios if we’re doing this properly. Outside, wherever outside is available. Watching the stars until there is no good reason to go in. Netflix can wait. Netflix can wait all summer. This is the only screen I need.

18. Not having a garden

The one thing I have always wanted in London and never had. I think about it every summer. A small table outside. Morning coffee without getting dressed. The kind of evening that ends because you finally got cold, not because something better was waiting indoors. One day. Until then, I borrow other people’s gardens, restaurant terraces, park benches and the occasional hotel courtyard. London is generous if you know where to look. But still. A garden. One day.

19. Summers in Çeşme

The one place I will still wake up early without complaint. Before the crowds arrive, my husband and I take our own chairs down to the water. Sometimes we bring coffee from home. Sometimes we order Turkish coffee and wait for it in the silence. Then we stop at the bakery on the way back for fresh bread. We’ve been doing this for years. It costs almost nothing. It is the best part of every summer. Some rituals don’t need improving.

20. Never saying no to the sea

London is my home and I love it completely. But the sea does something to me that the city cannot. It always has. I grew up near it. I think some part of me never really left. The sound, the light, the way it makes everything feel both smaller and larger at the same time. I will always say yes to the sea. Without hesitation. Without needing a reason.

Wishful thinking. If only these were my views today.

21. Lazy days on a friend’s boat in Greece

No itinerary. No agenda. Just the sea, the sun, the sound of water against the hull, and the particular happiness that only exists when you are going nowhere slowly. After London even a slower, more intentional London. Nothing quite compares to a Greek island seen from the water. The Dolce Vita is not a fantasy. It is a Tuesday in August and you are anchored in a bay that has no name and you don’t need it to.

22. The Claridge’s sourdough mission

Every Saturday, my husband is dispatched. It comes back sliced. Goes straight in the freezer. Lasts a week now that the girls are no longer at home. I choose not to think about that too hard.

23. The Sunday chicken roast

Non-negotiable. The recipe changes. I’m always trying something new, always convinced this version will be the best one yet. My husband has learned to accept this with grace. But if the week has been long and the energy is gone, Pavilion Road butcher or Eli’s on Bute Street will do it properly and I feel no shame whatsoever. The chicken roast is not about the recipe. It is about the ritual. The smell of it in the house. The table set. The sense that the week is ending the right way. Some things hold a home together quietly. This is one of them.

24. Jago’s butcher at Chelsea Green

Not just for the steak. For the girls. They are students now, on student budgets, and they are not spending their money on steak. So I do. I always bump into the same friend there, also quietly feeding her boys who are in town. We never plan it. We couldn’t coordinate it better if we tried. This is what motherhood looks like at 52. Not packed lunches. Not school runs. Just a good butcher on a Chelsea side street and the quiet satisfaction of knowing they will eat well tonight.

25. The espresso martini

I don’t drink much. But when the moment calls for it and sometimes it does. An espresso martini or a margarita, accompanied by nuts, is a very good answer to a very long day. I have strong feelings about nuts. Pistachios in particular. I hope my teeth hold out long enough that I never have to find out what life is like without them. This is not a small concern. This is forward planning.

26. Getting rid of the grey

Once a month. In the budget. Non-negotiable. I have no interest in the conversation about whether women should embrace their grey. Some do it beautifully. I am not one of them. Zero regrets. Zero apologies.

27. Getting my nails done

Also in the budget. Also non-negotiable. There is something about well-kept nails that makes everything else feel slightly more under control. I can’t fully explain it. I’ve stopped trying.

28. Stopping the to-do list

I have written more to-do lists in my life than I can count. I understand the satisfaction of crossing something off. What I can no longer tolerate is everything that doesn’t get crossed off just sitting there, quietly judging. The undone list is not a productivity tool. It is a guilt machine. I’ve retired it. Things still get done. Somehow.

Apparently this is what 52 looks like from the inside.

29. Making a mood board

Cut out from magazines. Pinned to a board in my office. Full of places I want to go, things I want to feel, words that are currently holding something I can’t yet articulate. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is on there. So is Sense of Purpose. So is Voyage of a Lifetime. My 20-year-old self made mood boards too. The difference is that this time, I actually believe it.

30. Keeping a diary again

Not every day. Not perfectly. But the notebook is open and the pen is moving, which is more than I can say for the last few years. I kept one from the age of sixteen. Somewhere along the way I stopped. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not asking too many questions. I’m just writing it down.

31. Writing a Substack Note every single day

A new mission. A new accountability. Sometimes I overthink it. Sometimes I don’t. Either way, two months in and I haven’t missed a day yet. Small observations. London through the seasons. Things I notice on foot that I would have missed from a taxi. It turns out showing up every day even imperfectly, even briefly is its own kind of discipline. And its own kind of joy.

32. A different relationship with social media

I use it less. And more. But differently. Less browsing, more searching. Less consuming, more creating with intention. Less anxiety about what everyone else is doing, more focus on what I actually want to say. When your business depends on being seen, this shift is not without its complications. I notice it. I think about it. I haven’t resolved it. But I know that the version of me that spent hours scrolling was not the version doing her best work. The quieter, more deliberate version is. I’m choosing her.

33. A lightbulb moment

The kind that arrives quietly, usually when you’re not looking for it. The kind that makes you think: why didn’t I think of this sooner?

34. A new project I’m not ready to talk about yet

It will either be a genius idea or a complete free fall. Either way, I’m excited. There is no loser here. You’ll need to wait until September to find out.

At the Lanesborough Garden Party on a random weekday - pay attention to the jeans….

35. Spontaneous evenings with my husband

The empty nest has an unexpected gift nobody mentions: him. Last minute drinks. Evening events we actually both want to attend. Saying yes to things because he can join and he makes everything more fun. I have been doing this long enough to know that PRs who have discovered him love having him in the room. Possibly more than me. I choose not to think about this too hard. He is the more fun one. I married well.

36. FaceTiming my daughters wherever they are

I will drop everything. I will always pick up. I will not, however, do it in the middle of a coffee shop with strangers listening in. Some conversations belong only to us. The world does not need to hear my children’s lives. Neither does the table next to me.

37. My daughters as plus ones

When they are in town, everything rearranges itself. Plans get cancelled. Invitations get extended. If I can bring them, they become my plus one. If I can’t, I’ll choose them anyway. Dozo for a bento box. The chicken baguette from the French grocer on Bute Street. There is always a queue and it is always worth it. Lunch at Chucks on a sunny day. None of these are grand gestures. All of them are everything.

38. Driving my daughter to the bus stop at Victoria

I insist on it. She doesn’t always need me to. I go anyway. And I always insist on getting her a snack for the journey because some habits from when they were small don’t need to be retired just because they are grown. We always end up stopping by Peggy Porschen on the way. I take a photograph of the storefront. Every time. As if it might have changed since last week. It never has. But the moment always has.

39. The four women lunch

Whenever my daughters are in town, I organise lunch. Just us. My mother, my daughters, me. No partners, no agenda, just four women who would not exist without each other, at a table with good food and too much to say. We always try somewhere new. The last one was Martino’s at Sloane Square. Already thinking about where next. These lunches are not in the diary far enough in advance. That is something I am quietly correcting.

40. Tuesday morning bridge club

No other obligations can take over a Tuesday morning now. It means time with my mother. It means learning something I should probably have learned years ago. It means three other women around a table doing something that has nothing to do with productivity or content or being useful to anyone. Is it a sign of getting older? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just one of the best decisions I’ve made this year.

41. Making time for friends who come back

So many have left. In the past few years, more than I expected to other countries, other lives, other versions of themselves. London is not what it was, and some people needed somewhere else. But when they come back, even briefly, I will drop everything. A coffee, a last minute dinner, a walk around Hyde Park. No advance notice required. No diary coordination. Just: you’re here, I’m here, let’s not waste it. The friendships that survive distance are the ones worth everything. London’s energy has changed. But these people carry what London used to feel like, and I want to be near that when I can.

42. Restarting Pilates

It’s on the list. It has been on the list. It will make it off the list. Probably September.

43. Weight training

Everyone says we should. Every woman over fifty I respect says it changed everything. I believe them. I am not yet doing it. This is me holding myself publicly accountable.

44. Reading a book in two days

The empty nest has an upside nobody mentions.

45. Deliberately making time for books

Not finding it. Making it. There’s a difference.

46. Finally being the person at book club who actually finished it

After years of bluffing, I’m not sure which feels better. The book or the moment.

47. My car

I love driving. I know. I know. But there is something about being in a car just parking somewhere, music on, nowhere to be that nothing else replicates. It is one of the few places that is entirely mine. The first thing I told both my daughters when they turned eighteen: get your driving licence. Not because they need to drive everywhere. Because independence is not an app. It is knowing you can leave under your own power whenever you need to. I learned that early. I have never stopped being grateful for it.

48. The car we drove for 22 years

We finally passed it on to our daughter. I know. 22 years. The same car. Call it loyalty. Call it sentimentality. Call it not being able to let go of something that carried so much. I still remember the day we bought it. The drives to the hospital. Twice. Endless school runs. Christmas drives to Belgium through the night. The girls growing up in the back seat, then growing too big for the back seat, then leaving the back seat for good. You could write a book about what happened in that car. Actually, maybe I will. It now belongs to her. Which means the memories do too. I can’t think of a better place for them to go.

49. Family time trumps everything

You don’t know how much time you have. You think you do. You don’t. The Belgium Christmas that felt complete. The breakfast tin of biscuits handed over on the last morning. The goodbye you don’t know is a goodbye until it already is. Make the most of it. Don’t overthink. Don’t wait. Whatever it is, the lunch, the trip, the phone call you keep meaning to make. Just go. Just go.

50. Allowing yourself to cry

The losses don’t stop coming. I don’t think they ever do, not at this age, not at any age. But I’ve learned something about grief that nobody told me: the pain comes because of the love. If someone is worth crying for, it means you were lucky enough to have them. Not everyone gets that. The tears are not the opposite of gratitude. They are gratitude. Just in a different form.

51. Making more phone calls

Since my father died, I retreated. Not dramatically, not all at once just gradually, the way you do when grief makes the world feel smaller and your own four walls feel safer. I used to bring people together. Hosted dinners, made the calls, held the centre. This year I’ve hosted more dinners than the year before. I’m finding my way back. But there is still more spontaneity to recover. More calls to make. More tables to set. The empty nest made it easier to disappear into quiet. I’m choosing, slowly, to come back out. Not because I have to. Because I remember how good it feels when I do.

52. Manifesting travel. Finally.

For years there was always a reason to stay. My father’s illness. My daughters’ final years at home. My husband’s schedule. All of them real. All of them worth it. But I look at the mood board on my office wall — the Orient Express, the islands, the words Voyage of a Lifetime and I think: when is it time for ourselves? I think the answer, at 52, is now. Not instead of everything else. Not abandoning anyone. Just finally adding myself to the list of people I make plans for. I have waited long enough. The board says so.

—

Awkward posing celebrating Mo-Marrakech turning 10 at Kensington Roof Gardens

At 52, I don’t feel finished. If anything, I feel more selective. More aware of what matters. And more willing to let the rest go.

Not everything needs to be improved. Some things just need to be noticed.

And some things — the coffee, the walk, the four women around a table, the stars watched over a cheese plate — just need to be lived.

There’s more I’m still figuring out.

What would be on your list?

This was meant to be my birthday letter.
It arrived a few months late, but then, so did spring.

Consider it a belated gift, from me to you.
The whole list, left open.

If these letters keep you company, the best way to say so is here.
It’s what allows me to keep writing them.

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Chelsea in Bloom 2025, Sloane Street, London

I lived on Kinnerton Street for six years. Those streets are part of how I understand London, part of my own history here. Motcomb Street in particular has changed enormously since then, and what it’s become is genuinely wonderful.

Last year, during Chelsea in Bloom, a woman stopped me on the street and told me she had travelled from Germany because of my posts. She had planned her London trip around this week. I still think about that how a few flowers on a London street can become someone else’s reason to come.

And honestly, I understand it. There is one week every year when this neighbourhood stops being a neighbourhood and turns into something closer to a stage set. Flowers appear where you don’t expect them. Streets slow down. People dress for the occasion.

I’ve lived close to here long enough that this week has become one of my rituals. And there is something about returning to streets you once knew intimately, streets where you once simply lived and finding them transformed into something abundant and beautiful. It does something to you.

Cadogon Hotel, Chelsea in Bloom 2025, London

I always start before it officially begins.

Around 6–7pm on Sunday evening, I walk Sloane Street. The largest installations are usually already in place, not everything, but enough to see the shape of what’s coming. The Cadogan Hotel is often one of the first to finish. They always go big for flower show week and tend to be ready before most. From there I walk slowly toward Sloane Square, seeing what’s appeared along the way.

It’s quiet. You see things before anyone else does. And that changes how the whole week feels.

Some installations only appear overnight on Monday morning. That’s part of the magic and I’d never suggest skipping Monday. But Sunday evening gives you the first indication of what’s to come before the crowds descend. It means on Monday morning, when I go to the RHS, I don’t feel like I’m missing Chelsea in Bloom. I’ve already had my quiet version of it.

And from a social media perspective, being one of the first to post before something has been shared hundreds of times does matter. But honestly, beyond that, I simply love quiet moments with beautiful things before the world has found them.

People watching, Duke of York Square, Chelsea in Bloom 2025, London

At some point during the week, not at the beginning, when you still have your list and your route.

Stop…

Find a corner, order a coffee, and just watch.

They come from the countryside for this week, dressed for the occasion — hats, occasion coats, the works. Elderly couples in their finest on a day out. Children running out of school gates straight into floral installations, overwhelmed with excitement. Chelsea Pensioners, curious about what’s happening just outside the showground walls. Famous faces trying not to be noticed. Colourful faces not trying at all. Brands giving out ice cream and iced coffee from little stands.

You could go every day and see something different, feel something different, experience something different. I do.

This is how I do the week. In order, in full because you asked.

Peggy Porschen, Belgravia in Bloom, London

FUEL FIRST

Before anything else, you need to decide what kind of morning person you are this week.

If you want to feel indulgent before you’ve done anything: Cédric Grolet at The Berkeley on Wilton Place. Possibly the most expensive coffee and croissant in the neighbourhood and worth every penny. The pastries are sculptural. Almost too beautiful to eat.

If you want to feel the full energy of the week from the moment you sit down: Martino’s. The smoked salmon scrambled eggs, the outdoor seats, the particular mix of people who gather there during flower show week. Book ahead. It fills up.

For something quieter but no less considered: Linea, just beside the Saatchi Gallery. Sitting outside overlooking the gardens feels like a small escape from everything happening around it. It’s one of those spots that somehow stays calm even during the busiest week.

If you want to be right in the middle of it all: Vardo Chelsea. Busy, social, good for a long lunch that turns into something else entirely.

For something more neighbourhood, head to Elizabeth Street in Belgravia. Tomtom Coffee House for eggs, strong coffee, sit outside if you can and watch the street wake up. And Peggy Porschen. Yes, everyone photographs the pink frontage, but what people miss is that her savoury menu now outsells everything else. The pancakes are exceptional. Go for those.

One more, and it’s small: Pavilion Press Café on Pavilion Road. Part coffee stop, part curated newsstand, built as much around print and beautiful objects as it is around coffee. Tiny, quietly talked about, the kind of place you mention to people rather than openly recommend. If you find a spot outside, take it.

THE SHOW ITSELF

Chelsea Flower Show 2025, London

RHS Chelsea Flower Show

Royal Hospital Chelsea, SW3

Members’ days: Tuesday 19 & Wednesday 20 May, 8am–8pm Public days: Thursday 21 & Friday 22 May, 8am–8pm Chelsea Late: Friday 22 May, 5:30pm–10pm Saturday 23 May, 8am–5:30pm (plant sell-off from 4pm)

Tickets from £107. Book at rhs.org.uk They sell out.

I go on press day, which is Monday. It’s quieter, but in its own way completely alive. The BBC filming in the gardens, designers making final adjustments, the occasional familiar face wandering through before the crowds arrive. You can stand in a garden without someone else’s elbow in your ribs. You can talk to the designers. You can take photographs before everything becomes busier.

If you’re going on a public day: Thursday builds energy quickly. The whole neighbourhood has an elevated feeling that day. Friday evening is Chelsea Late, the show stays open until 10pm with music and a looser, more social atmosphere. Worth a ticket specifically for that experience. And Saturday: stay until 4pm for the plant sell-off. World-class nurseries offloading their stock, it gets competitive quickly. Worth planning your whole day around.

Gardens to seek out this year: Tom Stuart-Smith’s Tate Britain Garden, an evocation of the new Clore Garden opening outside Tate Britain this autumn. The Parkinson’s UK garden by Art Anderson — three sensory zones designed as a sanctuary, one of those gardens that quietly stops you in your tracks. Frances Tophill’s RHS and King’s Foundation Curious Garden, with Sir David Beckham and Alan Titchmarsh both involved. And the Eden Project garden by Harry Holding and Alex Michaelis, marking the Eden Project’s 25th anniversary.

Inside, eating well is possible, but only if you plan ahead. The Spring Garden experience with Jeremy Chan of two-Michelin-starred Ikoyi and José Pizarro needs advance booking. So does The Dorchester afternoon tea overseen by culinary director Martyn Nail. Book before you go.

King’s Road, Chelsea in Bloom, London

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✨ HOW I ACTUALLY DO CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW WEEK

I’ve written out exactly how I time the week where I go first, what I skip, and how I avoid the crowds. Because this is the difference between enjoying it and feeling completely overwhelmed by it.

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I went to see the exhibition expecting to look at dresses.

There has been so much written about it already. The craftsmanship, the designers, the history carefully arranged behind glass. And it is all there, exactly as described. Three hundred pieces drawn from an archive of four thousand. A century of one woman’s life, told entirely through what she wore.

But standing in front of Queen Elizabeth II's wedding dress , which was, we were told, on public display for the very last time, I found myself thinking about something else entirely

Not the dress itself. But what it was trying to do.

The wedding dress stops you. It has to be seen to be understood.

Norman Hartnell designed it in 1947, just two years after the war. Clothing was still rationed. Most British brides were married in borrowed fabric or reused dresses.

Into that moment, he created something almost defiantly extraordinary. Ivory duchess satin, embroidered with ten thousand seed pearls and crystals. Motifs of white York roses, wheat ears, orange blossom. The train alone was fifteen feet long.

And knowing that this may be the last time it is ever seen in public changes the way you stand before it. The embroidery is now so heavy it is slowly damaging the fabric beneath it. It will go back into storage, perhaps permanently. There is something almost unbearably moving about seeing beauty when you know its time is ending.

You do not look at it in the same way.

But here is what I did not expect: the young Queen was magnificent.

I had followed her for the last thirty years of her life, as most of us had from a distance, on screens and in newspapers. A small woman in a bright coat with a matching hat, always composed, always recognisable, always somehow already there when you looked up. I had never thought of her as a style icon. She was simply a constant.

It was only in this room, moving through the early decades, that I understood what I had been missing.

In the 1950s she was daring. The evening gowns from this period are genuinely breathtaking, full crinolined skirts in duchesse satin, bodices embroidered with crystals and bugle beads, silhouettes that belonged to a young woman who understood the theatre of being seen.

The kingfisher-blue silk faille ensemble she wore to Princess Margaret’s wedding in 1960, captured in Cecil Beaton’s famous portrait is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a gallery in years.

The coronation gown, embroidered with the flowers of every nation she served (the English rose, the Welsh leek, the Scottish thistle, the wattle of Australia, the lotus of Ceylon, the maple leaf of Canada) is almost impossibly intricate up close, the kind of work that makes you hold your breath.

By the time most of us were paying attention, she was already someone else. The silhouette had simplified. The colours had brightened. The theatrical exuberance of those early decades had given way to something more considered, more systematic, more powerful in its own way, but different.

We saw the signature and missed the years in which it was being formed.

I had seen her in person three times across my life.

Once at Ascot, where she simply walked past us with one bodyguard beside her, no announcement, no fanfare. Just a small woman in a bright coat moving through a crowd that parted instinctively around her. The surreal ordinariness of it has stayed with me ever since.

Once filming for The Ritz during her Jubilee celebrations, watching her appear on the balcony and then pass below in the carriage. The scale of the love in the crowds that day was almost overwhelming. Something you cannot quite prepare for, even standing in the middle of it.

And once on the Mall, the morning they carried her coffin from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. I went because I felt I needed to be there. Because some moments are too large to watch through a screen.

I remember the silence most. And then the sound. The footsteps of the Royal Family walking behind the coffin, steady and rhythmic against the hush of hundreds of thousands of people. And the tears of strangers around me, people who had never met her, grieving as though they had.

That is what she built over seventy years of showing up, in every condition, in every country, in bright colours with a matching hat.

Not just a wardrobe. A presence. A language spoken entirely in cloth and colour, quietly, to the world.

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The curator of this exhibition, Caroline de Guitaut, Surveyor of the King’s Works of Art was kind enough to walk our small group through the collection herself. And what she described was not fashion in any way I had previously understood it.

It was a language.

A deliberate, lifelong system for communicating without words.

The bright colours we associate with her later years were not simply a preference. They were chosen so she could never disappear in a crowd. So that even at the back of a vast room, even at a distance, people would find her.

But the meaning went further.

In Australia in 1954, she wore a stole embroidered with the golden wattle, the country’s national flower. It is displayed here in a case, delicate and yellowing slightly with age, and knowing what it meant makes it almost unbearably tender.

In Pakistan in 1961, dining with President Ayub Khan, she wore a Norman Hartnell gown in the colours of the Pakistani flag, a white satin dress with a dramatic emerald-green pleat cascading down the back. She had said something before she spoke a single word.

In Saudi Arabia in 1979, Hardy Amies designed an entire silk chiffon ensemble including a turban-style hat that honoured the religious and cultural conventions of the country while remaining entirely, recognisably her.

When she met Pope John XXIII in 1961, she wore black lace and silk tulle with a mantilla veil honouring Vatican protocol for non-Catholic monarchs, a convention she observed without exception throughout her reign.

She had, the curator explained, almost complete mastery of her style. The handwritten notes on dress sketches throughout the exhibition. Her own hand, adjusting, directing, deciding, confirming it. She chose everything herself.

And then, in 2012, at the age of eighty-six, she appeared to parachute into the Olympic Stadium with James Bond.

The two dresses displayed side by side, hers and her stunt double’s, the latter fitted with a zip for the parachute made me laugh out loud. Because that was also her.

Still deciding. Still in control. Still, in her own way, having rather a good time.

What surprised me most, after sharing this, was how much it still mattered to other people.

My reel about the exhibition reached over a million views which in itself felt extraordinary, but what moved me most were the comments. People said they wanted to go. People said it looked beautiful. People said they had followed the Queen for years, that they missed her, that this felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see these pieces in person.

I had gone in search of something personal. But the response reminded me that she still belongs to many of us, in different ways. And that sharing what moved me had somehow become part of that larger memory.

Walking home, I thought about this differently.

About how we all, in our own smaller ways, choose what we show. Not through state visits or balcony appearances, but through the small, repeated things we put into the world.

A photograph of morning light through a window. A street covered in blossom. A table set for lunch somewhere beautiful.

I started sharing these moments years ago, quietly, at a time when very little else felt steady. I wasn’t building anything. I was simply reaching for something that felt like calm and finding, to my surprise, that other people reached back.

And maybe that is why this exhibition stayed with me so deeply.

Because beneath the craftsmanship, beneath the archive, beneath the extraordinary clothes was the same thing I am always searching for in my own work..

One moment full of noise and scale and celebration.
The other still, solemn, and almost unbearably quiet.

To witness both was to understand that public life is not only what is seen, but what is felt by the people standing in the crowd.

Not just beauty. But presence.

The understanding that colour, composition, repetition, used with care can become a language. One that travels without explanation. One that doesn’t demand attention, but quietly holds it.

She understood this at a level most of us will never need to. Her audience was the world.

But the impulse to be seen, without having to stand in the centre of the room.

I recognised that.

Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Style is at The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 18 October 2026. Tickets from £22, booking essential via rct.uk. Tickets are selling out quickly — sold out until July at time of writing.

The wedding dress will not be displayed again after this exhibition closes.

There is a moment every April when London stops pretending to be ordinary.

It doesn’t arrive all at once.

At first, it’s easy to miss.

A doorway you’ve walked past a hundred times has something climbing it. A street you thought you knew looks different, a bit softer, somehow. More generous.

You slow down without meaning to.

And then you notice it.

Wisteria.

It arrives later than the magnolias. Quieter than the cherry blossom. And for reasons I can’t quite explain, it always feels more intimate.

Less like something you go out to see. More like something you find unexpectedly and then keep noticing, again and again, across the city.

Because unlike blossom, which lives above you, wisteria comes down to meet you.

It wraps itself around entire buildings. It drapes over doorways and balconies. It spills across iron railings and along garden walls.

It doesn’t decorate London.

It changes it.

And this year, it has arrived at almost exactly the same time as the tulips and the last of the cherry blossom. Which means for a brief, almost unreasonable window, London is not one thing, but everything at once.

Purple. Pink. Soft green leaves just beginning to appear. Golden light catching on buildings that suddenly feel older, softer, more cinematic.

I’ve been walking these streets every morning this week.

Not to cover them. Not to photograph them. But to see what changes when you slow down enough to notice what is already there.

And during wisteria season, there is one walk I return to every year.

Through Chelsea. Into South Kensington. Up through Kensington. And finishing in Holland Park.

Not as a checklist. But as a way of moving through London when it is at its most fleeting and perhaps at its most generous.

If you’ve walked my magnolia or cherry blossom routes, this follows a similar rhythm just later in the season, and a little quieter. You can check them out here:

Magnolia Season in London

Cherry Blossom Season in London

Before you begin

When to go: Wisteria season in London typically runs from mid to late April into early May. This year, with the warm spring we’ve had, it arrived slightly early. Go now. Not next weekend.

Best time of day: Early morning on a weekday. The streets are quieter, the light is softer, and the wisteria smells stronger before the heat of the day arrives.

How long: The full walk takes between three and four hours if you wander slowly, stop for coffee, and pause when something catches you. And it will. Each section also works on its own if you’d prefer a shorter morning.

One small request: The wisteria on this walk grows on private homes. People live behind these doors. So admire from the pavement. Don’t lean on railings. Don’t move things for a better photograph. The beauty of this walk is in noticing, not claiming.

Part One — Chelsea

Allow 45 minutes to 1 hour Starting point: Old Church Street

Coffee first — Stillroom

Begin on Old Church Street.

There is a café here, Stillroom that opened only a few weeks ago and still feels slightly undiscovered. Pavement tables that catch the morning sun. Excellent coffee. An atmosphere that feels closer to a quiet Parisian side street than central London.

Sit outside if the morning allows.

This is how I’ve learnt to begin a walk like this. Not by moving. But by pausing first.

Cheyne Walk

From Old Church Street, walk down to Cheyne Walk.

Before anything else, before the wisteria, before the streets stop by the river.

The Thames is wide and unhurried here. The houses along the embankment are some of the most beautiful in London. George Eliot lived here. Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept peacocks in his garden. Turner painted the light on this stretch of water from an upstairs window.

Sit on one of the benches if you can. Not to photograph it. Just to let the morning arrive properly.

Gertrude Street and Christchurch Street

From Cheyne Walk, turn north into the residential streets behind it.

Gertrude Street. Christchurch Street.

This is where wisteria in Chelsea quietly begins.

Not dramatic. Not overwhelming. Just small signs at first climbing vines, soft clusters of lilac appearing along doorways and railings.

Stop here and smell it properly. Not as you pass. Actually stop.

Because this is the part that never translates in photographs. Sweet. Slightly powdery. Unmistakably tied to this exact moment in spring.

Radnor Walk and Redburn Street

Continue toward the corner of Radnor Walk and Redburn Street.

There is one house here in particular. You’ll know it when you see it.

The wisteria has climbed the entire facade wrapping around windows, spilling outward, softening the edges of the building completely.

Stand across the street. Look at it properly. Before you reach for your phone.

Part Two — South Kensington

Allow 30 to 45 minutes One cluster. Everything in one place.

Kynance Mews

Continue the full walk below — including:

• The quiet streets in Kensington where the wisteria feels almost hidden

• The exact route from Bedford Gardens to Holland Park without doubling back

• The house on Ilchester Place that stops people every year

• Where to pause, sit, and slow the walk down properly

Subscribe to read the rest and to receive new walks, seasonal guides and London stories as they arrive.

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October 2019. My father was in a coma.

I was walking home from St Mary’s Hospital through Hyde Park, that long path that takes you from the hospital toward Kensington, past the trees, past the palace, past the world carrying on as if nothing had changed.

It was one of those autumn afternoons that London does so well. Crisp air. Golden light. Leaves turning every shade of amber and rust. An old man walking slowly ahead of me with a stick, a small dog beside him. The sunset falling behind Kensington Palace. The leaves dancing in that light way they do just before they fall as if they know their time is almost over but aren’t ready to let go yet.

I was crying. Not quietly. The kind of crying where you stop caring who sees.

And then I stopped walking.

I watched the old man until he disappeared around the bend in the path. He had no idea he was carrying someone else’s grief as he walked.

I thought: my father is 72. I may never see him walk like that. I may never see him age.

And then I took out my phone.

I photographed the leaves. And the light on the water. And the sunset going down behind the palace.

And I posted it.

People said it was beautiful.

It was. That’s the thing. It genuinely was.

But what nobody knew, what I never said, is that I had just come from sitting beside my father who couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t know I was there.

That’s when I understood something about the account I had been quietly building.

The brighter the grid, the darker the day.

I wasn’t sharing beauty.

I was surviving by it.

I started my Instagram account years before that walk. It began as an experiment as a way to understand social media before my daughters were old enough to be on it themselves. I didn’t want to post selfies or share my personal life. So I shared London instead. Hidden streets. Colourful doors. The light on a particular morning on a particular corner that made me stop and think: look at that.

It made me happy. And when strangers told me it made them happy too, it gave me something I hadn’t expected. A purpose I hadn’t been looking for.

Then my father had his accident and the walks became something else entirely. They became my escape. They kept me breathing. I would leave the hospital and walk for hours, photographing everything beautiful I could find, as if I could collect enough light to carry back into that ward with me.

Then COVID arrived and the whole world was suddenly where I had been for months. Frightened, isolated, unable to reach the people they loved. And something strange happened. The brightness I had been creating as a private act of survival became, for other people, a reason to hope. My long walks through an empty London. The flowers still blooming on locked streets. The sky still turning gold at evening.

I was sharing what I was desperately looking for myself.

And it resonated. Because everyone was looking for the same thing.

What I never said, what I still rarely say, is that the formula has never changed.

Look at my grid on the days it’s most joyful and you are almost certainly looking at the days I am most afraid.

I have always been a Pollyanna.

Since I was a child. I have always believed genuinely, not as a strategy, not as a performance that things will work out. That every dip has a recovery. That the stock market of life cannot go down forever.

That is not something grief taught me.

That is who I was before any of this happened.

And I know exactly where it comes from.

My father went bankrupt five times.

Five times he lost everything. Five times he rebuilt. And not once, not once did he make me feel that any of it was a problem too large to survive.

He lost his own mother at birth. Never met her. I think about that sometimes. What it means to come into the world already missing someone. To grow up with that particular absence.

Maybe that’s why family meant everything to him. Why he worked so hard to keep us close, to keep us kind to each other, to make us apologise and mean it and move on. He was building the thing he never had. Constructing it carefully, year by year, from scratch.

He always made me feel safe. Even when nothing was safe.

Even at the very bottom of the worst times, he would look at me and say: everything will be okay.

I believed him every single time.

A husband is different. A real marriage and I have been lucky enough to have one, twenty-three years in means sharing everything. The worries and the wins. When one of you goes down, the other lifts them up. That’s the partnership. That’s what it’s supposed to look like.

But a father, at least my father did something else entirely. Even when he was down, he kept everyone else up. I don’t know if my mother experienced him the same way. She has always been a worrier, and perhaps between them the weight was more equally shared. But with me? He was the anchor. Unconditionally. Every time.

I miss that more than almost anything. Not just him, but the specific thing only he could do. The ability to look at whatever was falling apart and say, simply, with complete conviction: it will be fine.

He was the one person whose certainty I never questioned.

I don’t have that voice anymore. And some days, when things don’t go according to plan, I notice its absence more than others.

He gave me that. The stubbornness to keep believing.

And then he died in a hospital during COVID and we were only allowed fifteen people at his funeral.

Fifteen.

This week a friend messaged me on the day she buried her father. There were 300 people at his funeral, she said.

I read that and I sat very still for a moment.

We should have been 300. I always thought we would be. He was that kind of man, the kind who fills a room, who people gravitate toward, who accumulates friendships the way some people accumulate possessions, naturally and without trying. Hundreds of people weeping, telling stories about him for hours. That’s what he deserved. That’s what I always imagined.

He loved a celebration. He loved gathering people together, making an occasion out of an ordinary evening, turning a table of six into a party of twenty. That was him.

I think he would have enjoyed one last big one. One final room full of people, full of noise, full of the life he spent seventy-two years collecting.

He got fifteen, in a pandemic, in silence.

But I think he would have laughed about it eventually. And said: that’s okay. Not a big deal. I had a good run. I had my family with me. That’s all that matters at the end.

I am his daughter in this way above all others.

I don’t give up easily. I never have.

Long before Instagram, people told me no. They told me I’d never get a job in finance. They looked at what I was building. Vintage fur coats sold at private home sales, fine jewellery at pop-up stores, chocolates pitched to the buyers at Harrods and they asked, sometimes kindly, sometimes not: who is going to pay for this? Who is going to say yes to this?

A lot of people said yes, as it turned out.

I have had posts that performed to nobody. Articles that disappeared into silence. Reels that I knew were good and that the algorithm simply swallowed whole. I have failed more times than I can count, in more formats than most people attempt.

And every single time, I have started again.

Not because I didn’t feel the failure. I felt it. I feel it still.

The rejection feels personal. It almost never is.

I keep telling my children: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. What’s the worst that can happen? You get a no. But what if it’s a yes. Imagine that.

Substack was the same. People looked at this adventure with kind scepticism. Why would anyone pay for your writing when there is so much information available for free? What makes you think people will subscribe?

It turns out there are people who genuinely appreciate what you put out into the world. Who find something in it that matters to them. Every time I receive a new paid subscriber and especially when they write to me, the ones I least expect, a quiet message saying something I wrote stayed with them, it fuels me in a way I can’t fully explain. It makes the whole thing feel worth it.

And those who don’t subscribe? That’s life. You cannot get everyone’s support. Not everyone will understand what you are trying to achieve. Not everyone needs to.

That’s okay too.

Consistency always comes through, one way or another. It takes time to build a product, a brand, a newsletter. The key is to keep going.

There was a Duracell advert when I was young, perhaps you remember it. A small pink bunny that just kept going. Long after everything else had stopped. Long after anyone expected it to still be moving.

That bunny has always felt like a self-portrait.

I think I got it from him.

The man who went bankrupt five times and still made me feel, every single time, that everything would work out in the end.

I am still going.

I don’t know what else to do.

Grief never leaves you. That’s something nobody tells you.

They say time is the cure. I think time just gives you better tools to hide your feelings. Life goes on. You learn to carry it differently. But it doesn’t go.

In the past five years I have lost my father. My uncle who was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in October, flown to Canada for treatment in November, gone just before Christmas, a goodbye that didn’t happen in the way goodbyes should. My mother-in-law who, in her last conscious moments, saw us come through the hospital door and said: thank you for coming, thank you for being here. As if, even then, she was thinking of us. A dear friend, gone suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving questions I cannot answer.

One after another.

And each time, I opened Instagram and posted something beautiful.

Not as a performance. Not as a lie. The beauty was always real. I meant every image. But nobody scrolling through those pictures of wisteria and cherry blossom and golden afternoon light knew what the woman taking them was carrying.

I’m not depressed. I want to be clear about that. I’m coping. I function. I find joy, real joy, daily joy, the kind that makes me stop in the street and reach for my phone because something is too beautiful not to capture.

But underneath it all, for five years now, it has just been very, very sad. And I felt it all.

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If this were one of my old diaries, you would see tear marks on the pages.

I have kept diaries since I was sixteen. A box of notebooks, one for every year. The handwriting changes. The preoccupations change. But anyone finding them would know, from the marks on certain pages, that I was crying when I wrote.

You can’t see that here. Not on a screen.

The format doesn’t allow for it. You read these words in the same clean font whether I wrote them dry-eyed at my desk or whether I wrote them as I am writing this one with tears falling onto a keyboard that doesn’t know the difference.

I am crying now, as I write this. I want you to know that. Not for sympathy. But because it seems dishonest not to say it. Because the whole point of this essay is that there has been a version of me you couldn’t see.

This is what she looks like.

She looks like this.

My grandmother was born around 1913 or 1914 — we think. In those days, girls' births in Türkiye were not always registered. She came into the world without a record. She left it knowing exactly when her time had come. A Jewish woman living in Türkiye through the First World War as a child, through the Second World War as a young woman, through decades of history that should have been impossible to survive.

I never asked her what those years were really like. Whether she was scared. Whether she felt safe. I told myself there would be time.

The day she went to hospital, she asked my mother to FaceTime me before they left. She said she wanted to say goodbye. That she wasn’t coming back.

I laughed, not cruelly, from love, from the refusal to accept what she was telling me. I said: of course you’re coming back. We’re going to celebrate your hundredth birthday. I’m already planning it.

She looked at me through the screen for a moment.

She said: no. I just wanted to make sure I said goodbye.

She was gone within the hour. She was 97.

I have thought about that call almost every day since. She knew. She was calm and certain and she offered me a goodbye and I handed it back to her.

I thought I was being hopeful.

I think now I was just being afraid.

My father wanted me to write a book about his life. There were things in his past, turbulent things, frightening things that I was afraid to know. I told myself I would ask him when I was ready. When the time felt right.

The time never felt right.

And then the phone rang at 2am and I drove to the hospital in the dark and he was already gone.

You always think there is more time.

Until there isn’t.

Substack was supposed to be an extension of Instagram.

More depth. More detail. Guides to London, restaurants, hotels, culture, travel. Professional. Controlled. The kind of writing that pairs naturally with a beautiful grid.

Then I wrote my first personal piece about how my walks began, about my father, about grief and something opened that I have not been able to close since.

I am one of the most private people I know. You could scroll through years of my Instagram and find almost nothing personal about me. I have never shown my face much. I have not talked about my family much. I have kept the brightness and kept the rest to myself.

And then Substack happened.

A woman who has known me for ten years read one of my essays and said: after ten years, I feel like I am finally getting to know you.

Ten years.

That’s what I had been protecting. That’s what the brightness had been holding in place. Not dishonestly. I was never performing joy I didn’t feel. But the full picture, the complete woman, the one with the tear marks on her diary pages, she had never been visible before.

She is visible here.

I never meant to tell you any of this.

And now I can’t seem to stop.

Yesterday I posted a picture of a pink door covered in wisteria.

London is slowly turning purple, I wrote. You can already smell it as you walk past.

People liked it. Someone said it made their day.

I was sitting at my kitchen table when I posted it. Thinking about my friend. Thinking about 300 people in a church. Thinking about fifteen people in a pandemic. Thinking about my father, who was bigger than life and deserved every single one of those 300, and got fifteen instead.

Thinking about the small pink bunny in the advert.

Still going.

Still going.

If my father read this essay today or my whole Substack, for that matter, he would probably be very proud. I can see him forwarding each piece to his friends, calling them one by one, making the case for why they absolutely needed to subscribe. It would have made me cringe. The way I possibly make my own daughters cringe.

He would have said: you are finally writing again.

He may have had a tear or two. He was never truly afraid of tears, despite what he told me at my grandmother’s funeral.

And then he would have looked at me and said: you see? Everything turned out okay.

Forrest Gump’s mama always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.

I say it’s a rollercoaster. You are at the top of the world at one point and at the bottom the next, and you keep going round and round. Both are probably true.

I’m still finding out. Still finding answers at 52. As much as we’d like to pass on wisdom to our children and we do have some to pass on, we are also still figuring things out as we go along. Every age brings its own challenges. Its own surprises. Its own ups and downs.

We keep going.

That’s what he gave me.

The stubbornness to keep going and believing that all will be fine in the end.

The woman who posts the wisteria is real. I mean every image she shares. The beauty is genuine. The hope is genuine.

But if this were a diary, you would see the tear marks on the page.

Now you know.

Three things I’ve learned about carrying grief and beauty at the same time:

Post the beautiful thing even when you’re crying. Not to hide the tears, but because beauty and grief are not opposites. They have always lived in the same moment. Both are true.

Write it down somewhere. Not for anyone else. Because the stories you don’t record are the ones that disappear. I know this now in a way I didn’t before my father died. In a way I wish I’d known before my grandmother did.

When someone offers you a goodbye, receive it. Even when you’re not ready. Especially when you’re not ready.

If these essays keep you company, the ones about grief and beauty and the long work of figuring out who you are in the middle of your life, you can support this writing by becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive a shorter, more personal monthly letter. The things I didn’t quite say in the main essay. The letter behind the letter.

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One question before you go:

Is there something you’re carrying right now that nobody can see?

Reply to this email. I read every one.

I found my old diaries last week. I didn’t expect them to change the way I see my life.

Not the tidy ones I once imagined keeping to look back on.
The real ones.

Notebooks with rushed handwriting, pages slightly bent, receipts and restaurant cards glued in between, boarding passes, postcards, a parking ticket from Montepulciano dated May 2001.

Little proof that I had been somewhere and wanted to remember it properly before it slipped away.

I sat on the floor and spread them all out.

For a moment, I just looked at them.

Then I started reading.

And I realised something I had never named before:

In my twenties, I wrote to understand my life.
Now, I often find myself shaping it to be seen.

I didn’t have that language then. Back then, it just felt like writing things down before they slipped away.

But reading it now, at fifty-two, I can see it so clearly.

One of the earliest diary is from 1995. I was twenty-one, living in Boston, going to concerts at Symphony Hall and writing bullet points about my days with the energy of someone who believed each one deserved to be recorded.

Back to school — Ohh! Last 2 weeks — hey!
I am really sick.

At night → to Boston Symphony — concert from Bach to Brubeck — it was very nice → (Cana, Batu, Tolga, Sedef et moi)

Then I spoke to my boyfriend. He missed me. Ohh! I miss him too.

A concert ticket tucked between the pages. Seat A49. Balcony 1 Left. $35.

I remember none of it. And yet reading it, I am entirely back inside that evening.

There’s an entry from New Year’s Day which is also my birthday. I had written at the top, in capitals: HAPPY B-DAY TO ME ♪ ♪

Then: At midnight we went to the Harbor to watch fireworks — on the radio the new year music — raining, lots of people — it was very romantic and nice. Then home sweat home → champagne and my cake.

Home sweat home. She meant “sweet.” She always wrote fast, this younger me. She didn’t go back to correct things.

And later: I am very excited.

She was packing for tomorrow’s holiday.

She was always packing for something.

Reading these pages, I kept thinking of Bridget Jones Diaries.

Not the chaos, exactly. But the spirit of it. The bulletins. The emotional honesty. The way she wrote everything down without wondering how it would land.

Bridget Jones wrote her diary because she needed to. Because writing it down was how she processed being alive.

That was me too.

Only mine was less wine, more Turkish passport complications.

On a trip to Caribbean cruise in January 1995, I wrote:

I am going on a cruise to the Caribbean with my only love (Enzo Köt).

Enzo Köt. His nickname. Written in brackets, like a private joke with myself.

We arrived to San Juan at midday and got to our room. A window! He! He! On the 9th floor. Lucky us!

And then, at the midnight pool party in Antigua:

At 12:00 → midnight buffet at the poolside. It was so much fun. Everyone from 8 to 80 was dancing. Very tropical drinks.

She drew a little cocktail glass next to this. And wrote: → pineapple drink.

I stared at that tiny drawing for a long time.

She was so present. She was drawing cocktail glasses in her diary at midnight because she wanted to remember exactly what she was drinking.

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The 2001 diaries are different. Fuller. More self-aware.

By then I was twenty-seven. My boyfriend (now my husband of more than twenty years) and I had decided to travel to Argentina together. It was December. There were riots in Buenos Aires because of an economic crisis. The president had resigned. Twenty-four people had died.

We went anyway.

I wrote this on the plane:

We are finally on our way to Argentina. I should be overjoyed with happiness, but instead I am nervous… I guess I am a bit over-stressed.

And then later, at customs, Roger Marc refused to come with me. On principle, he said, to teach me independence:

Seriously, I don’t understand him sometimes. I’ve travelled enough to know what happens to a person with a Turkish passport.

(They did stop me. I had to call him to get my plane ticket anyway. In his defence, he has since agreed to always pass through customs with me.)

And then, twelve hours into the flight, somewhere over Brazil:

Finally I am starting to get excited. Currently we are flying over Brazil and all I can see is acres of trees. It is magical.

That’s not a travel guide.

That’s a brain trying to catch up with itself.

Anxiety, then frustration, then wonder. Written in ink, in real time, without knowing how it would resolve.

The Tuscany diary from the same year has a page I keep coming back to. We were driving through Montepulciano, the weather had turned foggy and strange and she’d forgotten her glasses, and she started writing a little ghost story to herself about the old farmhouse:

The family has a little girl. She finds a toy in this old house. She fixes it. All of a sudden, the toy starts to speak and Bang! All bad things start to happen. I mean the weather was really foggy, rainy and mysterious.

She was entertaining herself. In her own diary. Building a little story out of an inconvenient afternoon.

That’s the version of me I had forgotten existed.

We had bought the Michelin Guide for that Tuscany trip. A proper red one, the kind that felt authoritative just to hold and planned everything around restaurants we wanted to try.

We drove from village to village. We stopped where we felt like stopping.

We found a supermarket and went slightly mad inside it.

Pasta, cheese, drinks (wine, grappa, vino Santo). By the end, we had no idea how we would carry any of it back to London. Nevertheless, we still bought them.

We had dinner on our last night at a restaurant on a hill overlooking the bay. I wrote just two words at the bottom of the page: Unbelievable. Magical.

Not a hashtag. Not a caption. Not a reel with trending audio.

Just the word that was true.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up collaborating with the Michelin Guide on different projects.

I had to pause when I realised that reading these pages.

I went from planning a trip with the Michelin Guide to eventually working alongside it.

Perhaps nothing was accidental.

Perhaps I was already becoming this, one page at a time, without realising it.

I read something recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Maybe midlife isn’t about starting over.
Maybe it’s about coming back to the woman you were before the roles, the responsibilities, and the expectations took over.

And sitting there on the floor, surrounded by these notebooks, I realised…

That’s exactly what this felt like.

In my twenties, I wrote to understand what I was experiencing.

Now I shape what I share.

And they are not the same thing.

When I film a reel, you see the beautiful corner. The perfect light. The hotel lobby at the right angle.

You don’t see the house in Punta del Este where the pool barely existed and there were no towels. I wrote that down. I wrote it almost doesn’t exist. I don’t think anyone will use it. I wrote about being overdressed in the humidity and not seeing the sun. I wrote about being annoyed at Roger Marc at the Buenos Aires customs and then, privately, being glad he was sitting next to me on that plane.

Back then, I wrote all of it.

Without thinking anyone else would read it.

And perhaps that’s what I miss most.

Not privacy.

Freedom.

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In 2004, my daughter was born.

I started a diary again. A different kind. Filled with first-time motherhood feelings. the worries, the exhaustion, the love that was bigger than anything I had been prepared for. About nights that felt too long. About wanting to slow time. About trying to hold onto small moments. A hand in mine, a child still small enough to carry.

And then I stopped.

Because I got scared.

Scared of what I was writing. Scared of how much I felt. Scared that if I kept putting it all down in ink it would become too real. The fear, the doubt, the love so large it was sometimes hard to breathe inside it.

So I closed the notebook.

And I didn’t open another one, until now.

Instead, life took over. Two children. Work. The machinery of a full house.

I kept calendars, schedules, flights, reservations, where we went, where we ate.

The kind of information people now search for, that algorithms reward, that fills a grid beautifully.

I have all of it.

Perfectly documented.

But there is no soul in those calendars.

No trace of how something felt.

No hesitation. No I am in a paradise written twice just to make it real.

Just information.

Useful. Searchable. Shareable.

But not lived in the same way.

My daughters are now nineteen and twenty-one.

The house is quieter than it has been in two decades.

And something strange has happened in that quiet.

I have space in my head again. Time in my day. Room to think a thought all the way to the end without being interrupted.

And I find myself writing again.

Not the bullet points. Not the diaries.

But something in between.

A Substack piece about my 52nd birthday that surprised me with how honest it was. More honest than anything I’d written in years. It felt closer to the girl writing in Boston than to the content creator thinking about reach.

And then a guide to magnolia season, which brought in thirty-nine new followers and felt, if I’m being honest, like putting on my Instagram hat. Thinking about the algorithm. Thinking about what people were searching for. Useful. But not me, not really.

The difference between those two pieces is the difference between these diaries and those calendars.

One was written from something.

The other was written for something.

And I think, only now, I’m beginning to understand which one I want to do more of.

We went back to Tuscany three times after 2001.

Once with our girls when they were small. Once just the two of us, for our twentieth wedding anniversary.

The same villages. The same roads.

And yet not the same at all.

The last time, I was focused on filming. Capturing. Framing the shot.

And both of us noticed that some of the villages felt different. More worn. More crowded than we remembered.

Was it the place that had changed?

Or the way I was seeing it?

I wish I had read these diaries before going back.

Because what I was really trying to return to was not Tuscany.

It was the way I experienced it the first time.

These notebooks have given me something I didn’t expect.

Not just memory.

Proof.

Proof that I was curious then.

That I am curious now.

That I have always loved travel, atmosphere, the small things that make a day feel like itself.

That I have always written to understand where I am.

I didn’t lose my voice.

I just stopped trusting the first version of it.

Maybe this is what the empty nest gives you, if you let it.

Not just time.

But permission.

Permission to go back to the first version of yourself. The one who drew cocktail glasses in her diary. Who wrote ghost stories to entertain herself on a foggy afternoon. Who ended entries with “THANK YOU GUYS” in capitals because the day had been so good she had to say it to someone, even if that someone was only the page.

Maybe Substack is part of that for me.

Not just a platform.

A place to write the longer version. The real one.

Not polished for an algorithm.

Not shaped for reach.

I keep thinking about how I used to end those pages and what to do with all of this.

Simply.

THANK YOU GUYS!

Or just “THE END.”
No trying to understand what it all meant.

Just the day, as it was.

And somehow… that felt enough.

I didn’t start Rita Farhi Finds with a plan.

But reading these pages, I wonder if it started much earlier than I thought.

In those Boston bullet points.
In the supermarket in Tuscany.
In the sentence I wrote on a plane over Brazil at midnight that I had completely forgotten about until last week.

Perhaps the Finds were always the surface.

And the diaries were always the truth.

Maybe this was never just Rita Farhi Finds.

Maybe it was always Rita Farhi Diaries.

And maybe this is just a new page.

But this time, I’m not going to get scared and close the notebook.

I think the answer is to keep writing.

Not just the reels.
Not just the guides.

This too.

The longer version.
The real one.

Just the truth of what it feels like to travel, to notice, to have lived somewhere in the world with your eyes open and to want, still, at fifty-two, to keep going.

If any of this feels like your kind of thing… there is more to come.

I think I’m just getting started again.

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I’ve been thinking about the idea of a circle of life lately.
Not in any grand way.
Just quietly.

Perhaps it’s because Easter is coming.
Or because my daughter’s birthday is, too.

She was born nineteen years ago, on a very sunny Easter weekend.
I remember the light that day more than anything else.
Soft, but certain.
The kind of light that makes everything feel like it’s beginning.

And somehow, from that moment on, Easter became something else entirely.

—

She came three weeks earlier than expected.

I had gone in for a routine check-up, with other plans entirely. The last thing on my mind was giving birth, but the umbilical cord was tangled, and suddenly everything changed.

We called ahead.
They were waiting for me.
It all happened very quickly after that.

I remember shaking during the birth.
My husband stroking my hair to calm me down.
Later, I was told it had been far more serious than I realised at the time.
He had never seen a baby so tangled.

He saved her life.
And mine.

—

Afterwards, I stayed in hospital to recover.

I remember the room filled with the most beautiful sunshine.
The whole week felt calm in that strange way that sometimes follows chaos.

My older daughter arrived on her new scooter all the way from Hyde Park. She was so proud of herself.

And I remember the overwhelming feeling of relief.
That we were safe.
And somewhere in all of that joy arrived too.

And perhaps that’s where it began.
Not Easter itself, but what it came to mean for us.
A marker in time.
A beginning we didn’t plan, but one that quietly shaped everything that followed.

—

And then, in the years that followed, came the egg hunts.

I used to plan them the night before, long after everyone had gone to sleep.
Little clues written out by hand.
Chocolate eggs hidden in places I thought were clever and sometimes forgotten the next day.

Some years, the grass still damp from the morning.
Other years, everything moved indoors because of the rain.
Cushions lifted.
Drawers opened.
Small footsteps running from room to room.

And always, that same feeling that something simple could feel like everything.

—

Her birthday folded into it all.
So close to Easter that the two became one.
Balloons and eggs.
Candles and spring light.
Happy, uncomplicated days.
The kind you don’t realise you’re collecting at the time.

—

Nineteen years have passed, and I still don’t quite know how.

Easter was never just one day for us.
It became a season.
The start of family holidays.
Time set aside for being together.

And now...
we’re approaching another Easter.
And for the first time in a long time, we haven’t quite managed to plan it.

Everyone has their own schedules now.
Work. Commitments. Life.
We will still celebrate, just before we leave, but it feels different.
Not in a dramatic way.
Just... slightly out of sync.

And I notice it.
Because those holidays used to be non-negotiable.
And now, somehow, they’re not.

—

It’s strange, the things that stay with you.
How certain details, colours, textures, small rituals find their way back, years later, without asking.

Before all of that, there was another version of Easter.

It also made me think of my life before children.
Before Easter became egg hunts and birthdays and family traditions,
it meant something else entirely.

—

That was where my first Easter tradition began.
Not at home, but at work.

With something very small.

Speckled chocolate eggs, tucked inside delicate, egg-shaped boxes. We called them “Creppon Eggs” softly coloured, almost imperfect.

The labels were printed at home, never quite aligned.
And yet, together, they worked.

I remember taking them to Harrods.
A small space.
A quiet opportunity.

“If it sells, we talk.”

So I waited.

—

And then, slowly, something shifted.

What began as a single Easter corner began to grow.
Not because I was making the chocolates myself. I wasn’t, but because I was searching.

Looking for things that felt different.
More crafted.
More expressive.

I started sourcing from small artisan producers. From places not yet known, not yet seen in London.

And that’s how I found them.
An artisan chocolatier in Spain.

Their eggs were unlike anything I had seen at the time. Bold, colourful, almost sculptural.

That year, everything changed.
What had started as a small shelf moved into the windows.
Into the magazine.
Into the story Harrods was telling for Easter.

—

I remember walking through it all. Past displays filled with colour and detail,
past windows that felt almost theatrical and realising, quietly, that something I had started in a very small way had found its place on a much larger stage.

I was slightly outside of it, and yet somehow part of it.

—

Looking back, I can see it more clearly now.
It was never really about the chocolate itself.
It was about the search.

Finding something before it was seen.
Recognising something before it fully revealed itself.

And in many ways, I realise I’ve never stopped doing that.
Whether it was chocolate then, or places, or moments, or corners of London now, it’s always been the same instinct.
Just expressed differently.

—

Last week, I found myself back in that world again.
Not in the same way, but close enough to recognise it.

At Claridge’s.
Tables lined with Easter eggs.
Not the kind you rush to buy.
But the kind you pause for.
Each one shaped with intention.
Built layer by layer.
Each one a different point of view.

—

And then there are the ones that made their way home with me.

A leopard-print egg from Il Gattopardo — bold, playful, almost too beautiful to break.
And a floral one from Café Royal’s Blooms & Bubbles — softer, more delicate, as if spring had been pressed into chocolate.

They’re sitting in the kitchen now.
Waiting.
For Easter.
For everyone to be together.
For that familiar moment when they’re finally broken open. Not carefully, but all at once with pieces shared, passed around, tasted together.

And I realise...
as much as things change, some traditions don’t.

—

Outside of Claridge’s, Easter unfolds across London in quieter ways.

At Fortnum & Mason, it begins with the windows.
Softly moving.
Almost like theatre.

Inside, tables filled with eggs and ribbons.
Not things you necessarily need.
But things that remind you of something you once loved.

—

And then, unexpectedly, you walk past Hedonism.
And you hear it.

Chickens.

Soft, unmistakable, completely out of place.
You stop.

For a moment, your imagination takes over.
Not quite a countryside barn though wouldn’t that be nice.
But just enough.
Just enough to interrupt the city.
Just enough to make you smile.

—

In Covent Garden, at Clos Maggiore, Easter feels different again.

Quieter.
More intimate.
Blossoms suspended above you.
Eggs hanging between branches.

It doesn’t feel like decoration.
It feels like stepping into a moment.

—

And somewhere between all of this, the eggs, the memories, the places,
I realise I’ve been here before.

Not in the same way.
But close enough to recognise it.

Once, Easter was something I was building.
Then it became something I created for my children.
And now...
it’s something I walk through more slowly.

More aware of what it holds.
More aware of what has passed.
And what is quietly changing.

—

The egg hunts don’t happen anymore.
The clues aren’t written the night before.
The house is quieter.

And yet, the feeling hasn’t disappeared.
It’s just... changed.

Softer now.
Less about creating the moment.
More about noticing it.

—

The light.
The colours.
The small details.
The way something unexpected, even the sound of chickens in a shop window
can bring everything back, just for a second.

—

A circle, in its own way.
Not repeating.
Just returning.

If this made you see Easter a little differently, please share it.

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A few Easter eggs I couldn’t stop thinking about

Claridge’s ArtSpace Café — Thibault Hauchard
A playful nod to Claridge’s iconic Art Deco doors, hiding a surprise within.
Dark chocolate, buckwheat and vanilla praline with a smooth caramel centre.
Architectural, clever. An egg that invites you to open it, not just admire it.

The Ritz London — Lewis Wilson
Valrhona 69% dark chocolate with salted Piedmont hazelnut praline and crunchy pearls.
Precise, elegant, almost architectural.

Harrods — Alistair Birt
Grand Cru 42% milk chocolate with sea salt caramel, hazelnut crunch and gold-dusted Piedmont hazelnuts.
Rich, generous, unapologetically indulgent.

The Berkeley — Salvatore Mungiovino
Manjari chocolate with citrus and macadamia praline.
Lighter, brighter, slightly unexpected.

Jumeirah Carlton Tower — Martin Haidar
A trio of almond blossom, golden hazelnut and salted pistachio.
Softly layered like spring translated into chocolate.

The Connaught — Nicolas Rouzaud
A chocolate orchard in miniature.
Dark chocolate layered with caramel and hazelnut praline, scattered with jewel-like fruits.
Playful, intricate almost like stepping into a story.

Valrhona Lantern Egg — Circle Wong
A sculptural, lantern-inspired creation rooted in memory and cultural storytelling.
More than an egg, something ceremonial.

Kayu — Khalil Bouabid
Dark, rich, direct.
Less decorative, more about depth.

Café Royal — Cakes & Bubbles
Floral, delicate as if spring had been pressed into chocolate.

Il Gattopardo
A bold leopard-print egg playful, confident, impossible to ignore.

Subscribe for more slow London stories, seasonal observations, and the places that stay with me.

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I thought London was just blossoms this month.

I was wrong. And if you stop at the blossoms, you miss half the city.

If you’ve been following along recently, you’ll know that March, at first, felt entirely defined by flowers.

If you’re still chasing the blossoms, I mapped out the most beautiful cherry blossom walk in London here. ‘A Slow Walk Through Cherry Blossom Season’ here
And for magnolias ‘Magnolia Season in London: The Most Beautiful Spring Walk Through Chelsea, Kensington & Notting Hill’ here

That quiet moment when London begins to soften. I found myself chasing them through Notting Hill, standing among the crowds gathered around that now-famous house, walking quieter paths in Swiss Cottage where the city feels almost still, and drifting through South Kensington where magnolias appear unexpectedly on otherwise ordinary streets.

For a while, it felt like London had turned entirely pink.

But if you stop there, you miss another side of the city entirely.

Because March isn’t just about flowers.

It’s about contrast.

It’s about the last traces of winter still hanging in the air, and then suddenly, colour. Soft at first. Then everywhere. Pink against grey skies. Petals against pavements that only weeks ago felt heavy and cold. A quiet reminder that things change. That something always returns.

And perhaps that’s why we chase them.

Not just because they’re beautiful, but because they feel like hope.

Something fleeting you can stand beneath for a moment, before it disappears again.

But this month wasn’t only lived outside.

I found myself stepping inside more than usual.

Not to escape London, but to experience it differently.

More slowly. More intentionally.

Almost as if the galleries were an extension of the weather outside.

And what stayed with me most was how each place carried its own atmosphere. Almost like moving through different emotional worlds.

If this is the version of London you’re looking for, slower, quieter, a little more intentional, I write these as I experience them.

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Hayward Gallery — Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life

You arrive at the Southbank and feel the city immediately: concrete, river, wind, movement. People passing in both directions, the usual low hum of London at pace. And then you step inside and suddenly everything changes.

Chiharu Shiota’s work isn’t something you simply look at.

You enter it.

Entire rooms are filled, almost consumed by dense webs of thread, stretched from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, layered so intricately that they begin to feel almost architectural. There are objects suspended within them: chairs, keys, fragments of lives once lived, caught mid-air as if held inside memory itself.

The effect is immediate, and physical.

You don’t just observe it.

You feel it.

There’s a quiet tension in the space, something between beauty and claustrophobia, as if you’re walking through someone else’s thoughts. And what struck me most was how it slows you down. You can’t rush through it. You have to adjust your pace, your gaze, even your breathing.

It becomes immersive in the truest sense, not just visually, but emotionally.

For me, that was part of the magic. It didn’t simply present an artwork. It altered the atmosphere around me. It made me more aware of my own body, my own stillness, my own thoughts moving in the background.

There are exhibitions that dazzle you. This one seemed to absorb you.

Royal Academy — Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First

If the Hayward feels introspective, the Royal Academy feels almost liberating.

Rose Wylie’s work is bold, unapologetic, and deliberately unrefined. Large-scale canvases filled with colour, gesture, and what at first glance feels almost childlike simplicity. But the longer you stand in front of them, the more intentional they become.

There’s confidence in the looseness.

Precision in what appears instinctive.

And then you learn that Wylie only gained widespread recognition in her seventies.

Seventy.

And everything shifts.

The work becomes less about style, and more about time. About persistence. About voice. About the freedom that comes with no longer needing approval.

I found that moving in a way that felt strangely personal. Maybe because so much of life and especially creative life is spent trying to arrive earlier, achieve sooner, be seen sooner. And yet here was an artist whose work felt sharpened by time rather than diminished by it.

You leave not just having seen something, but having rethought what it means to begin.

There’s a particular kind of reassurance in that.

Not all things need to happen quickly to matter.

V&A — Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art

At the V&A, the experience is something else entirely.

This isn’t fashion in the traditional sense.

It’s imagination made physical.

Elsa Schiaparelli’s work sits somewhere between couture and surrealism, deeply influenced by artists like Dalí, and you can feel that immediately. Garments that don’t just dress the body, but transform it. Gold that feels almost alive. Silhouettes that distort, exaggerate, challenge.

There’s a theatricality to it, yes, but also an extraordinary level of craftsmanship.

You find yourself leaning in, trying to understand how something so intricate could exist outside of an idea.

And knowing that this is the first time the exhibition has been shown in the UK adds a certain weight to it. It feels like a moment worth seeing now.

What I love about the V&A, when it works like this, is that it doesn’t ask you to separate beauty from intellect. It lets both exist at once. The clothes are stunning, but they’re also mischievous. They remind you that fashion can be a form of thinking, a kind of visual language, a conversation between the body and the imagination.

That’s what I took with me from it: not just admiration, but delight

Courtauld Gallery — Seurat and the Sea

And then, at the Courtauld, everything quietens again.

Seurat’s work asks something very different of you.

From a distance, the paintings feel calm, almost minimal. Seascapes that seem still, composed, balanced. But as you move closer, the surface begins to dissolve. Thousands of tiny dots. Each one precise, deliberate, necessary.

You realise that what looks effortless is anything but.

And it forces you to shift your perspective.

To step back. Then closer. Then back again.

It becomes less about what you see and more about how you see it.

That, to me, is one of the most quietly moving things about art: the way it trains your attention. The way it insists that looking is not passive. That seeing is a form of effort. A kind of participation.

Seurat’s sea felt like that. Not dramatic, not loud, but deeply considered. The kind of work that rewards patience and gives it back to you in return

Sir John Soane’s Museum — memory folding in on itself

And then, one evening at Sir John Soane’s Museum, a place that already feels suspended in time, I found myself listening to a story about the Nile.

About the very boat Agatha Christie travelled on.

And suddenly, I was back in Egypt.

On that slow journey down the river.

Watching the light change over the water.

To this day, my children still say it was the best trip we ever took.

Some memories stay with you like that.

Quietly. Permanently.

That’s what London can do when you let it. It doesn’t only give you the present. Sometimes it folds the past into it. A room can become a doorway. A conversation can become a memory. A museum can become a river. And for a moment, you are nowhere and everywhere at once.

That night stayed with me not because it was grand, but because it was layered. A story within a place within another story. The kind of experience that reminds you how much of life is carried by association, by feeling, by the way one thing unexpectedly opens onto another.

The city, still alive

And despite everything we hear about London changing, about people leaving, about the city becoming harder to hold onto, you feel something else entirely when you’re in it.

In the queues.

In the galleries.

In the quiet hum of people moving through it.

In the way people still show up for beauty, for ideas, for meals, for the simple act of being somewhere that asks something of them.

And then there are the smaller discoveries.

The places that slip into your routine without announcement.

For me this month, it’s been Mulliri in South Kensington, a coffee stop I hadn’t planned to find and now return to without thinking. There’s something comforting about that, isn’t there? The accidental places that become part of your rhythm before you’ve had time to name them.

And then, the evenings.

A night at The Lanesborough, stepping into their newly opened garden space. Soft lighting. Music in the background. My husband with a cigar. A feeling of something both familiar and fleeting. We used to live just around the corner on Kinnerton Street, and suddenly we were surrounded by people from another time in our lives. It felt local. Grounded. Like stepping briefly into another chapter of our own lives.

London does that. It folds time in on itself.

Another evening at the Mandarin Oriental, celebrating design in a setting where everything felt intentional: the curve of a chair, the way a table was lit, the ease of the conversation. The kind of evening you leave feeling quietly inspired, as if the room itself has reminded you that attention to detail can still be a form of generosity.

And then there are the places you return to without planning to.

For me this month, it’s been Martino’s in Sloane Square.

Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner.

Always full. Always buzzing.

The kind of place that quietly becomes part of your routine, not because it’s trying to be a ritual, but because it already feels like one.

Small signs of spring

And in between all of that: walks along the South Bank, moments in Victoria Park, the first tulips beginning to appear, a reminder that Easter is just around the corner.

Even Fortnum & Mason, as always, has leaned into the season. Windows that feel almost theatrical in their detail. London knows how to celebrate the small things.

And maybe that’s what March has really been about.

Not just flowers.

Not just exhibitions.

Not just dinners.

But noticing that life is always happening in fragments.

Some beautiful.

Some difficult.

Some ordinary.

Some carrying the weight of things you can’t say out loud.

Because somewhere in between all of this - the blossoms, the galleries, the dinners, the walks - life was happening too.

The kind of news that shifts something in you.

Closer to home.

Further away in the world.

It’s easy, in moments like that, to retreat.

To make your world smaller.

And yet, this month reminded me of something else.

That sometimes, you have to gently push yourself outward.

To walk.

To sit in a room filled with colour.

To notice.

Because joy doesn’t always arrive loudly.

Especially now.

It’s quieter.

Found in fragments.

In blossoms that only last a few weeks.

In a conversation.

In a gallery room.

In a familiar street.

London in March never quite decides what it wants to be.

Sun, wind, hail. Sometimes all in one afternoon.

And maybe that’s the point.

You don’t wait.

You step into it anyway.

Maybe that’s what this month has really been about.

Not just where to go.

But how to remain open.

And if the blossoms have started to fade, don’t worry.

There are still more to come.

And with Easter just around the corner, I’ve been quietly gathering something else.
A different version of London again.

I’ll share it next.

If you’re new here, this is how I tend to write about London.
Not as a list, but as a way of moving through it. And if this made you see the city a little differently, you can subscribe here for the next one.

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And if you know someone who might need a softer version of London right now, feel free to share this with them.

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If you’d like to keep walking a little longer, you might also enjoy:

When Everything Changed: The Story Behind the Walks

Highgate Cemetery: A Quiet Walk Through Grief, Memory, and Unexpected Beauty

What It Really Means to Chase Beauty for a Living

There is a moment in London, every year, when the city softens.

Not loudly.
Not all at once.

But quietly, almost without announcement the trees begin to bloom.

Magnolias first.
Then cherry blossoms.

For a few short weeks, everything feels different.
The streets are softer.
The light lingers a little longer.
And suddenly, everyone is walking just a little slower.

I’ve been out every morning, following them.

Through Chelsea, where magnolias appear on the most ordinary streets.
Through South Kensington, where you turn a corner and everything is pink.
Through quieter paths I hesitate to share publicly, because part of me still wants to keep them untouched.

⸻

A lot of what I share here is open to everyone.

But the more personal pieces and the exact walks for those who want to follow them live a little more quietly behind the paywall.

It’s where I write more freely.
And where London becomes less of a guide, and more of a feeling.

I think that’s why this time of year always feels different.

Not just because the city changes, but because we notice it more.

We walk a little slower.
We look up more often.
We pay attention to things we usually pass by.

And for a few short weeks, London feels almost… softer.

⸻

Because spring never lingers for long, I’ve added a small spring invitation — 30% off for the next few days — for those who feel like coming along.

For the next few days, you can join at a reduced annual rate.

Think of it as a coffee on a slow London morning in exchange for everything I notice along the way.

Step into it →

(Best accessed via browser for the lowest price)

⸻

The full cherry blossom walk with every stop mapped out is waiting there too.

Magnolia Season in London: The Most Beautiful Spring Walk Through Chelsea, Kensington & Notting Hill

Where have you seen the most beautiful blossoms this year?

Rita x

This space is supported by readers who choose to stay a little longer. If you’d like to follow along more closely, join me here.

“To walk alone in London is the greatest rest.”
— Virginia Woolf

Where do you go when your mind feels full?

Not overwhelmed in a dramatic way.
Just… crowded.

Too many thoughts.
Too much noise.
Too many things pulling at your attention all at once.

I’ve started to notice that, more often than not, the answer is not to stop.

It’s to walk.

Not quickly.
Not with a destination in mind.

But slowly enough for the city to begin revealing itself again.

This is what I’ve come to think of as
the art of seeing London.

Because London isn’t a city that offers itself all at once.

It asks something of you first.

Time.
Attention.
A willingness to look up and sometimes down at things you would normally pass without noticing.

And every year, there is a moment when this becomes easier.

Not because London changes completely.

But because something small shifts.

Cherry blossoms begin to appear.

At first, just one or two trees.
Almost easy to miss.

And then suddenly, everywhere.

Soft pink branches stretching across parks, scattered along pavements,
framing streets you thought you already knew.

But what changes most isn’t the city.

It’s how people move through it.

They slow down.

They pause where they would usually pass through.
They look up more often.
They linger without quite knowing why.

And if you follow that rhythm,
instead of rushing ahead of it,
you begin to notice something else entirely.

That London is not something you need to chase.
It is something you learn to see.

Londoners know this moment well.

It usually arrives sometime in March
and lasts only a few fleeting weeks. Sometimes less, if the wind arrives too soon.

The petals fall quickly,
scattering across pavements like confetti
before disappearing almost as suddenly as they arrived.

But cherry blossom season isn’t only about the trees.

It’s about what happens around them.

And yet every year,
we rush to find them.

Saving locations.
Chasing streets.
Searching for the “best spots.”

But the longer I’ve walked London in spring,
the more I’ve realised something else:

The beauty was never just in finding the blossoms, but in learning how to see what was already there

The way people slow down.

The way a quiet street suddenly feels softer.
The way strangers pause beneath the same branches,
looking up at the same moment.

🌿 A Walking Reset

And over time, I’ve realised
that what I return for each spring
isn’t just the blossoms themselves.

That when the mind feels full, not overwhelmed, just… crowded the answer is not always to stop.

It’s to walk.

Not quickly.
Not with a destination.

But slowly enough
for the city to begin revealing itself again.Which is why, over the years,
I’ve developed a small ritual.

Every spring, I find myself walking across London, not to see everything,
and not to capture every tree, but simply to move through the city
a little more slowly than usual.

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If you enjoy slow London walks like this, you can subscribe here.

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The viral blossom house in Notting Hill, London

There is a house in Notting Hill that blooms every spring.

For most of the year, you could walk past it without noticing.
Just another beautiful street in London. Quiet. Lived-in. Ordinary in the way London so often is.

And then, almost overnight, the tree outside it transforms.

Soft pink blossoms spill across the façade, framing the house in a way that feels almost unreal. The kind of beauty that stops you mid-step. Makes you look twice. Makes you reach for your phone without thinking.

It is, quite simply, breathtaking.

I used to go early.

After the school run, on those in-between mornings when London feels like it belongs only to the people who live in it.
You might see one or two others pausing. A quiet admiration. A photo taken quickly, almost respectfully.

It felt like something you had discovered, even if you hadn’t.

Now, you don’t discover it anymore.

You arrive… along with everyone else.

People gathering on the pavement, waiting for their moment.
Phones raised. Outfits planned. Angles considered.

The blossoms haven’t changed.

But everything around them has.

Swiss Cottage Cherry Blossom, London

And it’s not just here.

The once quiet blossom path in Battersea Park is no longer quiet. The spring tree walk by the river, where branches form a soft tunnel towards the Power Station chimneys.

In Greenwich Park, if you want to see the blossom without the crowds, you have to be there when the gates open at 6am, standing under the cherry blossom tunnel near Ranger’s House before the first tour groups arrive.

This year, Swiss Cottage is next the line of cherry trees by the library already turning into a backdrop.

It moves almost like a wave.

From one neighbourhood to another.
From one “hidden gem” to the next.

Until there are no hidden gems left.

Recently, I read a piece about this very house in The Times, and then found myself scrolling through a viral Instagram reel of the same spot.

The language was almost identical.

People climbing on garden walls.
Posing on front steps.
Blocking pavements so residents can’t easily get in or out of their own homes.

One neighbour described it as a pilgrimage.
Another said people behave as though it is their studio, not someone’s front door.

In the comments under one reel, people were blunt:

“The owners should charge an admission fee at this point.”
“Everyone’s having a piece of the cake including you, posting this.”
“Our local magnolia tree was eventually cut down because people kept climbing on it.”

And just beneath those, a quieter frustration:

“Oh no… what a difference a few years makes.”
“Instagram and TikTok have changed everything.”

On other streets, residents have started painting once-pastel façades in deep, almost-black shades, and stringing chains across their front steps. Small, visual ways of saying: this is a home, not a set.

I wrote about that too: Why Notting Hill’s Most Photographed Houses Are Being Painted Black

The street sign sits right beside the house.

There is no real way to keep it anonymous.
Even if no one shared it, it would still be found.

Online, though, it looks simple.

“Where is this?”
“Adding this to my London list.”
“This is unreal 😍”

Saved. Shared. Sent.

The kind of place that travels faster through a screen than it ever could on foot.

But under those same posts, you’ll now always find the other side too.

“People forget someone actually lives here.”
“This used to be such a quiet street.”
“Why does everything have to be ruined once it goes viral?”

And somewhere in between those two reactions… is where most of us sit.

Admiring it.
Saving it.
Wanting to see it for ourselves.

Because I’ve been there too.

I’ve stood across the street, waiting for the light to fall just right.
I’ve shared these places. The quiet corners, the beautiful streets, the moments that feel like something out of a storybook.

I’ve always seen my page as a way to inspire people:

To step outside.
To walk.
To slow down.

To notice the small, fleeting moments that make London feel magical again.

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But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

The more we share,
the more people save.

The more people save,
the more the algorithm rewards it.

And slowly, almost without realising it,
we move from moments to destinations.

From quiet appreciation
to something more curated, more intentional, more… crowded.

Spring in London has always felt like a gentle return.

A soft unfolding after months of grey.
A season that invites you to slow down, not rush.

But lately, it feels different.

Faster.
Louder.
More watched.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what my responsibility is in all of this.

Because it would be easy to stand on the “right” side and say I am not part of the problem.

I don’t climb on walls.
I don’t sit on people’s steps.
I don’t shake branches for better photos.

I go early.
I try to be quick and quiet.
I tell people to be respectful.

And yet.

My work feeds the same machine.
Even when my intention was simply to make someone pause.

The reel that makes someone add “Notting Hill blossom” to their list.
The carousel that becomes a bookmark for a future trip.
The gentle caption that might be the final nudge for someone to go and see it in person.

I don’t control what happens after someone saves a post.
But I can’t pretend I have nothing to do with it.

There’s a very human moment that happens when you’re standing in front of somewhere like this.

You look up at the blossoms.
You look at your phone.
You look at the other people already filming.

And quietly, without saying it out loud, the question appears:

“If everyone else is doing it… why shouldn’t I?”

It’s the same question on both sides.

The person climbing on the wall.
And the creator deciding whether to post the exact address.

We tell ourselves small stories to make it feel harmless.

“I’m only here for a minute.”
“I’m just taking one photo.”
“I’m not as bad as the others.”

But places don’t experience us individually.
They experience us all at once.

I don’t have a neat solution.

I still love sharing London.
I still feel a rush of joy when a street is suddenly covered in blossom or magnolia or wisteria.
I still believe that paying attention to beauty can change the way a day feels.

But I am trying to hold a few new questions alongside that joy:

• Would I still come here if I couldn’t post it?
• Am I sharing this because it moved me, or because it will perform?
• Is this a place, or has it quietly become a backdrop?

If the honest answer makes me uncomfortable, that’s usually a sign to step back.

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Practically, it’s made me change a few things.

I share more impressions and fewer instructions.
More “this is how it felt to walk through London today” and fewer “here is the exact door, at this exact angle, at this exact time of day.”

Instead of geotagging a crescent or typing the full street name, I might simply write, ‘Notting Hill early morning’ and talk about the light instead.

I’m slower to share exact street names while something is going viral.
Sometimes I keep a place for myself until the season has passed.
Often, I’ll show a detail, the petals on the pavement, the light on the branches without turning someone’s front door into a landmark.

And when I do share specific locations, I try to include a reminder:

Please be gentle.
Stay on the pavement.
Remember someone actually lives here.

It’s not perfect.
It’s not enough to undo years of geotags and guides.

But it’s a start.

Because underneath the arguments about influencers and residents and “who is to blame,” there’s a quieter truth that I keep coming back to:

We are all visitors, even in the cities we call home.

We move through streets that belong to other people’s lives.
We stand under trees we did not plant.
We photograph houses we will never step inside.

The least we can do is move through that borrowed beauty with a little more care.

This year, when I visited the Notting Hill tree, I filmed for a moment and then put my phone away.

I watched the queue forming.
I watched a resident trying to edge out of their front door.
I watched a girl in a pink dress shiver in the cold while her friend adjusted the camera.

And then I did something I don’t think I’ve done before.

I crossed the street… and left.

Not because I have the moral high ground now.
But because I wanted, just for a minute, to remember what it felt like when blossom season was less about getting the perfect shot, and more about the quiet surprise of turning a corner and finding a tree in full bloom.

I don’t know if spring in London will ever go back to that.

But I do know this:

The way we share these places is not fixed.
We get to decide what kind of visitors we want to be.

And if paying attention is the first step to loving a city, then maybe the second step is learning how to love it without crushing what made us fall for it in the first place.

Explore more from my London series

Read Next

— Why Notting Hill’s Most Photographed Houses Are Being Painted Black
A story about aesthetics, identity, and how even colour can reshape a neighbourhood.

— Magnolia Season in London: The Most Beautiful Spring Walk Through Chelsea, Kensington & Notting Hill
A seasonal ritual, a fleeting bloom, and why some streets suddenly feel like paintings.

— Highgate Cemetery: A Quiet Walk Through Grief, Memory, and Unexpected Beauty
One of the quietest places in London to notice the seasons changing.

— London at Christmas: My 2025 Tree Walk
Christmas Trees worth visiting in London.

Magnollia trees spilling over a pastel townhouse in South Kensington, London.

Every Londoner has a magnolia tree they secretly wait for.

The one you check every year in early March.

You walk past it for weeks while it looks completely bare… and then one morning, almost overnight, it explodes into pink.

Magnolia season in London is fleeting. Sometimes the wind arrives too soon and the petals disappear in a matter of days.

Which is why every March I go magnolia chasing across the city walking through quiet streets, stopping for coffee along the way, and noticing the small signs that spring has quietly arrived.

For the past two weeks my inbox has been full of the same question.

Where can I see the magnolias in London?

It started slowly at first. A few messages after I shared a photograph of a pale pink tree outside a quiet London house. Then more. Then dozens.

Which streets?
Which neighbourhoods?
Where are they blooming this year?

And I understand the curiosity.

Magnolia season in London has a way of making people stop in their tracks.

Because every year there is a moment when you suddenly realise winter is over.

Not because the calendar says so.

Not because the weather has suddenly improved. This is still London after all.

But because one morning you turn a corner and a magnolia tree has quietly burst into bloom overnight.

Soft pink petals against white stucco houses.
Branches stretching toward a sky that still feels slightly wintery.

And suddenly the whole city feels different.

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The moment London begins to turn pink again…

Londoners know this moment well.

It usually arrives sometime in March and lasts only a few fleeting weeks. Sometimes less if the wind arrives too soon.

The petals fall quickly, scattering across pavements like confetti before disappearing almost as suddenly as they arrived.

Which is why, over the years, I’ve developed a small ritual.

Every spring I go magnolia chasing across London.

Not in a rush.
Not to photograph every tree.

Just to wander slowly through the neighbourhoods where they bloom most beautifully.

Coffee in hand.
No strict schedule.
Stopping occasionally simply to look up.

Over the past week I’ve been sharing small glimpses of these walks here on Notes - moments of magnolia branches appearing above quiet streets, petals gathering along pavements, and the subtle shift that happens when London begins to soften into spring.

Many of you asked if there was a walk you could follow.

So today I thought I would share the route I often take. A slow wandering walk across West London that passes through some of the neighbourhoods where magnolias bloom most beautifully.

It’s not meant to be rushed.

Think of it less as an itinerary and more as a gentle afternoon wandering through the city just as spring begins to arrive.

The Magnolia Walk Route

Is this the cutest magnolia house in London?

Chelsea → South Kensington → Kensington → Holland Park → Notting Hill

The walk moves gently across West London, beginning in Chelsea and finishing in Notting Hill. If you follow the whole route slowly it takes around two to three hours, depending on how often you stop.

And during magnolia season, you will stop often.

Because every few streets another tree appears.

If you’d like to follow the full walk including the streets where the magnolias bloom most beautifully and the cafés where I usually pause along the way.

The rest of the guide continues below for paid subscribers. Join along my adventures below. Save this walk for a spring afternoon.

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London has quietly turned pink again.

Every year there is a moment when the city seems to change overnight.

Cherry blossoms opening along quiet streets. Magnolias stretching their petals toward a sky that still feels like winter.

Soft, fleeting, hopeful.

Spring has a way of reminding us how quietly life renews itself.

And today, as the city begins to bloom, it also happens to be International Women’s Day.

Which made me think about the women in my life.

The ones who came before me.
The ones who walked beside me.
And the ones who are still becoming who they will be.

My Grandmother

My grandmother belonged to a generation that rarely spoke about itself.

She was born around 1918 (we think), just after the First World War, and lived through decades that shaped women very differently. Years marked by uncertainty, rebuilding, and quiet endurance.

She was also a Jewish woman growing up in Europe during the years surrounding World War II.

I often wonder what that must have been like for her.

She never spoke about those years in detail. Perhaps that was simply the way of that generation. You carried what you had lived through quietly and moved forward.

Looking back now, I wish I had asked her more questions.

When I think of her, the memories come in small images.

Her knitting quietly in the corner of a room.
A book always nearby.
The smell of Turkish coffee.

She spoke French beautifully and loved playing cards.

Bridge, mostly.

And she made the best tarama spread that I still wish I had learned properly.

But the image that remains most clearly in my mind is of her sitting in front of a window.

When my parents travelled to London and she came to stay with us, she would sit there for long stretches, calmly watching the day unfold outside.

Almost like a statue.

Observant. Quietly present.

We weren’t afraid of her. She was gentle and kind.

But that generation simply didn’t interact with children the way we do today. There were no endless conversations or planned activities.

Love lived in quieter places.

She lost her husband very young and suddenly found herself raising two teenage children alone.

For a woman of that generation, at that time, that must have been incredibly difficult.

She never remarried.

Sometimes I wonder if she ever allowed herself the possibility of another love. A companion. Someone she shared quiet moments with that we never knew about.

I honestly don’t know.

Instead, she focused on raising her children and building a life.

She taught bridge to other women, turning something she loved into a way to support her family.

And perhaps that explains why, at ninety-five, she was still playing bridge and even winning tournaments.

How incredible is that.

The Woman Who Raised Us

There is another woman who belongs to the story of my life.

She is not related to us by blood, but in every meaningful way she is family.

She came from a small village and had very little education. She was still a teenager when she began working for my family, originally helping my grandmother.

My mother was still very young herself.

When my mother married, she came with her.

And when my brother and I were born, she helped raise us.

She loved us fiercely, almost as if we were her own children.

We would sneak into her room at night and climb into her bed.

She cooked for us.
She cared for us.
She watched us grow.

Over the years she had suitors and opportunities to leave, but she stayed.

I don’t think she ever imagined that one day we would leave Turkey.

In her mind our lives were meant to unfold together in the same place.

And if we had stayed, perhaps she would have lived with us forever. Perhaps she would have been there when I had my own children.

When we moved to London, she remained with my grandmother as her companion.

Today she is in her eighties, almost blind and deaf.

We do not even know her exact age because girls’ births were not always formally recorded in the village where she was born.

But she has been part of our family since she was a child herself.

Sometimes family is not defined by blood.

Sometimes it is defined by the people who stay.

My Mother

Then comes my mother.

She married very young, barely eighteen or nineteen which was not unusual in her generation.

And then life changed suddenly.

In 1990 we left Istanbul and moved to London.

My mother was forty years old and didn’t know a single person in this city.

For me it was easier. I started high school and quickly found friends.

For her, it meant starting again.

Leaving behind family, friends, language, everything familiar.

The circumstances that brought us to London were complicated and turbulent, a story that could probably fill a book of its own.

But what I remember most about those years is how she carried on.

She created a home for us in a place that was completely unfamiliar to her.

Quietly.

Without making a drama of how difficult it must have been.

Looking back now, I realise how much strength that must have required.

Years later, when we lost my father, another difficult chapter arrived.

And once again she showed that same quiet resilience.

I encouraged her to return to something she had loved when she was younger in Turkey: playing cards, especially playing bridge.

She hadn’t played much in London.

But once she started again, it was as if a part of her came back to life.

Today, in her seventies, she not only plays bridge again, she also teaches it.

Every time I think about that, I feel incredibly proud of her.

It is proof that it is never too late to return to something you love.

Never too late to begin again.

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My Daughters

And then there are my daughters.

Two young women who could not be more different from each other.

I sometimes joke that one is my Mediterranean flower and the other my Nordic scientist.

One studies theoretical physics.
The other studies law.

One approaches the world with careful seriousness.
The other with a lighter, more playful curiosity.

Yet both are thoughtful, hardworking and brave.

They made me a mother. Something I had always wanted, though I don’t think anyone truly understands what that means until it happens.

Motherhood changes the way you see the world.

Your heart suddenly exists outside your own body, walking around in two young human beings you love more than you ever thought possible.

It hasn’t always been easy.

Motherhood comes with worries, sleepless nights, doubts and endless responsibility.

But I would never change it for anything in the world.

Having them in my life has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.

Their generation has grown up in a world very different from the one I knew.

They experienced COVID during important years of their lives — years when friendships and ordinary teenage moments suddenly disappeared.

They saw friends struggle in ways we rarely did when we were young.

And yet they still carry hope.

Their resilience amazes me.

Perhaps every generation of women learns strength differently.

My grandmother through survival.
My mother through reinvention.
My daughters through navigating an uncertain world with courage.

And me, perhaps through witnessing them all.

The Women Who Walk Beside Us

And then there are the friendships.

By the time you reach your mid-fifties, you realise that a life is almost mapped through the women who have walked beside you at different moments.

Some friendships begin when you are so young you cannot imagine life without those people.

Growing up in Istanbul, I had a group of girlfriends — six or seven of us — who were completely inseparable.

Summers on the islands.
Endless conversations.
Laughter that seemed to stretch through entire days.

We knew everything about each other: first crushes, teenage dreams, small heartbreaks that felt enormous at the time.

When we moved to London in 1990, those girls became my lifeline.

There were no mobile phones then. No WhatsApp. No social media.

If you wanted to stay connected, you wrote letters.

So we did.

Long letters that travelled slowly between Istanbul and London but carried enormous comfort. I would wait for them to arrive and read them again and again.

In those early years of starting a new life in a new country, those friendships held me up more than they probably realised.

And somehow those friendships never disappeared.

I haven’t lived in the same city as them for more than thirty years. Yet every time we meet wherever it may be in the world, we slip back into our younger selves within minutes.

There is something irreplaceable about childhood friends.

They know the entire story of who you are.

There was also another small circle of girls who appeared in my life during those years of transition.

When I first arrived in London for school, everything felt unfamiliar.

A new culture.
A different way of speaking.
Thinking.
Even socialising.

It was exciting, but also overwhelming.

And somehow, in the middle of all that, I found three girls.

One Brazilian.
One Lebanese.
One Japanese.

And then there was me.

We were the girls from the American School in London, the ASL girls, as I still think of them.

Each of us came from very different cultures, yet in many ways our worlds felt strangely similar.

We all understood what it meant to live between places, between identities, between expectations.

Those two years were not always easy, but those friendships carried me through more than they probably realised.

They helped me navigate that strange moment of being young and far from what felt familiar.

And somehow, like so many of the women in my life, they are still there.

They saw those formative years.

They saw the beginning of the person I was becoming.

Then came the university years.

Boston felt like a completely different world.

We were all far from our families, living in shared apartments, studying hard, discovering independence for the first time.

Our building felt like something out of the television show Friends.

Different apartments.
Doors always open.
Constantly walking in and out of each other’s lives.

We studied hard.
We partied hard.
We had endless conversations about the future.

Those were years when life still felt wide open.

And somehow those women are still part of my life today.

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Later came my first real job at the World Bank.

Those women became what we still call the World Bank girls.

Over the decades we have watched each other move through marriages, children, divorces, illnesses and loss.

Life has not always been easy for any of us.

But somehow those friendships remain.

Then came motherhood in London.

When my daughters were little and attending nursery, another group of women entered my life, the Young England mothers.

Those women made those years colourful and joyful.

Later came another circle through Falkner House School.

And when my father had his accident in 2020, those friendships became something much deeper.

Those women created a WhatsApp group called Rita’s Relief Squad.

Every day I wrote updates from the hospital.

They listened.
They encouraged.
They simply showed up.

One of them even sent homemade food to my house every single day.

Even today I struggle to find words to describe that kind of kindness.

And then there are the friendships that arrive in the most unexpected ways.

For me, some of those came through Instagram.

Women I met through curiosity, creativity, and the strange modern world of social media.

Many of them are younger than I am.

But that has never really mattered.

Once, I was the youngest person in the room when I started my career.

Now the roles have reversed.

They may teach me about algorithms and the digital world.

Perhaps I can offer something different in return. A different perspective, experience, maybe a little life wisdom.

Friendship evolves like that.

A Quiet Thread

Looking back, I realise that a life is never built alone. It is held together by the women who walk beside us.

My grandmother’s endurance.
My mother’s courage.
My daughters’ hope.
The friendships that appeared exactly when they were needed.

Resilience does not always look dramatic.

Sometimes it simply looks like women showing up for each other.

Again and again.

Across generations.

And today feels like a good day to celebrate that.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Rita x

P.S. If you have a grandmother, mother, daughter or friend in your life who shaped who you are, today might be a good day to tell her.

If this essay made you think of a woman who shaped your life, send it to her today.

Sometimes the smallest message can mean the most.

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I have been walking Hyde Park for thirty years. This week, I saw something I had never noticed before.

A starling, perched on a railing by the Serpentine, beak lifted, singing at considerable volume. Iridescent feathers with green, purple and black colours, depending on the light.

Extraordinary, when you look. I had never, in all that time, noticed that bird.

I thought this said something about the bird.

It says something about me.

I have been telling myself and telling you, which is worse, that I have been learning to slow down. That I have been paying attention. That I notice the small things. The light on a particular street. The quality of a Tuesday morning. The beauty in the unremarkable.

I write about this. I have written about it a great deal.

And then I went to Hyde Park on an ordinary morning with a friend, walked and talked properly (no phones, no destinations, no photographs being composed) and in the space of two hours saw things I have been walking past for three decades without registering.

The starling.
Goslings taking their first steps by the water.
Household Cavalry on horseback with the Shard visible in the background, impossibly like two versions of London that shouldn’t be in the same frame.
A game of volleyball being played, cheerfully and without irony, in front of the Albert Memorial.

None of this was new. All of it had been there every spring.

The day wasn’t dramatic. It was ordinary and that’s the point.
The ordinary holds the gifts if you stand still long enough to notice them.

I was the one who was different or rather, I was finally, briefly, slow enough.

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The Same Park, Different Years

This is where we taught our children to ride a bike.

I remember taking my daughter to the playground and waiting for the Household Cavalry to pass at 10.30am sharp, on their way to the Changing of the Guard. This was before Instagram/social media existed.

We would stand there, watching them go past the sound of hooves on the path, the uniforms, the horses impossibly tall at her height.

Her excitement is what got me excited.

Now I chase them for Instagram reels.

Though yesterday I saw them and didn’t reach for my phone.

They were coming back, which I almost never see. I am usually there early enough to catch them leaving. We met at noon, my friend and I, long after my old morning routines would have brought me through the park with a purpose.

There was the time my daughter fell into the Serpentine because she couldn’t stop her scooter in time, and we had to return home, soaked and indignant, to change her clothes.

The time we were having a picnic and were attacked, decisively by squirrels, and I wasn’t sure whether to save the food or my initially excited but then genuinely frightened child.

During Covid, when the parks became everyone’s sanctuary, this was where I walked when there was nowhere else to go.

After my father’s accident, it was the path I took home where I could cry without anyone noticing. Where I could breathe properly again before opening the front door.

Later it was about chasing the horses against daffodils.
Filming swimmers in the frozen lake.
Catching parakeets eating cherry blossoms.

I have the pictures and videos to prove it.

Some were planned. Most weren’t.

Each time, in a way, I did slow down to capture the moment.

But did I really slow down enough to enjoy it?

The Walk We Don’t Count

There is a particular kind of walking that doesn’t count as exercise in the fitness app sense, doesn’t produce a photograph, and doesn’t result in a destination.

It’s just walking with someone you’ve known long enough that the conversation can go anywhere and does, across two hours, from something serious to something trivial to a long silence that neither of you feel the need to fill.

At one point she said,

“I don’t think we’ve walked like this since the girls were in primary school.”

And I realised she was right.

Back then the walks were always between something:
the school gate and the car,
the park and the next activity,
the end of the day and bedtime.

This was the first one that didn’t lead anywhere.

I walked this park that morning.

And when the horses appeared, I did reach for my phone out of habit more than intention.

In the past I would have taken photographs and video from every possible angle. I would have moved closer. Followed them down the path. Filmed again when they turned.

This time I stopped where I was, zoomed in, took a video and a single photograph, and put it back in my pocket.

I watched them instead.
The strange contrast of the Shard framed between the trees behind them.

I have the footage.
I also have the memory.

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I write about slow living.
I have also, for the past few years, been chasing virality.

Both of these things are true simultaneously.

The chasing has looked like checking which reels performed. Thinking about hooks before I’ve finished experiencing whatever the hook is about. Arriving somewhere beautiful and feeling the faint disappointment that it’s not quite photographable.

Noticing a bird, then reaching for the phone before I’ve actually looked at the bird.

The Hyde Park morning was the first time in a while that I went out without that orientation. Not because I decided to. I had simply arranged to meet a friend, and you don’t check your save count when you’re walking and talking with someone you love.

Learning to Slow Down for the First Time

My daughters are grown. I am no longer running.

For years, the running was necessary and real. The particular velocity of a life with children in it, the way your attention is always partial, always divided, always managing the next thing while handling the current one.

You don’t see the starling because you are watching the child who is about to feed the geese something they shouldn’t eat.

I knew that when the children grew up, things would slow down.

I assumed that I would slow down with them.

What I didn’t anticipate is how long the running continues even after the thing you were running for has ended.

The body and the mind don’t receive the memo immediately.

You keep moving at the old speed, arriving at a quieter version of the same life, and wondering why it doesn’t feel different yet.

Slowing down is not a destination.
It’s a practice you are apparently
always at the beginning of.

What the Starling Was Doing

The starling on the railing was singing.

Not performing. Not demonstrating. Singing. Beak lifted, completely absorbed in the song, indifferent to the park and everyone in it.

I hadn’t reached for my phone at first.

We were watching it, the way you do when something unexpected appears close enough that you don’t want to startle it by moving.

At one point my friend said,

“She’s literally talking to us. So chatty. This is your kind of thing you should film it.”

So I did.

Before, I would have felt the familiar anxiety that I might miss the moment. I would have reached for my phone immediately, trying to catch it before it flew away.

This time, I didn’t rush.

The bird stayed.

We stood there for longer than you’d think, two grown women watching a starling sing by a lake in London on an ordinary morning in early spring.

And because it stayed, I could enjoy her company first.

I have a video now.
And a photograph.

Thank you for walking with me, for slowing down with me, for choosing not just to observe, but to participate in a practice that makes the ordinary glow just a little brighter.

Thirty years of starlings singing on that railing, and I never stood still long enough to hear one.

What I learned, almost without realizing, is that the practice of paying attention doesn’t end with a single walk or a single realization. It’s a discipline, a muscle that grows when you choose not to rush past the day’s textures. The starling reminded me of that. The park reminded me of that. And a long career of trying to capture life reminded me, too: beauty doesn’t arrive; you do.

I haven’t arrived.

I walked somewhere beautiful on Tuesday and saw a bird I’d been walking past for thirty years.

That’s where I am.

At the beginning of it all.
xo Rita

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If you enjoy these slower London walks — the blossom routes, the early morning cafés, the quiet streets before 9am. I share those each week in my paid notes.

The free posts will always offer the spark.
The paid space is where the conversation continues.

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If you’re new here, I wrote earlier this week about how February has changed for me over the past five years.

You can read that here.

Still dancing with him in my dreams…

Five years ago today, the hospital called in the middle of the night.

It was still during Covid. The time when we weren’t allowed inside hospitals unless something had already gone very wrong. So when they tell you that you may want to come in to see your father, you know this is not good news. You know the end is near.

I remember driving to the hospital in the dark, speaking with my brother about how we would break the news to my mother.

We had been fighting for a year and a half to keep my father alive, through some of the most chaotic times of our lifetime. Since his accident in October 2019, there had always been a goal, a summer in Turkey, one more season together, one more walk, one more memory to make.

We had somehow managed it until then.
But this felt different.

The hospital felt different.
The doctors felt different.
And for the first time since his accident, I felt defeated.

He looked tired.

Before I left in the morning, so that my mother could take my place (because we weren’t even allowed to be in the room together as it was covid times), I told him that if he felt like he needed to leave, it was ok. That we would be ok. That we would look after Mum.

He squeezed my hands and I saw tears in his eyes.

I will never forget that moment.
And I will never quite forget the guilt that followed.

Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to say that.
Perhaps I was supposed to promise him another summer.
Perhaps hope was the only thing I should have left behind in that room.

So I changed my tone immediately and told him I would see him tomorrow. That Mum was coming. That we’d be back.

That night, when my mother wanted to stay with him, we told her to go home and rest. History had shown us this battle was always a long one. She would need her strength.

None of us despite all the hints given to us thought this would be the end.

I will never forget that moment.

Hope is a funny thing.
Losing hope is terrifying.

And for the first time in his battle, I had lost mine.

He passed away quietly on his own at 2am.

When the phone rang, I wasn’t ready. No one had actually said he was gone. My husband didn’t know. I didn’t fully understand. I just took the keys and drove to the hospital in the middle of the night, because that’s what you do when someone calls and says you should come.

You are never ready to say goodbye to someone who felt bigger than life, someone who made you feel safe in the world simply by being in it.

When I arrived, his room was dark. Music was playing softly. And when I stepped inside, I realised I was too late.

In a way, I had said goodbye earlier that morning, even though I hadn’t meant it as a goodbye.

Afterwards, I remember getting into my car alone while it was still dark outside. I don’t remember how I drove home. I don’t remember where I parked. I don’t remember how I found my way back into bed and cried in my husband’s arms.

Adrenaline is a powerful thing. When you need it, survival takes over. Somehow you move through tragedy. You make phone calls. You tell people. You organise. You stand. You sit. You nod. You breathe.

And then comes the funeral.

We still couldn’t gather properly. We couldn’t say goodbye in the way we had imagined. He was buried in the same cemetery as Amy Winehouse, which the girls were oddly excited about. I remember thinking how children will always look for something to hold on to, some small point of light, even on the darkest days. Maybe we all do.

My daughter gave a beautiful speech. I couldn’t speak at all, even though I had so much to say. Grief does that sometimes. It takes the words from the person who has carried the story the longest.

But the sun came out that morning just as it has today in London.

Children’s voices drifted in from a nearby school as we walked towards the burial site.

He would have loved that.

He loved children. He played with me constantly when I was little. He adored his grandchildren, all four of them, and they adored him right back.

He had a child’s soul himself in a way of taking life lightly, of believing no problem was ever big enough to darken everything else.

Even at rock bottom, he made you feel things would sort themselves out.

Think positive, he would say.

Spring in London

I catch myself hearing that in my head now whenever the sky finally clears after days of grey, or when the first signs of spring begin to appear along the streets of London.

That’s what I miss most.
Someone who made you feel secure.
Safe.
Light.

January has been difficult again this year. The loss of my mother-in-law, the loss of a dear friend, and endless grey skies that refused to lift. A month meant to mark beginnings quietly became something I wanted to erase from the calendar.

And yet this morning, five years later, the sun came out again.

Spring flowers are beginning to open along the streets of London. The first magnolias have appeared in Kensington, those pearled buds that always seem too delicate to endure this city’s cold air, and yet they return, year after year.

It feels significant.

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Maybe March will feel more like the new year this time.

Maybe moving forward doesn’t mean leaving anything behind.
Maybe it means allowing light to sit beside what we carry, grief and gratitude, side by side.

A walk.
A longer afternoon.
A warmer day than expected.

Because after all the dark winters, spring always remembers how to return.
And five years later, under this same London sun, it feels like a small permission to begin again.

If this felt familiar in any way, you can share it with someone who might need a little light this week.

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London has held many chapters for me over the years.

If you’re new here, you might also like:

• This is not the 52nd birthday letter I planned to write
A walk through Hyde Park, motherhood, and remembering a friend who’s gone.

• How to Capture the Magic: iPhone Photography & Reels in London
Creator tools

• When everything changed. The story behind the walks
On seasonal rituals, memory, and the comfort of returning to familiar paths.