I know we’re in the second week of August now and I should have posted this sooner, but it’s amazing how quickly the first week has passed me by. Like really quickly.

In July, I read four whole books and even I’m surprised by that, because for the last few years, I’ve been struggling to read more than 1 book a month.

So let’s have a look at what I finished off in July.

Workhorse

I’ve already written a review of Workhorse by Caroline Palmer so here are a few quick things to note about the book:

• 500+ pages

• Set in NYC

• Ambitious, yet unlikeable female main character but you’ll want to root for her.

• Features the high-octane environment of the fashion industry

• The Devil Wears Prada meets The Talented Mr Ripley (without the murderous intent)

• The struggle of a striver caught in a world of nepotism where only the elite reach the top.

Rating: 4/5

Off the top of my head…

I enjoyed Workhorse immensely for its witty, dark and satirical narrative. It’s a book I savoured in spite of the unlikeable main character that I inexplicably found myself rooting for. Great story, but the book loses a star for being too long — 500 pages is way too much for a work of fiction that could have easily lost 50-100 pages. The ending, while gratifying, fell a little flat for me. It needed a more exciting build up. Overall, very enjoyable read!

Trad Wife

This one is interesting as it threw me for a loop, so here are the basics:

• Horror story

• You think it’ll start off as a satire, but there’s a twist

• Parallels with Megan Agnew going to visit Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm for an interview

• Career woman meets tradwife narrative

• Features abortion, mental health and child neglect

Rating: 3.5/5

Off the top of my head…

Trad Wife started off well but the writing style felt disjointed and rushed. The character introduction of Jenny Kaplan is based around her own life falling apart as well as her career. With an inflammatory and provocative article gone viral, she’s branded as social media’s feminist, and the manosphere is on her case. But the way this is presented lacks detail which made it hard for me to connect with Jenny and her later character development. Mia, too, is a caricature and overdone and the whole book, while still very interesting, had a general air of caricaturisation more than satirical horror.

The ending is unexpected and Trad Wife ended up being both thriller and horror combined. Worth a read!

Yesteryear

I LOVED Yesteryear. Here’s my lengthy review about it so you don’t have to read more of my fawning about this book. Some deets:

• trad-wife influencer who’s been lying to her followers about all the help behind the scenes wakes up in the era she’s been glamourising online where she has to do the hard work herself.

• Sold over a million copies in 4 months.

• Anne Hathaway plans to turn it into a film.

• A look at a particular subsection within American culture

• VERY unlikeable character but unbelievably great read

• Thought-provoking

Rating: 5/5

Deep Work

A book I’ve been meaning to read for years and comes highly recommended by productivity gurus:

• Self-help for distracted people

• Perfect if you’re looking to improve intellectual capacity, focus and concentration

• Inspiring for writing projects, such as writing a novel or several publications

• Full of tips and tricks on doing more

• Ways to remove distraction

Rating: 3/5

Off the top of my head…

This is the kind of self-help I like to read to help me improve my life. The book is full of research on why we need to engage with deep work sessions, how to get to a deep work state and the benefits for knowledge workers in the corporate world who need to get more out of themselves. But I personally think it’s also great for creatives, including writers, or those who are looking to build a side hustle outside of their normal 9-5. The reason the book loses 2 stars is because it dragged in certain chapters and I felt my attention waning where it felt irrelevant. It need a little more oomph for inspiration. It’s also not a book for every single person — mums with young kids who are already depleted of their brain capacity from sleep deprivation and the general onslaught of motherhood will find absolutely no benefit from this book and will only feel frustrated. But even so, the idea of waking up a little earlier to complete a personal project is something I love the sound of and would love to incorporate a little more into my life at some point.

My favourite(s)

Of the four, I first and foremost enjoyed Yesteryear. A few weeks later, I’m still thinking about the book, its concepts, its absolute genius as a spectator of culture, mindset and communities. But after that, Workhorse has been a fantastic read. Even though the ending wasn’t as brilliant as I would have liked it to be, it’s still one of those books I’ll probably put in my top 10 of 2026 — of course, that’s a maybe, but it’s possible.

What are your thoughts on these? Have you read any of them? If so, what did you think? Let me know.

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This has taken me a long time to write, edit, cut out paragraphs and re-edit because there is SO MUCH to say about it. It’s been nearly two weeks since I finished the book and I still don’t know how to distil my thoughts about one of the most talked about books of 2026.

The story starts off about Natalie and her upbringing by single mother within a church community alongside her sister. We know nothing about her father, except Natalie’s mother likes to keep an air of ambiguity about him with “he’s no longer with us" which leads to people drawing the assumption that he died tragically leaving a widow and two children behind instead of him leaving the family.

When Natalie makes it to Harvard, her world opens up with her interactions with other young women, many of whom are relatively left-wing and liberal in values. It’s also where she meets her dimwitted husband, Caleb, to whom she confesses right away that she’d love to have a family and a farm. What then follows is Natalie turning into a homesteading, homeschooling, farming influencer, who gives off the illusion of doing it all on her own, while hiding all the hired help of nannies, cleaners, farm hands and a production team from her audience of millions.

Then one day, she suddenly wakes up to find herself living the actual tradwife life in the 19th century. The image she’d been putting out online and glamourising to millions has become a reality and it’s an utter nightmare. She realises she wants none of it and would rather escape it completely.

My thoughts

I loved Yesteryear. It was clever with its twist at the end, and completely unexpected, but the build up of Natalie’s life up to this point is explained by an apathy for kindness, something her mother notices, compassion, integrity and honesty. She’s mean-spirited, presumptuous, racist and yet, very confused about what she wants and what she’s trying to achieve. The story is about a complex and brilliantly written character who has been shaped by her experiences and lives in a discomfort that she’s unwilling to address — that she’s tried too hard to fit into a mould that’s not for her and is frustrated with the outcomes of her inauthenticity.

Raised as a sheltered Christian girl, Natalie is incredibly self-righteous, unkind and judgemental in her internal narrative. I found it interesting that she isn’t a Bible basher, which is intentional by the author. Natalie has been purposely written as someone who isn’t theologically deep or knows the Bible inside out. She depicts the religious veneer of American cultural values where there is less theology and a craving for nostalgia without being truly Christian. We’ve probably all met a Natalie at some point — a version of dogmatic religiosity that easily translates across faith groups.

Undoubtedly, this is a bigger conversation around not just influencers and social media and the falsity of their lives, but an analysis of religious narratives that people are expected to swallow without question.

One aspect of the story got me thinking about my own relationship with God, as someone who isn’t Christian, when Natalie’s mother tells her that she views God as an audience, an entity that’s always watching her, so she performs for God. This isn’t a concept that’s unique to Christianity alone, but it raises questions as to the passivity of the role of God in many people’s lives instead of the role being an active one. For Natalie, it’s clear that her connection with God is one of passive observance — someone who watches her to ensure she’s being a ‘good girl’ and doing the right thing at all times, as opposed to her exploring a connection.

The themes of religiosity aren’t fully explored because Natalie herself has a superficial relationship with faith. She follows the rules, performs and puts out the right image, but her internal narrative is one of frustration and conflict where she constantly gaslights herself into thinking that everything is fine, even if she’s told that she stands to lose a lot in the long run.

Which brings me very perfectly to Caleb’s father, Natalie’s father in-law, who is a Trump-esque character — powerfully connected, high up in politics and sitting on masses of wealth — who allows Natalie and Caleb plenty of privilege but he also comes with plenty of strings attached. Natalie continues to agree to things that will overarchingly harm her in the long-run but having been so caught up in her own smug, self-righteous overconfidence, she fails to predict how much she stands to lose by jumping head-first into marriage with Caleb, and it’s too late by the time she’s figured out what she’s losing.

The one thing I haven’t seen anyone say about Yesteryear is that it’s entirely and completely a story rooted in cognitive dissonance and performance. Natalie’s discomfort with who she really is and what she does completely clash with each other. She’s clearly uncomfortable and inauthentic to herself and that comes through every time she finds herself apologising to God for her unkind thoughts.

The book is a narrative on the lengths people will go to to lie to themselves because they’re so committed to putting out a particular image. Including to their own children. But she doesn’t realise her kids pick up on everything and thus react accordingly. Yesteryear is about what happens when people lead a life of performance for an audience.

There’s also an interesting discussion to be had on the unappealing choices available to women between being corporate boss-babes forced to choose career or kids vs homesteading and leading a traditional life as an obedient housewife, which is exactly the dichotomy we see playing out on the internet. Personally, I find the whole discussion stupid because it’s so reductive.

In Natalie’s head, there’s no middle ground and she self-righteously looks down on the women at Harvard who choose the careers, but this hubris comes back to bite her when she becomes a paid influencer trad-wife which is a career of its own that requires her to split her time between her business and her children — something she acknowledges when she accrues millions of followers and feels like she’s caught between difficult choices.

So here’s the real question? Who is Yesteryear really about? Is it, dare i say it, about Hannah Neeleman and Ballerina Farm? I could say yes, just for kicks and clickbait, but for the sake of honesty and being true to myself, it really isn’t. Ballerina Farm is a bona fide business that’s internationally known and recommended by other farming businesses so, unlike Natalie and Caleb, they actually do know what they’re doing. They’re also transparent to their followers about the help they have at home and on the farm. Other than the several children, the farm and the Christian values, the similarities end there. To me, it was less about Ballerina Farm and more about the overall unveiling of the unsavoury world of trad-wife influencers — from the mindset to the finances, from the postpartum depression to the child neglect, Yesteryear nails every single detail in a clever, subtle way to bring about a story we all hate but couldn’t put down.

As a book, it reads well, and it maintains the suspense before the twist is revealed, and the ending made perfect sense to me with a blast from the past. My only criticism is that it seemed to dance around some of the important issues with the politics. The chapters set in the past dragged a bit and weren’t my favourite until the very end.

My actual verdict? This is one to read simply for the analysis of performative religiosity, hidden identity and poor decision making. It raises questions about how we perceive God watching us, how our upbringing creates subliminal messaging and the fact that living a life of performance and inauthenticity can only take you so far. In fact, the message with Yesteryear here is women need to know themselves better, be true to themselves and unlearn the messaging they’ve been raised with. And also, being a pick-me mean girl never works out well for anyone in the long run.

Yesteryear is not entirely a parody or satire of tradwife accounts, even if we wanted it to be. It’s a story of performance, frustration, being inauthentic and cognitive dissonance, and how they culminate in drastic consequences when these things are left unaddressed.

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I’m stepping away from the personal essays and bookshop recommendations to bring some reviews and reading updates to my Substack.

Reading this year has been rather sporadic and I hate to say it, I haven’t enjoyed all the books I’ve read. It’s felt like a drag, so when July began, I resolved to not let my reading continue in this way. I recently finished an absolute corker you’ll want to read.

So…let’s get started with talking about Workhorse, shall we?

The Review

Never judge a book by its cover, they always say. In the case of Workhorse, you can’t help but judge it solely by its cover. It’s beautiful, bold and absolutely striking with its colours and garishly blue eye-shadowed illustration of the story’s protagonist and FMC, Clo, who aspires to greatness at a prestigious fashion magazine in New York in the post-9/11 era — an era where it was a huge privilege to have a magazine byline in print before magazines became an entirely digital presence. Immediately, this gave me The Devil Wears Prada vibes.

Except in this case, the devil is Clo, who is a liar, a thief and a bit of a grifter desperate to climb the ranks to Anna Wintour levels of greatness and all that comes with it in the NYC fashion magazine world. Of course, she isn’t the only grifter in all of this because along comes Harry who seems to have the same humble background and ambitions as Clo, but his relationship with her is always teetering between trust and betrayal leading to a constant paranoia that culminates in lost friendships, realisations and revenge.

The funny thing is that it’s hard to hate Clo. She makes horrendous decisions, seems to have zero morality and is frighteningly remorseless when her worst side comes out. But it is expected that for one to work in such a cutthroat industry, one must have a lack of regard and apathy for morals. And that’s why I felt I couldn’t hate her. She’s surrounded by people who are willing to do worse to reach the heights of Manhattan’s elite social scene and she has to do what she must to survive, unless she makes a decision to leave altogether.

Yet Clo is a horrible misogynist. Her attitudes towards mothers, older women, women and their relationship with food, are arguably a product of her time in which women are mere objects and pitted against each other, and in those moments, Clo is even more of an unlikeable main character. I’m all for unlikeable characters, but the misogyny only serves to show how shallow she is, which left me questioning rooting for her in the first place. The cognitive dissonance as a reader is very, very real.

Clo is a workhorse surrounded by showhorses. I love this term — it needs to become part of our everyday vernacular to describe being less privileged working next to the elite of the society. While Clo is of middle-class breeding, didn’t want for anything and went to a good university, her lack of connections to the upper echelons of society is the source of her desperate social climbing in the book.

Showhorses are part of a pedigree that’s unmatched and a birthright — old-money family reputation, elite private schools, Ivy league colleges, contacts in industry, generational wealth, a graduate job that’s guaranteed to lead them up into fast-tracked positions of leadership because the industry demands their family’s connection. We all know this story very well.

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Clo’s only way to attain that much-coveted greatness and status is through proximity and friendships. Her obsession with daughter of famous actress, Davis Lawrence, is dangerously unhealthy while her friendship with Harry opens up more questions for her than the answers she wants from him.

While Clo is the main character of Workhorse, this novel doesn’t work without the backdrop of New York and its intimidating reputation of the city where people ‘make it’. The glamour, the bars and restaurants, the locations and the entire big city, Big Apple, success-grabbing atmosphere is the overarching theme that sits quietly behind the story moulding it into the wickedly dark narrative of the striver who wants it all and will do anything to get it.

In a city where there’s so much to gain, Clo climbs higher not realising that the fall is far greater with the risks she takes, and as she crawls deeper into the rabbit-hole of the rich, she finds it’s much harder to get out.

Like with The Talented Mr Ripley, you bizarrely find yourself wanting Clo to get out and get away with her crimes because the people around her are so insufferable, superficial and absolutely horrifying in their truest forms.

However, unlike The Talented Mr Ripley, Workhorse isn’t a psychological thriller. The climax and the revenge aren’t as exciting as the well-deserved outrage she receives at the life-threatening mistake she makes as a result of her obsessive paranoia and drunkenness. In that moment, I was mentally punching the air and not rooting for Clo at all. I was, however, perplexed that Clo could have been trusted in the first place and was equally frustrated. But the story plays out and just as Clo faces isolation, she seeks to also isolate. After all, that’s the price she has to pay for greatness, or to at least remove herself from a risky situation.

The end fell flat, in spite of everything. Workhorse is a fun read, but at around 500 pages, it’s a LOT of work. To find that the ending was quietly done feels like a diminished reward for the reader. The author, Caroline Palmer, is a former Vogue staffer so Workhorse reads almost like a memoir clothed in the fictionalisation of average, yet ambitious women that Palmer herself must have witnessed firsthand.

But there’s something about her having worked in the fashion magazine world that’s incredibly fascinating. I love an insider’s story and even if it’s exaggerated, I’m certain that grifting personalities like Clo will have existed, and still do in 2026.

So if you’re wondering whether it’s worth picking up Workhorse, I’m going to say absolutely yes. This is a hefty book compared to the average novel, but it’s so rich in detail and displays the highly-strung culture of New York fashion magazines that I think it would be a hard one to DNF and stop thinking about. I didn’t like Clo at all and yet, I wanted her to have everything. And it is precisely for those feelings of conflict that make Workhorse an impactful story worth reading.

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The B-Roll

The Library Raised Me

It was a weekly ritual in my home to go to our local high street, do the weekly groceries and pop into the library so I could get my stack of books to bring home to read. Bookshops didn’t exist in the area. In fact, they still don’t to this day, but the library remains…

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3 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Bushra Wasty

I’ve never felt the need to confess anything. But I have to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a while. It’s partly why it’s been a few weeks since I’ve written anything on here.

The Confession: I love reading but I struggle to read.

I mean that I struggle to sit down and focus on a book, or I read it very halfheartedly and with little commitment and effort. I don’t feel like reading most of the time but equally, it’s the one thing I gravitate towards most often, more than fitness, than anything else.

This sounds bizarre because reading is supposed to be leisurely and pleasurable and anyway, why would I need to even commit to a book when it’s just a book? And why should I gravitate towards something even if I don’t feel like doing it? It feels like I’m living in a cognitive dissonance.

Overthinking reading has led to a very dissatisfying reading experience which is the precise opposite of what I wanted to get out of reading in the first place.

But with a huge TBR and an even greater feeling of desperation that time is running out each day, I’ve realised I need to make myself speed up and focus even if I struggle to focus and it takes effort to do so.

For example, it’s taken me all of June to read Workhorse by Caroline Palmer which, by the way, is a BIG one to read at over 500 pages. It’s been a tough one for my wrists, but I’m happy to say that I finished it before the month was up by reading 123 pages on the last day. Something I didn’t think I could ever do before.

Reading with a huge TBR feels like a game of catch-up, where you’re always trying to stay on top of your reading lest you fall behind. Of course reading is enjoyable and we should all be reading leisurely for pleasure, but when life is hectic and there’s so many pressures on our time, all the time, sometimes reading doesn’t happen at all.

I wasn’t happy when I saw that not reading was happening way too often, sometimes weeks at a time. Having already been someone who lost 12 years of their adult life to not reading anymore, I wasn’t prepared to make this a permanent fixture again. Even if I want to read, wanting to read wasn’t enough.

A lack of time, a mountain of housework and other responsibilities all put together mean I have to work with whatever time I have left. Sometimes that means waking up earlier to read a few chapters, squeezing it in before bed or ignore everything around me for an hour and just reading very, very determinedly. VERY determinedly.

I’ve even downloaded apps to time and track my reading; I love seeing the numbers and geeking out over the reading statistics. It keeps me motivated. But they’re not enough.

I wasn’t like this in the past. It was a natural instinct to read. I’d read when I ate, while I brushed my hair, while I was waiting for dinner and even while walking around the house, which annoyed my sister whenever I’d bump into her.

My own standards of being a reader—for myself in particular and no-one else—have been set from my childhood habits where inhaling a book was like breathing. That was the yardstick I kept using, and still measure myself against. Comparing myself now to who I was 30 year ago probably isn’t helpful given that back then, I was a 9 year old with zero responsibilities and plenty of time. I was doing exactly what I was meant to be doing.

So imagine the shock I felt, that after 25 years, that approach to reading no longer exists within me and I have to retrain myself to get back into that frame of mind and build it as…ugh, a habit.

You see, I feel disgust because it was so deeply ingrained in me to read books that even thinking of it as a habit makes me want to throw up a little. It’s part of my identity; it should be effortless and I shouldn’t have to think about it. Why, oh why am I even overthinking reading a book in the first place?

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It’s recently dawned on me, as I turn 40 this year, that everything I want for myself in my life henceforth is going to take effort, discipline and motivation.

After 13 years of lifting weights, my left knee has decided it’s time for it to start giving me trouble. This knee was the very reason I began working out and looking after it when I was 19, eventually choosing to strengthen the muscles around it from 27 years old when I had my first child. But it seems that it needs even more consistent attention.

So now, after every gym session, I spend 10 minutes doing knee mobility exercises and walking backwards on the treadmill. If I want to continue lifting, I’ll have to make an effort to look after this knee.

It’s the same with reading. Where I previously found reading easy, effortless, an instinct I believed I was born with, I’ve realised that I have to work pretty hard to focus and force myself to read a chunk of a book. If I don’t do it this way, it’s very easy for me to let the other, more pressing concerns of my life take over the time needed to read and so I’ll be back in the 12-Years-Of-No-Reading phase. Without reading, I feel anxious.

Whenever I talk about this anywhere online, there’s always that one person who says that that’s not how reading should be done where I have to force my focus or that the book just isn’t that interesting if it requires that much effort. But if I don’t make myself read, the alternative is much worse — not reading at all.

Sometimes in order to make something we want happen and to make a behaviour stick, we have to do it even if we don’t feel like doing it.

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I have been absolutely ecstatically, over-the-moon happy that I received an ARC of Zoulfa Katouh’s The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue. Highly anticipated as a lover of her debut novel, As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow, I wanted to make sure I read the book and wrote a full review while it’s all still in my head.

Synopsis

The story is about a Syrian American teenaged girl called Jihad, a senior student at high school in New York. Living in Queens, Jihad is simply one of the many among its diverse community and a part of the tapestry of New York’s multiculturalism.

Just about managing to cope with her mother’s death from the year before, a newly married sister who is no longer as around as much as she used to be and a father who’s still grieving, Jihad is lonely and struggling. The loss of her mother is a loss of the equilibrium that kept her grounded. And of course it’s a deeper loss of care, love and protection. She feels lost and she needs her mother, who she sadly lost to cancer.

Jihad’s passion and talent for art is her coping mechanism and she dreams of going to an elite college for art — one where it can flourish and she can build a new life.

Her father wants the best for her and enrols her in a Manhattan private school, one that her old friend Alexis also attends. Unsure, but glad to be reunited with Alexis, Jihad joins her new school with very eventful consequences.

What follows is a horrible experience of discrimination, Islamophobia, prejudice and physical bullying. Jihad is alienated, faces total humiliation and becomes a social pariah with no one to turn to. In the midst of the misery, Jamie becomes a friend who’s sincere and a breath of fresh air.

Still, Jihad undergoes a difficult time, one that no one should ever have to endure and, with an indifferent principal unwilling to do anything about it all, she turns to an old sketchbook belonging to her great-aunt from Syria that allows her to tell her mother’s story to all of New York, with climactic consequences.

As her name suggests, Jihad is struggling — with the situation and with the truth of her family’s realities — and the strength she needs to overcome this part of her life has to come from within.

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What I Thought

I was really excited to read The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue especially after having read As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow, because hello, have you SEEN this cover? It’s gorgeous. The story is engrossing from the first sentence pulling me in as Jihad goes from public to private school, dealing with the emotional struggle of not having her mother around and an absent father.

The writing is impeccably Katouh as usual. Easy to read, flows well, beautiful description, hard to tear my eyes away. It’s become my baseline for good writing. It’s not clunky and awkward, and lacks friction. If I wasn’t so challenged with my attention span, I’d have finished this in less than a week.

Tackling Islamophobia, racism, prejudice, sexual harassment, Katouh brings a fresh approach to talk about these topics while also showing us that, quite unfortunately, things still haven’t improved in 2026. Each character is portrayed with razor-sharp definition with every one of them playing a part in Jihad’s character development and a fast-developing plot line.

Whether it’s Alexis, who turns out to be the opposite of what Jihad thought she was, or Mason, Adrian and Nicole, or Jamie being supportive, each character plays its part in the plot. Wearing hijab and with a name like Jihad, she’s already anxious carrying the weight of being visibly Muslim and standing out like a sore thumb among the highly privileged and narrow-minded students all the while still dealing with the grief of her mother and the change of school.

Her misery and teenage mood is deliberately misinterpreted by her antagonists to bolster the bullying and campaign of hate against her.

I was initially unsure of Jamie because I wasn’t sure of the direction of his character arc and what kind of part he’d play in Jihad’s life. Being the heartthrob of the school, his constant presence to support Jihad results in resentment from other girls, further alienating her. The way in which she faces their ire and brutal games felt realistic — the cattiness, the mind games and the isolation as punishment. It’s all very Mean Girls but if Cady was visibly Muslim and didn’t become a Plastic. What makes it worse is the betrayal towards Jihad from those she trusts and how she didn’t see it, including the passive aggression, until it was directly in front of her. It’s a direct result of Jihad always making herself smaller, accommodating and never facing the reality that her friend wasn’t the friend she needed.

Many will relate to this situation, myself included, where in order to be more accepting of our differences, we diminish ourselves to make others more comfortable with our being. What we don’t realise is that we lose parts of ourselves along the way the more we do this, stripping away the authenticity that makes us who we are as a whole.

Zoulfa Katouh does this incredibly well.

Further Thoughts…

I don’t think I have a particularly favourite character, but in all honesty, i really didn’t like Jihad’s sister for not checking in on her in person enough. It still hadn’t been too long since their mother’s death and even though she’s a newlywed, her support for her sister is paltry and quite honestly, very lame.

However, as the story continues, it becomes apparent that her lack of support allows Jihad to process her feelings and address the realities of her family and the loss of her mother. And of course, there is a plot twist, although I admit that the impact of it was less than that of As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow.

What I struggled with was addressing the magical element of the story, because I read it as solely realistic literary fiction, so if you do plan to pick it up, the fantastical aspect is a key part of Jihad’s artwork.

The Bottom Line

The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue had me gripped and kept me reading to the very last word. While it’s not the 5 star book as its predecessor, it has all the ingredients that brings together a story for a mainly YA audience — but it’s brilliant, astute, and exceptionally clever. With so many different aspects to the story, such as friendship, identity, family, personal ambitions, the book will identify with many readers who are going through their own struggles in life.

This post isn’t paywalled so if you enjoyed it, please leave a comment or share publicly. Thanks so much and see you next time!

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ICYMI: there’s more to read.

It was a weekly ritual in my home to go to our local high street, do the weekly groceries and pop into the library so I could get my stack of books to bring home to read. Bookshops didn’t exist in the area. In fact, they still don’t to this day, but the library remains.

Even if we couldn’t make it to the library on the Saturday, my dad and I would go on Sunday bike rides taking the quietest routes possible and stop at the library along the way to other shops.

It sounds like I grew up in sleepy, affluent suburbia. You’ll be surprised to know that I’m talking about zone 3 of South London, where the city was busy, overwhelming and had people from all backgrounds and social strata living closely together.

But those weekly bike rides to the library were everything for me. Knowing it was now time to move onto the next set of happenings in The Babysitters Club, discovering Caribbean fiction, and catching up with the twins at St. Clare’s shaped my brain. I wanted to read as much as I could and the library delivered in spades.

I come from a family where we had solid, consistent values and one of them was that reading was a must. While my parents weren’t solid readers themselves — they didn’t have time between raising us and working — I cannot be grateful enough to them for encouraging us to read, for making the effort to take all of us to the library, and for never discouraging me even when I’d be holed up in my room reading away.

At secondary school, I was blessed to have a school library that was an actual library complete with an upstairs area (a restricted zone only for sixth formers to study) and a spiral staircase. Downstairs was where I discovered yet another couple of boarding school series’ of books — Harry Potter and Trebizon. While HP is much-talked of, the Trebizon series is lesser known but lives quietly in the minds of young girls of the 90s who wished they could have gone to boarding school and become tennis champions on their way to play at Wimbledon. For a fleeting moment, I imagined myself being raised in an upper middle-class family to have those opportunities and what my life could have been like.

As a South Asian girl from a family of modest means, I knew it would never have happened but at least the library taught me to imagine, to dream and to wonder.

It has been so impactful on my life that our first home purchase was based on proximity to the library. A different one in a completely different city but no less enriching in its experience, and even more child-friendly than the one I grew up with.

Of course, it helps that the park, the shops and the bus stop are all right there as well, and we’re in catchment for great schools, too. But the library just sealed the deal. Just as I’d had a close relationship with the library when I was younger, I wanted the same for my children.

This new library in my life played a different role. They had baby and toddler reading and nursery rhymes twice a week. As a new mother without support, these sessions were an absolute godsend — both for me and my baby — and they held immeasurable value to my early motherhood experience when I had yet another newborn and a toddler to entertain. Postpartum both times and the terrifying toddler phases didn’t feel too bad with the library to pop into as an exciting activity or new books for the kids to explore. It was just as much for me, as it was for them. Without the library in my life, a part of my parenting experience would have been sorely lacking.

Research supports the importance of the role of the library in children’s critical thinking skills, including their inquiry habits and cognitive development. The exposure to a wide variety of literature allows children to read diversely, in all senses of the word, and to find the books they love. It shapes their minds, their thinking patterns, and forms a reading habit that’s hard to extricate. I can attest to the fact that when I stepped away from reading for 12 years from my young adulthood years, I was less disciplined, made less thoughtful decisions, and was emotionally dysregulated, although we may need to account for pregnancy, too.

It wasn’t until I entered a bookshop, aged 32, and remembered that I lived right across from the library, and how could I have forgotten that the library had shaped me? Not because I had spent a lot of time there, but that it fed my thirst for reading, and that much reading fired all the neural connections in my brain to love the Austen classics, have an interest in the Regency era while also understanding the history of the Afro-Caribbean community in South London, as well as American suburban teen girl culture and the privilege of English boarding school students.

The library did more to open my mind than travelling as a tourist has ever done and, coming from a marginalised community, it sharpened my cultural capital and my internal British self-identity as a child of immigrants. I’ve never felt confused straddling two cultures because reading books about the Afro-Caribbean community’s experience taught me I wasn’t alone in my dual culture experience. It only affirmed my Britishness alongside the smatterings of South Asianness.

Wanting that kind of library experience for my children, I made sure that wherever we lived, we were near the library as much as possible. Even when we moved to New Zealand, we explored all the libraries we could find and discovered a fantastic one a 5 minute drive away. Even better, half an hour away was a library on the beach.

Keenly aware of how much the library has given me, our last house move brought us as close as it possibly could to the library. This was unintentional but it adds to my joy knowing that the library is not only raising my kids, but it will also be a haven for me for many years to come. And even though I have my own library full of books, the local community’s library is the one that continues to shape me. Hopefully till I’m old and grey.

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WE ARE IN A HEATWAVE. In May. The British weather dial is broken because it went from 5 degrees last week to 33 degrees this week. I am not coping as I sit here writing in front of the fan on maximum speed in the coolest, least sunny room I can find.

Beyond hydration, reading helps me deal with the heat. It’s perfect, pick up a book, sit in front of a fan and don’t move.

On an ideal heatwave day, that is what I do. So what am I reading right now?

CURRENT READ

With Zoulfa Katouh’s second book coming out in June, finishing off The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue is top priority for me. At the moment, I’ve hit the plot twist of the story and I’m not mad about it. It seems to be Katouh’s trademark move and the twists make her stories memorable. I still haven’t forgotten the twist in As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow, where I felt Sixth Sensed and had to put the book down for a minute or two afterwards.

More to the point, this one is probably going to be more pertinent and relatable to a Western audience where growing Islamophobia is a concern for younger Muslims. It’s going to touch a nerve.

The cover is eye catching which is why I had to take a picture of it alongside my niece’s latest read, Heir by Sabaa Tahir, which has an equally beautiful cover.

BOOKISH B-ROLL THINGS

I’m often jealous of people who can sit and read for hours. I can’t do that myself unless forced to, such as on a train or plane where there really isn’t much else to do. But as someone who spends a lot of time at home, all I see is the tasks that need doing. I spend a lot of time at the gym, including getting my steps in and the treadmill has now become my favourite place to read.

Other than the killing two birds with one stone thing, it’s also mentally soothing to let my body move while my mind relaxes. The mundaneness of walking without a direction allows me to engage in reading a book I’m enjoying allowing me to have a sense of achievement that I’ve nourished both my body and my brain.

It’s my best life hack.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Reading Workhorse had to be paused while I finish off The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue, but I’ll be back to it as soon as I’m done because the story has me in a chokehold. The fashion magazine industry is cutthroat and I love that there’s throwback fiction that almost satirises the ways it worked in the early 2000s.

I try not to get too ambitious with reading but I’d love to finish reading Less by Patrick Grant and move onto The Psychology of Money. It comes highly recommended not just on my feed but also from friends which makes it even more interesting. When friends who know me well recommend a book, then I feel more of a need to read it.

Here’s hoping we won’t have more heatwaves over the course of the summer. I’m partial to a consistent 20-22 degrees as the perfect summer.

Stay cool and keep reading!

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Did Not Finish.

That’s what DNF means. When I first heard the acronym, I was perplexed. Not because I didn’t understand it but I was perplexed that the option was even available. I could just…not finish reading the book because it wasn’t working for me. I didn’t even think that was allowed. Apparently I, the grown adult, needed to have another adultier adult tell me it’s okay to put a book down that’s not working for me, mark it as DNF and forget about it.

In spite of this, I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. The book isn’t unputdownable, but I’m unable to put it down for some inane reason. It took me a while, a few discussions online and lots of commentary around this on social media to understand that it’s perfectly normal to DNF and that these were rules I’d made up for myself.

I’ve always enjoyed reading, so I thought every book would hit the mark for me. As I became an adult with tastes and expectations, I soon realised that that was absolutely not the case. Time is precious and not every book was going to be for me. Romantasy and fantasy getting a major side-eye from me right now.

It wasn’t the money I’d spent on the books, or the fear that I’d miss something important. High achievers unite, it’s the sense of failure around not completing a book. If I didn’t finish a book, I was a failure. But the problem moves beyond that.

If I can’t finish one book, it means I can’t finish ALL books, and I’ll never finish a book again, and therefore, I can’t read or be a reader.

Irrational though it may be, that’s my thought process. Fail to read one, fail to read them all. Confidence lost in reading, confidence lost in myself, and I fast forward to anxiety and living in guilt. That thought process is widely applied to everything in my life. No pressure there, then.

Even though I can see what the problem is, I still don’t know how to work through it. The fact that this isn’t just a problem with reading but an underlying issue with every area of my life means that I’m working really HARD on myself to overcome it. It’s a slow and painstaking process that takes a lot of introspection. Being completely honest here but it has, on occasion, left me in tears because getting unstuck from one’s own toxicity and limiting inner critic means addressing your flaws and the ridiculous stories you told yourself in the past that have always held you back from great opportunities. And I don’t think it’s going to resolve itself anytime soon.

So the fact that I have to try DNFing without guilt is a problem for me. But equally, it’s an even bigger problem to keep trying to read a book that I’m not enjoying.

For some readers, the issue lies around the money spent on a book (although this is less of a problem if it’s a library book!), or the guilt that a friend recommended the book but it turns out to be a 1 star read. And also how do you tell a friend that you hated a book they loved? Between these simpler internal conflicts and my identity issues lies a spectrum of reasons why people don’t DNF books.

But the one thing that rings true with all of us non-DNFers is that we’re desperate to enjoy the book. We so want to love the book and have a good time with it that the disappointment we feel is directed towards ourselves. We lay the blame with our reader identity not being ‘enough of a reader’ to immerse ourselves into the book instead of questioning whether the book was meant to be for us at this moment in time, or even at all.

Take fantasy and romantasy, as an example. There’s a reason why I side-eyed it earlier.

I don’t read the genre. Barring a handful — Holly Black’s Folk of the Air made it through the gate — I don’t enjoy it at all. I’m not interested in the investment world-building requires, the slow start, the difficult names, the complexity of the lore, the maps, the faes and the innumerable overlapping relationships. It’s too much for all the tabs I have open in my brain managing everyday life, let alone a convoluted storyline that’s 12 books long.

I need relatable, human stories that I can connect with and escape to because, apart from A Little Life, human stories don’t ask too much from me. Humans are easy reads. Faes are not.

Before you think I’m hating, I’m not. I’m not anti-fantasy, fantasy isn’t the headspace I’m in ever, so I never pick it up. But also, because it’s an affront to my reader identity to DNF a book, I never bother dabbling with the books in that genre. I just know the DNF pile will be the size of the Eiffel Tower.

A lot of DNFing is about knowing yourself. Having self-awareness of your limits around reading and expectations of what a book can give you overcomes the guilt of DNFing. If a book isn’t working for you, fine. You tried, it didn’t work for you. Trial and error will get you there.

Surprisingly, DNFing is self-preservation of our deep-seated reading habits. We’re trying to protect our reading from becoming superficial and mindless, but our need for perfectionism holds us back.

But this self-preservation is necessary to maintain lifelong reading. Time is limited and if we read books we don’t enjoy or force ourselves to finish books that aren’t delivering value, we lose meaning to our reading.

DNFing is about intentional reading. Some books are right for us at a certain point in time, so we finish them. Other books are right for us at a later point in our lives, so maybe we can park them for when we’re ready again. And we have to accept that some books will never be for us to read at all, so it’s okay to let them go.

I find we don’t trust our instincts enough to do the latter and we really need to do that more, but because there’s stigma attached to DNFing books from the book snobs, we trust the book snobs’ voices in our heads instead of our own. Letting go of a book lets go of these voices too.

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So how do we let go of our hang ups around DNFing and get more comfortable with it?

Some practical steps

• The 100-150 page rule

  • If it hasn’t held your interest by the 100-150 page mark, then it’s time to re-evaluate if you want to give the book more of your time. This is dependent on the length of the book. If it’s a 300 page book, 100 pages is a third of the book and is more than enough to figure out if you want to invest more time. If it’s a longer book, 150 pages will give you a better idea. Basically, let the book earn you, not the other way around.

• Park it

  • I mentioned earlier that it’s okay to park a book — sometimes the book is good enough, but you’re not feeling it, yet you don’t want to DNF it. Keep it but leave it on the bookshelves to read later. If this happens often, keep a list of books you’ve parked and write down why for each book. You’ll want to come back to them later. Knowing which ones are parked and your reasons for parking them will help you decide if you want to continue reading, or DNF.

• Spread out the reading

  • Between parking the book for months (or years!) and pressing ahead without enjoyment or motivation, there’s the nuance of spreading the reading out. Maybe don’t try to finish the book in one go, finish it by reading a few chapters a week. Not all books need to be inhaled in 2 days. Some are slow burns and need to be digested in small chunks.

• Journal about it

  • If you’re not getting on with a book, but you’re not ready to DNF, journal about it. Write down the headspace you’re in, what’s been going on with you, if you’re feeling stressed and how the book is making you feel. What mood are you in? You’d be surprised how much our mood, and our headspace affects us reading a book. It’s also very possible that a book is more challenging than we thought, and may need another level of reading energy instead of it being a naturally easy read. Addressing all of this goes a long way towards attaining clarity while removing the guilt around DNFing. Which is exactly what we want.

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While DNFing books is a great way to find our reading tastes and hone in on them, the glaring risk that’s also an underlying fear with us readers-who-don’t-want-to-let-go is that we’ll DNF every book or too often. This is an irrational fear. Learn to trust yourself.

Someone who loves to read won’t do this. With AI now being thrown in the mix of published books on top of an already high volume of books being churned out, literature quality has dropped drastically. It’ll come as no surprise that DNFing will happen more often than we’d like as we become more discerning with our reading. It actually has very little to do with us at this point.

When we view DNFing as a way to sift through poorly written books, you’ll also become a more critical thinker and even more likely to find books you didn’t think you’d love. You’re putting down the undeserving books and investing less time in them, which allows you to find more pleasurable books. The irony of DNFing, when done right, is that it exposes us to more literature than struggling through books we don’t enjoy.

The more you put down, the more you pick up.

If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated!

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One of my best birthdays to date has been landing in New York to visit my sister who had an entire celebration ready, after which we celebrated her birthday 2 days later before heading off for a few days in Manhattan. That trip was truly memorable for many reasons. Beyond the fact that I got to visit my sister, the cup-filling feeling was simply that New York left me so dazzled, and I still dream about going back.

From my first look at the Manhattan skyline with its Art Deco glamour to walking down Fifth Avenue passing the Bergdorf Goodman building towards Central Park, grabbing a GIANT bagel from Liberty Bagels, then queuing up for a platter from Adels and cakes from Magnolia Bakery that we later ate at Bryant Park with the Chrysler Building lit up by the moonlight behind it to visiting the New York Public Library and seeing the view of the Statue of Liberty from the Staten Island Ferry, New York is an absolute VIBE and it has some kind of effect on people.

The only other city that makes me feel this way is Sydney.

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Having grown up in London, my view of New York is that it’s just London’s younger, less uptight and more flamboyant sister who is still in awe of her older sister who did everything first. After all, the iconic Strand bookshop is named after the historic street in London’s West End.

The city that never sleeps, the Big Apple — there’s a reason it’s so loved and I love, love, LOVED how it made me feel.

Whenever I visit a place on holiday, I find myself picking up books to read about it afterwards to immerse myself again and revive the memories before I forget about them. Reading books about a city through the voices of other characters also shows me a side that I might have missed, so I make a mental note to visit a place or try out a restaurant mentioned in the book.

I’ve been doing that a lot recently after my visit to New York. This month, I have the pleasure of reading two books set in the city. I can’t visit NYC often to meet its residents and really get to know its bones. So the next best way that I prefer to learn about the Big Apple is through reading.

So let’s talk about what I’m reading this month.

The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue by Zoulfa Katouh

I try not to take it for granted when I receive an advance copy of a book. ARCs are a huge privilege and I do my best to do the books justice when I read them. I’m careful which ARCs I want to receive. Sometimes I say no.

But was I going to say no to receiving Zoulfa Katouh’s second book? Hell, no. Receiving that email was THE golden ticket for me. When I read As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow, Katouh had me in tears, so being able to receive an ARC of The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue is a privilege beyond anything I could have imagined.

The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue has very little of the New York I visited between its pages, but the story is told through the eyes of a Syrian-American New Yorker, which is a unique experience in and of itself. It speaks of a New Yorker that exists now, and a reality we don’t often hear about.

Teenage girl, Jihad, dreams of studying art at a renowned university but is struggling through the grief of her mother’s death. With her dad keeping his pain to himself, he tells her that in order to achieve her dreams, she needs to attend a private school. Reluctant to do so, she makes the switch, but faces huge hurdles. Being visibly Muslim wearing hijab and having a name like Jihad in a school that isn’t used to students like herself leaves many students suspicious and unwilling to befriend her leaving Jihad alienated.

Turning to the one thing she knows best, she finds refuge in a sketchbook to draw the memories of her mother. As she channels her grief and pain with illustrations of the stories her mother told her about Syria, the world begins to take notice and Jihad is faced with making difficult decisions about her future.

I’m only 100 pages in and the writing is masterful. It’s PURE chef’s kiss as it was with As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow.

The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue is due to be released on 2nd June 2026. Full review to come soon.

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Workhorse by Caroline Palmer

This one caught my eye in Waterstones on the weekend. The blurb said New York. A fashion magazine in New York, to be precise. My interest was piqued. With The Devil Wears Prada 2 already out this month, reading Workhorse feels right on the mark.

The fashion magazine world is fascinating with ambition and envy at the heart of an elite institution. Speaking of elite, New York fashion is THE place to be, and Workhorse is a fascinating novel set at the turn of the millennium in a post 9/11 world. There’s mentions of all the usual landmarks, but other than its NYC setting, the attraction is to the era it’s set in.

Caroline Palmer is a former Vogue staffer writing about the fashion magazine world in the years just before the digital revolution led consumers online towards instant fashion trends instead of monthly trends in magazines. She knows her stuff and I need to know more.

Nonetheless, there is no fashion without New York and, like Gossip Girl, it’s an unspoken character without whom the story wouldn’t be THE story.

Clodagh, or Clo, is an editorial assistant at the world’s most prestigious fashion magazine. She’s in a highly coveted position that most girls would die for but covets much, much more. Unfortunately, in a world obsessed with looks, status and beauty, she holds the wrong kind of pedigree. She is a ‘workhorse’ — middle-class and suburban, but not quite elite enough, while the other editorial assistants, Davis with whom she’s particularly obsessed, are ‘showhorses’ — privately schooled, Ivy-league educated, trust fund babies, well-connected and extremely, yet frustratingly effortlessly beautiful. We all know the type.

Clo aspires to rise through the ranks and will take all the dangerous risks and overcome boundaries to achieve her ambitions.

This is a big one for me, at 500 pages, and at just under 100 pages of reading this, I’m already loving it for its cleverly wicked wit and dark humour. The interesting part is the nostalgia the book evokes for me. In 2001, I was only 14-15 years old. Reading this reminds me how easily I’ve forgotten how differently the world worked back then. And I can’t stop thinking about all the disappointments future fashion magazine editorial assistants were going to face in their career in the coming years.

I haven’t finished either of these books, so I can’t offer a full recommendation, but on first impression, the writing by both authors has me hooked in. If either books pique your interest or, like me, you want to be reminded of New York, you’ll find an enjoyable read among them. Let me know if you plan to read either book!

If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated!

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ICYMI, but there’s more…

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The internet will fool you into thinking that if you don’t own a bookshelf full of books, you’re not a true reader. I’m not sure where this thinking came from, but it’s relatively new. I tend to blame pretty much anything and everything on social media algorithms mainly because, prior to all this, we were reading books, not making a show of our bookshelves for the world to see.

I love seeing the bookshelves though. There’s something wonderful about the joy that a wall full of books bring to people’s lives. Whether or not they’re reading all of those books is none of my business. I know that many people tend to make it their business, and I make it my business to tell them to butt out.

However, we all have the inevitable tendency to see these beautiful pictures and videos and want that for ourselves. Let me just hold your hand when I tell you this: this is not the life you’re meant to have. Not yet. Maybe not at all.

The sooner we all come to terms with this, the sooner we can all move on and get cracking with the books we already have that are sitting unread. Does it sound hypocritical coming from me, the person who actually has a wall full of books? Yes. But in my defence, the house came with the bookshelves and I wasn’t going to fill them up with inane tat like fake books and a frame from The Range when I can store my actual books. My second defence is that I’ve been building up my collection over the course of 7 years, and so many of them are from the days when my bookstagram was taking off and I received a lot of ARCs from publishers. It’s a collection over time, not immediate.

I can talk about the trap of buying too many books without reading with incredible clarity because I was that person. I was buying those books as a form of consumption and not because of tsundoku: the hobby of collecting books. Finding the differentiation between the two things took a great deal of introspection. I had to sit with my feelings which, honestly, wasn’t fun or an easy thing to do, but in order to know myself better I had to do it. I asked myself if collecting books was making me happy.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No because I soon realised it was giving me anxiety to have so many books in the house and not read them. I needed to cull or read. So here I am talking about the trap of buying too many books instead of reading them.

We’ve all been subliminally conditioned by social media that we MUST have bookshelves spilling over with books. The aesthetic girlies say so, the intellectual philosophy bros say so, and so do the 300-books-read-a-year people. Your environment shapes you, so you need to surround yourself with books. But more than that, it’s the hype created around a book that actually drives us to buy books. I, too, am still guilty of this.

The other day, I saw Yesteryear trending on Threads because the premise sounds abso-bloody-lutely fantastic and lo and behold, I found myself at the till in Waterstones buying the book. I mean, if Anne Hathaway is turning it into a film, who am I to ignore it? This is the kind of twisted mental gymnastics I do to acquire a book I don’t need.

I plan to read it. I think. But will I get around to it soon? I don’t know. It gets worse because I’m married to someone whose entire philosophy around this is completely the opposite. My husband believes in a one-in, one-out process.

Only buy a book once you’ve finished reading the previous one, and make sure you do something about the book you’re done with before you start the new one.

Efficient though it may be, it’s offensive to the books in my mind. But at the core of it, he’s right.

It’s about consumption. Consumption isn’t just consuming an item, because then I wouldn’t be writing about this topic. Reading would be the act of consumption where the purpose of a book is fulfilled. By consumption in the context of books, I mean buying lots of books for the sake of buying it without doing anything with it and that it’s not making us any happier or adding any meaning to our lives. This definition can be applied to other aspects of our spending, too.

But for the sake of this discussion, this has been happening to many of us, mostly subconsciously and mainly because the book community gave us FOMO. It’s not their fault, it’s not ours, it’s the fact that these apps do this to us.

My solution was to delete the apps from my phone. I’m definitely not feeling as much FOMO anymore. If I do buy books, I’m more meaningful with my book buys asking myself the following:

• Why do I want to buy this book?

• Where does this book fit into my life?

• Am I buying it because of FOMO?

• Is the FOMO justified?

• Do I have enough space on my bookshelves?

Yes, I’ve put the books down with this system, and I feel much better for it.

We can be irrational, clutch our pearls and say “how DARE you question buying a book?” But if we truly loved books, we’d read them. Instead we buy them and they sit there, forgotten. Not as books that we’ll get around to one day, but books that our future generations will sit there sifting through soon after we’ve gone, saying “no one needs this many books.”

I don’t buy the tsundoku argument as much anymore because I think we use it as an excuse to buy books and forget about them. I could be wrong, but I reckon I’m mostly right about this.

The one thing we all need to be wary of is that we fall into the hype more easily than we think, buy more books than we need (even if we’re on a budget), and read less than we actually think we do.

As much as I love to support authors and book publishing and love to see book sales soar, I’m equally in support of wanting reading to be a meaningful and memorable experience for everyone instead of it being something we thought we’d do if we just bought lots of books.

If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated!

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Here’s a few you might like…

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Hey guys, I always love sharing bits about my life and having a chinwag. The B-Roll Scroll is the perfect way to do that. Whether it’s the latest show, a podcast recommendation, books (naturally!) or an article, I’ll be sharing useful links as well as some of my favourite finds.

Just a note that some of the things I share are affiliate links in this post. So…let’s get cracking!

It’s been quite a blur of a Bank Holiday over here. Normally, we try to take it slow but with a renovation looming next year, we took some time out to drive up to a couple of kitchen showrooms in Yorkshire to get some early research done.

The rest of the weekend was spent catching up on building an office chair, a wishing well planter that I bought on a whim from Morrisons that ended up having a few too many parts, spending time together as a family at the gym and a day at the farm with the best food I’ve ever had at a teashop.

But first, I want to share a few things I’ve enjoyed this week and some of them are a few Substack links. Get that cuppa ready and make yourself comfortable!

Scrolling The B-Roll

• The Lyss Method has given me a tonne of inspiration on hybrid training and getting strong as a woman who isn’t that far away from the complexities of perimenopause. I particularly found this post about perimenopause and metabolism very helpful on Alyssa’s page. It’s a big topic and there’s lots to unpack but it’s good to know that the most important thing we can do to manage our metabolism has a multitude of benefits across the board: strength training.

• I’m trying to make more conscious decisions with my spending and consumption. We don’t have time for everything we want to do so reading about how to buy things that align with us makes me feel grounded. This is especially helpful when it’s paired with solid advice about how to realistically achieve balance on the matter in a world that tries to get us to buy all the time.

• How to manifest what you want in life has been something I’ve only recently got my head around. I wrongly thought it was all mumbo-jumbo, whoo-whoo nonsense until mumfluencer Emily Norris explained it’s to do with visualising your life to make something happen. Another way to look at it is brainwashing yourself into building your dream life — it all makes sense to me!

• The publishing industry is a curious business so I always appreciate insight or a day in the life post that shows us what goes on at the big, well-known publishing houses.

• We all need a bit of a laugh, and this BBC Comedy Short Film about four misfit Muslim girls in a secondary school will give you a good chuckle. It’s cracking me up while I write this!

• I discovered a fabulous podcast that goes through women’s history and what they got up to over time. Her Half of History talks about the first woman with a university degree, the first female novelist, female playwright and so on. There’s lots to dig through and I’m just getting started.

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Some extras…

• Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the internet is absolutely AWASH with Michael, the biopic about Michael Jackson’s life. We went to watch it a couple of weeks ago and the millennial kids in myself and my husband came out. He’s more of the Billie Jean era while I’m of the Bad era. The film unlocked a lot of memories for us both. While there’s been intense critique about it, it’s unsurprisingly a box office hit scoring £160m ($217m) in its first weekend globally for a biopic. Jaafar Jackson, MJ’s nephew, has 100% nailed it with his uncle’s every single move. That’s talent in the family right there.

• Another one to watch, this time on Amazon Prime, is Bait, which is produced by Riz Ahmed and features him as the main character, a struggling actor, trying to land the role of James Bond. It’s funny, yet painful and felt like it hit too close to home when viewed through the lens of a South Asian experience. And if, indeed, Riz Ahmed ever does become the next James Bond in our world, I’m going to take it as proof that manifestation truly works.

The Actual B-Roll

what really goes on behind the scenes.

Our trip to the kitchen showrooms was a good one. We first went to the Howdens showroom in the village from where it gets its name situated in the East Riding of Yorkshire, then drove just over half an hour to Pontefract to see the DIY Kitchens showroom.

If you’re trying to decide, visiting both in one day is worth the journey. We came away feeling both informed and confused. Kitchens are so personal to every home and building the right one depends on your lifestyle and how you plan to use your space.

A few that stood out for me.

From there, a trip to Leeds for dinner to the truly epic Fazenda.

I don’t use epic lightly, but this was an experience that’s true to the word. This is not your average Brazilian steakhouse. The concept is based around churrasco cooking that’s served the rodizio way, where the meat is grilled on skewers over coals or an open fire and then it’s carved directly onto the platers by the servers.

Fazenda offers halal options for its full churrasco that comes with a selection of signature Picanha, Sirloin, Fillet and Ribeye, as well as lamb and chicken, that’s carved at your table and directly onto your plate as long as you grab it with your tongs.

It’s a bit dear coming in at £55 per person for the adult price (children are priced separately) but the price is value for money when you add in the smorgasbord of the salad bar, and the wide variety of sides. Drinks are extra, but food is plentiful.

I haven’t been impressed with the current situation with dining out with a lot of restaurants so Fazenda is one of the few that gets a solid approval rating from me for its quality, taste of meats, the fabulous choice at the salad bar, and the service. I think I must have eaten 300g of protein, at least for dinner.

Location: Waterman’s Place, 3 Wharf Approach, Granary Wharf, Leeds, LS1 4GL

It’s hard to find a farm with a farm shop, tea shop as well as one that’s open to the public, but we found one. A few weeks ago, we discovered a cute tea shop nestled away in the villages of Leicestershire.

Stonehurst Farm was thankfully open on Bank Holiday Monday and was pleasantly busy on the day with enough visitors without there being queues or waiting times at the tea shop.

I cannot stress enough as to how delicious the food is here. It’s simple — soups, toasties and jacket potatoes, but it’s tastier than I’ve had anywhere else. Everything is grown on the farm and cooked at their bakery before being served to the public at the tea shop. Jacket potato with cheese and beans is always my go-to lunch but I was immensely jealous of my husband’s celery and stilton soup. The kids chose an egg mayo sandwich and a cheese toastie, both of which were substantial and incredibly yummy.

I can’t fault the teashop, especially when you pair it with a visit to the farm where you can cuddle bunnies and guinea pigs, hold chicks, feed the lamb and go on a pony ride and tractor ride. £32 for a family ticket gets you all that and much more, including the motor museum. Add on a visit to the farm shop for extra large fresh eggs from the hen house.

It’s my go-to for the summer holidays!

Location: Stonehurst Farm, Bond Ln, Mountsorrel, Loughborough LE12 7AA

My favourite Threads

tap on the image to go to the original Threads post

• If you’re looking for independent bookshop suggestions, this is the Thread to click on.

• Hard agree with the reply on this one. Superdrug makes me feel like a throwback from Cosmo magazine. The variety is brilliant, but I feel like I’m being screamed at in emo pink. Maybe I’m too elder millennial for it.

• Some of the replies to this are absolute GOLD.

  

• I’m not big on the music front and this one is SO far from my taste. But it came up on my feed — the choreography is mesmerising. Someone said human kaleidoscope and I agree. Go and check out this piece of art.

  

  If you want to know what I get up to on Threads, tap below.

  Follow me on Threads

  Notes from me

Speak to you next week!

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Welcome to my new series where I discuss my fitness journey alongside reading. You’ll get to see all sides of the journey — the good, the bad, the ugly mistakes and the person it’s helping me become while I share what I’m learning along the way.

Over the past month, my fitness has gone from habit to slightly obsessed. It’s all I think about most days, and this obsession has been intensified by my husband’s suggestion that we move gyms in preference of a place that allows children over 10 on the gym floor, so that we can get our kids into fitness, too.

It’s completely changed everything for me. At the core of it, it’s a health club with all the bells and whistles. But the selling point is that we can take our kids, which makes a huge difference to my training. It means they get to stay active, I can teach them how to train and we spend time together. It also means that I can fit in my training without having to sacrifice too much time away from them.

We can already see that the fitness industry is changing how we view it by its inclusion of the younger generation. You only have to look at Gen Z, who are reportedly the healthiest generation ever. For them, the gym is a place to socialise, not just a place to train, unlike us millennials (and older) who drag ourselves kicking and screaming for squats and burpees. Gen Z treat the gym like previous generations treated a club, but without the drinking, dancing (unless it’s a fitness class) and creeps. Although the gym sometimes has those, too.

Fitness is probably the longest-lasting trend on social media right now, and it’s not about to go away. To be honest, it’s the one trend I can fully get behind. It keeps us in shape, it improves life quality and you can have fun while doing it. Everyone’s a winner.

Even when the fitness industry faced an intense setback during Covid, its recovery was as if the pandemic had never had an impact. The number of gym memberships belonging to people aged 16 years and above has brought the total to 11.5 million in 2025 where previously it was at 8.5 million in 2015.

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From trying everything and the addiction to novelty

I’ve been working out for over a decade, from my late 20s and all throughout my 30s. I can safely say that I’ve tried most fitness trends — BeachBody programmes (they produced Insanity), HIIT, running, mat Pilates, Bodypump, walking, walking with a weighted vest, swimming, bodyweight training, weight training, Reformer Pilates and so on. There was a LOT out there and I wanted to try it all. I’m not done yet either. I have my eye on Hyrox and long-distance running. Maybe even powerlifting. I’m not sure yet.

This pattern of trying out different things has continued for many years, where I was never really sticking to one thing, and with the non-committal thought that “maybe this next workout plan will be the THING I want to do” or “this looks so fun and maybe I’ll stick to it”.

In 2019, I found that weight training and running had been working for me, but when Covid struck, it all fell apart. Without the gym, I wasn’t sure how to lift heavy. Running was sporadic. With the stress of imposed homeschooling alongside keeping my eye on the news and everything else life-related, I couldn’t seem to find the time or motivation.

This pattern of behaviour didn’t really stop. Nothing stuck. I tried walking, running and resistance bands at home to get some movement in but it was pointless. I simply couldn’t bring myself to find a better replacement. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and all I really needed to do was come up with a new strategy to deal with Covid. I try not to think too hard that that was all I needed to do.

Still, I kept trying out new things through different fitness trainers and the home workout apps they were releasing to capitalise on Covid keeping everyone indoors. I was looking for something to give me the same dopamine kick that going to the gym did. Funnily enough, the gym I was at back then is the same gym we’ve just rejoined as a family now. I missed it, as well as my previous life routine and couldn’t get over the fact that I couldn’t go back.

What followed over the next 5 years were 5 house moves, both internationally and locally. Apparently, moving house in and of itself is an upheaval akin to divorce or bereavement. But moving house after 12 years in the area, pulling the kids out of their schools, putting our house up for rent and saying goodbye to longtime friendships all within 6 weeks? I felt broken. And I was heartbroken, too.

Unsurprisingly, I had no fitness goals and zero motivation; with the excitement of a move to New Zealand on my mind, it was survival mode on steroids. I also don’t regret doing the year abroad. It was genuinely wonderful, but it played its part in the pattern of behaviour I was in with my lack of focus.

With an algorithm willing to drive it forward, fitness influencers suddenly became extraordinarily amazing at making all things fitness-related look like the missing piece. Whether it was a new creator with the cleanest aesthetic doing calisthenics, a new workout with high-tech equipment, an app with a new workout routine that looked like it could revolutionise my life, each one had an appeal for why it was bringing the it factor to fitness.

And, like anyone else out there, I was falling right into the trap of fitness novelty. Similar to doomscrolling for the dopamine, I was addicted to novelty, the feeling of something new and fresh and exciting. It had me absolutely hooked. I wanted to keep changing my routine, telling myself I was optimising it but actually, let’s be really brutally honest.

I was looking for the dopamine kick.

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Paralysed by choice and consumption

There’s another element to this. The paralysis of choice. There’s so much choice in the fitness industry, from personal trainers to high protein recipes, to even the kind of approach you want to take with nutrition, that you find yourself wanting to try everything but you can’t stick to anything. It’s overwhelming.

It’s also a kind of decision paralysis that no one really talks about, where you pick something, then second guess yourself because it doesn’t make you feel good or you think you’ve chosen wrong. So you feel like stopping. For me, the decision paralysis didn’t end with the decision to sign up for a new PT programme or a fitness app. I never felt good about making the decision, just anxious, because I knew my pattern of behaviour. I knew I’d never commit and just move onto the next fitness trend. It’s absolutely wild that I was self aware of my habit but unwilling to change it. I think I just didn’t know how.

The paralysis would restart at deciding how to structure my days, whether I had the right conditions for it or the right clothing. I had so much choice at my fingertips but equally, I had decision fatigue before I’d even broken a sweat. In trying to stay fit, I was trying new things but I couldn’t focus. If you’re wondering whether I became fitter as a result of trying new things, I didn’t. With fitness, consistency with one or two activities is what drives results. Changing things up every 2 weeks and not committing was doing nothing for my body, and I was struggling to break this endless loop of signing up for something new while I still had an unused subscription to the previous programme for a month. So not only was my fitness progress suffering, my bank balance was gradually being whittled away by this addiction to novelty.

To be honest, this is consumption culture in a nutshell. Consuming, but not using. A quiet accumulation of things we’re meant to do or meant to use but we never do, and instead we end up even less happy and content than before because not only have we failed to reach our goals, we’ve also spent more money along the way.

Consistency over enjoyment

The advice given by fitness experts is ‘find movement you enjoy’. It’s great advice and works for many people looking for something sustainable and long term. It’s advice often given to beginners to keep them moving. The advice assumes that enjoyment creates a cycle of consistency, but a lot of the time, it’s the other way around. Whether it’s beginners or those (like myself) that are stuck in a rut of trying new things, enjoyment comes after. It’s found on the other side of novelty. No one enjoys movement, especially not if they’re on week 3, where the tiredness and monotony has kicked in, it’s getting boring and their performance is already stagnating. It took me several fitness programmes, different gyms, Youtube videos and apps before I realised that the problem was my lack of commitment to consistency.

Because it’s boring. The dopamine and excitement from novelty was addicting and, like every addict, I didn’t want to give up the source of my highs.

Truthfully, we stopped moving when we found our dream home in December 2025 and that was the turning point to get me back into routine. But the reality is that neither willpower nor mindset changed my mind. It was about making a choice to ignore the noise, look back on what worked for me, and make a decision to commit.

It was a case of finding a proper strategy (which I’ve outlined below) where I went back to lifting heavy with a proper programme on ONE app.

Once I felt rooted, I could get organised and therefore, I was no longer distracted. Stability matters.

My return to strength training has paid greater dividends because my previous groundwork from 2018 means I’m stronger than before, hitting bigger PBs. The work I’ve been doing has also rewired my brain to keep showing up at the gym. I’m in a routine and my body is proving to me that my past hard-won gains were worth the work I put in all those years ago.

Evidence shows that previously trained muscles grow back faster when they’re trained again. The body remembers everything it built when life is getting in the way and we take breaks from training. Thank you, muscle memory.

My strategy

• set your goals

• make a decision to commit

• delete your social media (this part is essential)

• choose your fitness programme (this can be an app, YouTube playlist or a programme from a personal trainer)

• make a decision to commit to it for at least a month

• check off each workout on a habit tracker for that time

• measure progress however you want (mood, scales, pictures, energy levels, fitness watch)

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On the other side

We live in an age of technology and instant gratification. Having so much choice isn’t helpful at all. It’s much easier to buy a 12-week fitness programme than do it. It’s more comforting to say it didn’t work after 3 days and go back to scrolling for the next interesting fitness trend than to stick to the workout programme and do the mental and physical work required that reaps the real rewards. It’s not an overreaction to say that social media has a greater impact than we think it does, and it’s worth deleting the apps from our phones if we want maximum focus.

I still have a lot of work to do in staying consistent, building myself up to a pull-up (I’m doing inverted rows and dead hangs at the moment), start running/jogging and look into how to hybrid train effectively. I plan to do it a phase at a time, and build up to the next stage instead to avoid burnout. I’m not super keen on falling back into my unfocused state simply because I overdid it.

But at the very least, what I keep telling myself is to stay in it. I’m at the point where I’m enjoying fitness, heavy lifting and the gym, and now I don’t want to let go. I’ve already experienced what it feels like to lose my fitness routine, so I’m going to hold on as hard as I can now.

My journey has only just begun. Again.

If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated!

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I returned from a week-long trip to London during the Easter holidays and I made sure this time that we got to see a few more bookshops. With the kids getting older and a teenager in the house, we’re reading much more than ever. The effort to raise bookworms never ends.

I’ve been to a LOT of bookshops across the world and London is a treasure trove of independent bookshops. You can find a more varied selection in an indie than you would in your average Waterstones, which is generally pushing a particular set of ‘highly-anticipated moneymaking bestsellers’ instead of unique reads that you wouldn’t find anywhere else or a book that’s specific to the bookshop’s theme.

What’s so special about independent bookshops?

Independent bookshops are my favourite kinds of bookshops. They’re owned by ordinary folk like ourselves or are family-run instead of being owned by a large bookstore chain, which is often owned by a hedge fund with its investors interested in one thing — how much money they’ll get in return.

Indie bookshops, on the other hand, are not dictated by mercenary motivations, but are instead fuelled by a passion of books and literature by their owners. They come with a uniqueness and the more we have, the more diversity we have in literature available to the public for joy and enlightenment — they’re just really cool places and we need to preserve the voices they contribute to the book industry. Some bookshops are themed either by genre, politics and even gender (there’s a women’s bookshop in Auckland!), or they’ll be your average cutesy bookshop on the high street, or a dark, dusty one with Gothic literature.

The coolest bookshops are always, ALWAYS the independent ones. However, they’ve also become a rarer breed than ever in this economic climate especially as they face intense competition from online retailers THAT-SHALL-NOT-BE-NAMED selling books at less than RRP resulting in indies being acquired by big chains. Like Waterstones which was bought by Elliott Advisors in 2018. The problem isn’t being owned by Waterstones, but that the true ownership and direction of the bookshop is in the hands of unseen people whose motives (and probably ethics too) don’t align with what readers and literary enthusiasts want from bookshops and book distributors.

(I’m not passing judgement on anyone buying from non-independent bookshops. I’m just pointing out why we’re at risk of losing them.)

I also don’t pretend to know ALL the cool bookshops in London, nor can I say that I’ve visited Daunt Books — the one that everyone talks about online. But I can share a few independents in the capital that are absolutely worth a visit outside of the usual suspects that make it to the algorithm.

Quick note: I once visited Hatchard’s Piccadilly just before Christmas, and I wouldn’t recommend it. Hatchard’s itself is absolutely magical, but it was heaving with people spilling over from people coming in from the tin-of-sardines situation in Fortnum & Mason next door, and we barely moved an inch around the bookshop. If you plan to visit Hatchard’s Piccadilly, DO NOT go at Christmas time.

So, if you’re looking for that soul-searching and unique read, let me walk you through a few bookshops where you might find your next page-turner.

1. Backstory Balham

At my end of London (I am unapologetically a Saaaf London girl), Backstory is a relatively new one to the capital. Opened up a few years ago by a journalist, the bookshop itself has an injection of personality from its owner with navy interiors that feel very newsroom reporter-blue reminiscent of the traditional press.

The book selection is a medley of recommendations from the staff in the New Fiction section, a selection of latest non-fiction and a table full of literary and translated fiction, all of which I feel I would need a comfy chair for had they not all been occupied by other readers when I was there.

Of course Backstory stands out for its not-basic-like-Waterstones selection, but the café puts it in a league of its own, because who doesn’t need coffee with a good book? It’s worth a visit just for that.

📍71 Balham High Rd, London SW12 9AP

Tube stop: Balham Station

2. Goldsboro Books

When a first edition book comes to mind, I think of antique bookshops housing coveted, valuable books that are WAY out of my budget and should never be exposed to daylight. I would never touch one in the first place for fear of damaging it. But, as a book lover who also wants to read her books, there’s a joy in reading a brand new book that’s also a high-quality first edition. Because why can’t we have special, original versions of new releases to curate a beautiful collection?

The great thing is that Goldsboro Books specialises in selling signed, first edition hardbacks of newly released books of premium quality for the head-over-heels bookworms who are also book collectors. I bought my very pristine copy of Cecily, and I haven’t cracked it open yet. I don’t think I will, at all.

The best part of this branch of Goldsboro Books is that it’s located in the iconic Booksellers’ Row, or Cecil Ct as it’s officially known (and more easy to find on a map). Cecil Ct houses secondhand bookshops and antique booksellers and it’s a curiously quiet place between the hustle and bustle of Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square. Funnily enough, it’s where Foyles first opened before moving onto their current, more prominent premises.

Not enough gets said about Goldsboro Books, but I could write an essay about the place, the concept, the fact that I love it. I’ll stop here.

📍23-27 Cecil Court, London, WC2N 4EZ

Tube stop: Leicester Square

3. Riverside Bookshop

Ever wished you could read by the River Thames, but forgot to bring a book? The Riverside Bookshop is here to rescue you from your sad, book-less predicament. Just a stone’s throw away from London Bridge station, the bookshop is along the promenade of shops around the Hays Galleria with a view of the HMS Belfast, the river, Tower Bridge and the rest of the beauties of London by the water. The bookshop is an added stop that’s ideal for a book browse if you’re in the area visiting Borough Market, Tower Bridge, etc. I, personally, view it as the main attraction of my visits to London Bridge.

It’s a stroke of genius to place a bookshop by the riverside, and even better that it hasn’t yet entered the ownership of a chain book corporation.

Proudly independent, just that alone makes it enough of a reason for a visit. But if you need more of a reason, on top of it being a bookshop by the river (I still can’t get over this fact, it makes it even more unique), it’s stocked with a broad range of literary fiction. What sets it above and beyond everything else is its staff; they’re helpful and knowledgeable. If you have a particular book in mind, they’ll probably know about it, or if you’re not sure what you want to read, the Riverside Bookshop’s booksellers can offer you some excellent recommendations.

Here’s a video I made about the bookshop a few years ago.

📍15, Hay’s Galleria, Tooley St, London SE1 2QN

Tube stop: London Bridge

4. Pages of Hackney

This one has absolute Notting Hill vibes, but even cooler. Pages of Hackney isn’t going to be part of an average tourist’s visit to London, mainly because Hackney hasn’t had the…erm, best of reputations in the past. That’s putting it mildly. But it’s still an eyebrow-raiser for me to say that Hackney is a great place to visit due to its rich heritage.

Once known as Murder Mile (see what I mean about its reputation) in the 90s, Lower and Upper Clapton are now full of independent knitting shops, bakeries, the best coffees and sandwiches I’ve ever had, and a vibrant, diverse community of people who are clearly well-connected as they stop to talk to each other in the street. It’s a unique part of East London, if not the capital itself, and in recent years, it’s become a very desirable place to live. It’s not that far if you’re in the London Bridge and City area.

With that comes Pages of Hackney, an award-winning bookshop selling literary fiction on politics, feminism and more, while also hosting events and arts exhibitions. They’re unequivocal in their support for Palestine and uplift Palestinian voices through the books they sell and the author events they host.

When you walk in, it’s definitely a classic bookshop. I love it. The vibe is absolutely eclectic and kind of dark because there’s so many shelves and not a lot of daylight.

But you’ll find books here that you will never have heard of anywhere else. I picked up a couple of fantastic reads on a visit, because I simply couldn’t help it.

It might not seem like it, but Hackney is also worth a visit for its fascinating history and beautiful architecture — there’s a GP surgery that looks like something out of the Roman Empire, and the tall houses could tell you a story simply by looking at them.

📍70 Lower Clapton Road, E5 0RN

Overground stop: A 10 minute walk from Hackney Central Overground station and Hackney Downs railway station.

Honourable Non-Indie Mentions

Do only indies get the love? By and large, they do by me, but I don’t hate on a good Waterstones or Waterstones-owned bookshop especially when it’s well-stocked and has some great events.

Foyles

Foyles is ICONIC. To me, it’s THE London bookshop to visit. My feed shows a lot of Waterstones Piccadilly, but never Foyles. Not independent as it was bought by Waterstones in 2018, it still deserves a mention for its history and reputation. Foyles was, and still is, known as the place for academic books for students and as educational booksellers.

In recent years, the book selection at Foyles has become more varied than out-of-print and secondhand books, with four floors to explore, a café, an auditorium and a dedicated children’s section. Foyles is a must-visit. Even more so, if you have a manga or anime fan in the family. Which, in my particular case, we do — there’s an entire section for that, too.

Foyles is fabulous and, as a side observation, the flag on the building looks very much like the New York Public Library’s flag, which I visited in September last year.

I really recommend visiting Foyles for its educational variety, too, especially if there are exams on the horizon.

📍107 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0EB

Tube stop: Tottenham Court Road

Waterstones Piccadilly

If you’re visiting London, there’s no way, absolutely no way you can miss out on visiting Europe’s biggest bookshop. With over eight miles of bookshelves, Waterstones Piccadilly spans across 6 floors. Going up and down the marble staircase, you can easily lose yourself here and to some degree, it’s an overwhelming place to be when it’s busy.

Author events are a staple and some of the most exciting names have been hosted here, as well as book clubs, like The Candid Book Club who have regularly held book events and book launches with authors such as Elif Shafak, Zoulfa Katouh and Elizabeth Day, at this bookshop.

Waterstones Piccadilly is a magnificent bookshop where you could lose yourself amidst its labyrinthine bookshelves, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing. But even if you do find your way out, you’ll come out onto one of the most centrally located parts of London. Just make sure its your last stop so you don’t have lug your pile(s) of books around with you all day!

📍203-206 Piccadilly, London W1J 9HD

Tube stop: Piccadilly Circus

Waterstones Richmond

A bit further out of the city (quite a bit, to be honest), lies Richmond in Surrey. Surrounded by a vastness of breathtaking views of green space, it’s serenely beautiful as it sits right next to a less busy part of the River Thames. The view from Richmond Hill is stunning and is one to be seen. And of course, there’s the park with the deer. No wonder it’s the happiest place to live in the country.

If you’re around the area, it’s worth dropping into Waterstones Richmond on the high street. It’s only three floors, but it’s well stocked, with plenty to keep the adults and children occupied, and perfect for picking up a book to read by the river on a lovely, warm day.

Richmond itself has a few independent bookshops that I’m ABSOLUTELY dying to check out and I plan to next time I’m there.

📍2-6 Hill St, Richmond TW9 1TN

Train stop: Richmond

There’s no shortage of amazing bookshops in London, but independent bookshops are becoming few and far between. It's more important than ever that we support them now as they continue to be undermined by Amazon or bought out by hedge-fund owned chains, only for them to lose the freedom of having a unique voice in the book community.

If you’re reading this and think I’ve missed out on a good indie bookshop or should go and check one out, pop your suggestion in the comments! I’m always looking for more ideas to add to my bookshop crawls around London (and beyond!).

If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated!

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It doesn’t quite feel like it, but Spring has sprung in the UK and even though it’s still quite cold, the longer days and birds chirping at 5am mean the new season is well underway.

I’m a big fan of Spring. It always fills me with joy for new beginnings, a different mindset and cementing the habits I began earlier in the year, or even at the end of last year.

Spring cleaning is taking place in many homes, with people decluttering their wardrobes, garages and even their phone’s camera roll. All really great stuff. Decluttering is cathartic and it feels incredibly calming to wipe away the dust and clutter collected over this past winter. We could all do with fewer things and taking inventory of what we own is a good way to ensure we save money to avoid buying duplicate items.

Spring cleaning the bookshelves, on the other hand, is a completely different matter. It’s not just a matter of physically cleaning the bookshelves themselves, but also culling the book collection. Getting rid of books isn’t as radical as it sounds and can, in fact, be a restorative action for the peace and wellbeing of the brain as well as rejuvenating the book collection too.

Before you get up in arms about this suggestion, as many readers on the internet do, culling a book collection isn’t new. Marie Kondo invoked outrage when she previously suggested that we should only keep 30 books, and of course, many bookworms, myself included, tutted at her in intense disagreement. Getting rid of books is an abomination. A heinous crime to be hissed at. Bring out the pitchforks because a mob is ready.

But is it really that bad a suggestion? Culling books are about curation, not decluttering. What we might be so quick to dismiss is more to do with keeping books that we actually want, instead of books we think we want. As a late 80s-born millennial, I remember a time when book marketing wasn’t so intense and we still read widely. It was also considered okay to get rid of books without it being blasphemy and being branded literary heathens. Now, our judgements have become algorithmically skewed because book marketing has become heavily about consumption so we buy a lot more books than we want, need or have room for.

BookTok, Bookstagram, all driven by the dreaded algorithm — they’re designed to make us buy, not necessarily to get us to read.

The art of tsundoku stays relevant to this conversation, because buying books to collect them as a hobby still applies, but we want to be surrounded by books that will, to quote Marie Kondo, truly ‘spark joy’ about reading, not just make us want to feel like picking up a book. In some cases, surrounded by too many books can be a cripplingly overwhelming experience because there’s so much to read and not enough time, ever. I speak from first-hand experience.

We should feel inspired to read, immerse ourselves in books, curate our taste and put it on display for ourselves and for people who enter our homes. But more importantly, if our bookshelves are overflowing with books and we don’t check in at least once a year as to what we own, how will we ever know what kind of reader we are each year of our lives? And is it worth holding onto the 848 page tome that is The Priory of the Orange Tree when I know I’m a solid 400-page novel reader? The only exception to this is The Other Bennet Sister. No explanation needed.

For those of us who don’t have the luxury of a home library, it’s also important to cull our book collection because of a lack of space. Space costs money and comes at a premium in the form of rent or mortgage repayments. The bigger the space you live in, the more you pay. So if you’re paying through the nose for a shoebox in Chelsea, it probably isn’t a great idea to keep ALL your books, especially since you have a lot of other things to keep in your home too.

This is even more important if your taste in reading has changed over time, which isn’t as unusual as it seems to be. We change as people over the years, why can’t our taste in reading evolve too?

It’s tempting to hold onto every single one of our books because we think we might come back to one of them to read even though we might not have touched that one copy in years, or we think we might be in the mood to read the novel sometime in the future and we don’t want to have to pay twice for them. But we only have so much time in the day and throughout our lives to read, so it’s not worth holding onto every book.

That’s why you have to work out which book is absolutely worth being a keeper.

So where do you start with clearing out the books?

1. Unshelve your books

Take every single book off the bookshelves and count how many you have at the end of it.

2. Make a note of your books

Take a note of every single book so you can look back on the books you own.

3. Sort your books

Sorting your books into piles will make the task less overwhelming and more manageable. You could do it according to size, genre, length, hardback or paperback — it’s totally upto you. I personally prefer alphabetically or according to genre.

4. Ask yourself questions

Right, it’s time to make the hard decisions. Go through each book and ask yourself the following questions:

• Why am I still holding onto this book?

• Do I plan to read the book, like…ever?

• Do I own a duplicate of this book?

• Have I outgrown it?

• Can I borrow it from the library or the library app if I ever want to read it in future?

• Am I a fast reader or a slow reader?

• Is this book in keeping with my general reading taste?

• Do I have a friend or family member that might enjoy this book instead?

• For long books: am I a long book reader?

• What are my reading goals this year?

Keep asking yourself questions and you’ll realise you have very little reason to hold onto some of your books.

5. Note down the decluttered books

Make a list of the books you’ve decluttered and a reason for each book as to why it wasn’t a keeper. It’ll prevent you from buying unwanted books again. Saves money and space.

6. Get them out

You’ve made the tough decisions. Now it’s time to get them out ASAP. Whether it’s a charity shop, library or recycling centre, just do it immediately otherwise they’ll make it back into your book collection again.

7. Clean your bookshelves

Now that you’ve unshelved your books, cleared out a few that you no longer need or want, it’s time to clean your bookshelves. It’s an easy one — a feather duster, microfibre cloth and a multisurface polish are usually good enough. Dust the shelves, spray the polish sparingly and wipe down with the cloth.

8. Clean your books

Before you shelve your books, give them a quick wipe with a different microfibre cloth. Make sure it’s dry. Simply wipe the edges, the spine and the covers. Dust collects very easily on all surfaces, and that includes books too.

9. Shelve your books

I call this the exciting part, mainly because it’s the moment we’ve been waiting for. I haven’t yet developed an organising system yet but if you have one, shelve your books according to personal preference. For some people, that’s alphabetically according to author’s name. Sometimes, it’s also title. There’s no rules here, so organise your books however you want — genre, size, alphabetically or anything else.

10. Set some boundaries

Make some rules for your book buying habit. Yes, yes, I know. I KNOW there should be no limits to how many books we buy or where we keep them. But even delulu needs a solulu at some point.

No matter how devoted a reader you are, you need to be able to navigate your bookshelves, and enjoy it. Prevention is better than cure — stop book buying becoming a problem in the first place. Setting a rule of ‘one-in, one-out’ or borrowing from the library will prevent books from overflowing on your bookshelves.

As much as you’re thinking “Nope, I can’t do this!”, I promise you that you CAN do this. If you feel like you might have too many books, it’s not a bad thing to want to clear out a few or give some away.

We all love books, but do we really love overflowing bookshelves or our books crammed into spaces? Spring cleaning is a great opportunity to not only reconsider the books we’re keeping but also how we’re using our space and giving our books the attention they deserve in our home.

It’s worth letting go of some to make space for the ones that truly reflect the kind of reader you are now.

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated!

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For transparency, this post includes a review of a gifted item.

“Swap over so you won’t bash elbows when you write.”

I remember this moment vividly at school. I was in year 3 aged 8, and my teacher told me to swap sides with my classmate and sit on his left side. Baffled for a moment, I quickly realised I had a very astute and supportive teacher who identified that my classmate was right-handed while I was left-handed, so whenever I sat on his right side, my left elbow would collide with his every time I did my work. She asked us to swap over to avoid conflict so that we could peacefully get on with our set work. Smart, observant teachers make all the difference to a student who doesn’t know their struggle. Her solution worked, and we were less irritated after that.

That was the moment where it dawned on me that not only was I left-handed in a right-handed world, but I needed to do this everywhere I went. I carried that piece of advice throughout my life so that wherever I could at school, I sat on the left side of my fellow students and explained why to my teachers who then proceeded to advise other left-handed students in class with the same. At university, I always sat on the left side of the lecture theatre and at the left end of the row, so there was no chance of elbow collision between myself and another student. Even in work meetings, I’ve always chosen to sit on the left side of my colleagues to take notes.

Being aware of my sinistrality in a right-handed world, I found solutions.

I also didn’t let it stop me from doing things like using the widely available right-handed scissors by turning them around. Ironically, I’ve never been able to use left-handed scissors because my strange use of right-handed scissors means I don’t know any better, even if left-handed scissors might be the better tool for me.

Funnily enough, and perhaps other elder millennials may be able to relate, being exposed to technology so early on in life meant I never needed a left-handed mouse because, like scissors, it feels weird. I use my right hand to use the mouse, because my left hand is weak and lacks the strong motor skills that my right hand has which, come to think of it, is also evident when I’m strength training.

My right arm is great with bicep curls, presses and raises, but God forbid my left arm should co-operate with equal enthusiasm.

Writing this out, it’s quite possible that I could be on a spectrum of ambidexterity or mixed-handedness where I use both hands for different tasks but with a general preference for sinistrality, or left-handedness.

With only 10% of the population left-handed, it’s unsurprising that the world is built for right-handed dominance with everything from peelers, scissors and computer hardware to ATMs, single-seats in universities and vending machines aimed at the righties of this world.

I’m not bothered nor resentful. Being the outlier has made me open-minded and solution-orientated on how to navigate the world.

Part of the natural wiring of my brain is to simply adjust and find new ways of doing things. Whether it’s using a can opener or a tape measure, I always have a workaround. It’s not convenient, but I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s become second nature.

“Why don’t you go to a left-handed store for tools that work for you?”

I’ve often thought about doing this, but I never felt it was a big enough issue to go out of my way to buy specific tools. Even with peelers, I managed to find one that worked for both hands: a bog-standard Y-shaped peeler.

Whatever hand we use, the one thing that our dexterity comes in most commonly handy for (see what I did there?) is writing, which brings me nicely back to the beginning of this piece. When it comes to writing, note-taking and anything paper-based, left-handers are left out in the cold.

For writers of languages that read from left to right, left-handers live an ink-smeared nightmare as their hand glides across the words they’ve just written discovering at the end of their sentence that not only have their words transformed into a toddler’s scribble, their hands also resemble said feral toddler who’s just discovered scribbling on their hands.

There’s another detail we all overlook. Imagine my irritation upon discovering that even the grain of the paper is designed for right-handed people with the assumption that the paper remains straight.

Right-handed people write with the direction of the paper grain, so it’s smooth and the pen glides across with ease. Left-handed people write at an angle to the paper grain, so writing is a struggle from the outset. That’s why we have to tilt the paper and need more room to write across a surface.

It’s a tad exhausting being a left-hander.

All is not lost. There are plenty of left-handed notebooks available, but the really pretty and cool ones, the Papier and Paper Republic variety, are hard to come by. So yet again, this left-hander has to adapt to the world around her, and struggle with ringbinders getting in the way at the beginning of a sentence.

Truth be told, I can overcome the notebook issue too if the rings are small enough and not obstructive. I’ve also trained myself not to write with the ‘hooked’ hand and tiring my hand out; it was simply instinctive for me to place my sheet of paper at an angle instead of keeping it straight. After all, isn’t it normal to do that? Maybe I was always a natural rebel at heart.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of advice on how to write as a left-handed person, especially since writing is a difficult thing to do in the first place.

Of course, the most essential part is the pen you use, and where a ballpoint pen is no problem at all and I can get cracking, I hit a bit of a snag when it came to using my first fountain pen. Excited though I was to have my first ever fancy grown-up pen, it was disappointing to experience the scratching and discomfort of using a right-handed nib.

I didn’t use a fountain pen for many years after until 2023 when, during my year abroad in New Zealand, I purchased my first Lamy pen because it came with a left-handed nib. The world opened up for me, and I fell back in love with writing and began to journal last year.

However, being a novice to the world of fountain pens as an adult, I didn’t realise I needed to experiment until I was offered the opportunity to try an Ellington fountain pen.

Brace yourselves, because it’s going to sound INCREDIBLY out of character for me to say this but…

GIRL!

I have finally tasted the sweet nectar of a fountain pen that absolutely slaps and I won’t be looking back.

(note: this is a gifted product in exchange for an honest review of my experience with it)

Trying out the Midnight Rose Fountain Pen, I wasn’t sure what to expect but my initial thoughts on how it looked:

• It’s beautiful, elegant and gorgeously presented in a gift box.

  • The pen itself feels solid. It has weight and a robustness to it that makes me feel like I need to write the next great bestseller, or a letter to a penpal.

  • It’s so stunning that I want to carry it around with me (I don’t, it’s too nice!).

  • The rose gold trimmings and engraving of ‘ELLINGTON’ across it adds that extra touch of luxury. It’s a true beauty.

  • The gift box makes the pen easier to look after and not lose it. I find this particularly helpful because it means I don’t need to worry about rummaging around for it it if it’s at the bottom of my bag — the box makes it easy to find and it adds a touch of luxury to keep it in there.

  • The barrel is made of stainless steel, hence the weight and its feeling of robustness — from holding it the first time in my hand, it’s reassuring that this is a pen that won’t fall apart in the first few tries.

First impressions count and in this case, I am VERY impressed by the quality and look of the fountain pen. It exudes class and a timeless British splendour.

Moving on, it was time to try out the pen and I noticed a pack of 3 cartridges in the pack. The pen itself comes already fitted with a refillable ink cartridge for which you have to purchase the ink separately. I gave it a few twists, watched a couple of videos — it’s pretty foolproof.

Giving it a go, here are my thoughts:

• It comes with a refillable ink cartridge.

  • No joke, my mind was BLOWN when I discovered the pen comes with a refillable ink cartridge.

  • Ink bottles come in a variety of colours from the classic black to a deep green and even a dark pink to add to the collection.

  • I like it when pens come with refillable cartridges — they’re cost-saving, sustainable and easy. I won’t need to constantly search for cartridges or buy them. Just refill and carry on.

• The included ink cartridges are a mix of colours.

  • There are 3 ink cartridges included on top of the refillable ink cartridge, in a selection of black and blue ink.

  • Like all fountain pens, it took a degree of force to push it in, but there’s no waiting to start writing, as the ink flows through to the nib right away.

  • The ink itself is great quality with a depth of colour.

  • I can write smoothly with the ink; it flows out efficiently with just the right amount each time and zero smudging.

I wrote a diary entry in my supermarket standard 2026 diary and here’s what I discovered:

• The extra-fine nib is an absolute game changer for my writing.

  • I didn’t think I could write in small writing but the 0.3mm extra-fine nib of the pen has allowed me to shrink my writing so I can fit more into my journal.

  • The extra-fine nib means I can be more creative with my writing style, by making it more fancy or adding a flourish. I truly love how fine it is for that and that detail really matters to make writing a more enjoyable and artistic experience.

• MOST IMPORTANTLY: the left-handed nib.

  • Having previously used a left-handed nib, the Ellington fountain pen is equal in that functionality.

  • I’m glad that the option is available, but what makes this better than my Lamy pen is for all the other reasons.

  • The nib is angled to accommodate left-handed writing to prevent smudging but as I’ve previously mentioned, there are ways to position the hand and the paper to make it an even more optimised writing experience.

  • There’s more information available on the Ellington pens website.

• It’s comfortable to use for extended periods.

  • It’s true. I didn’t want to stop writing and felt like I could write all day.

  • The barrel is wide enough for a long writing session.

  • The general advice for left-handers is to hold their pen slightly higher than right-handers do, and that worked very well for me.

Overall summary: The mere experience of writing with an Ellington fountain pen is that of opulent luxury.

Interestingly, for me what really sticks out isn’t the experience of writing with the left-handed nib, but the other aspects that make the pen a true joy to write with. No longer am I shying away from picking up the pen. I want to take it out more and show my friends (instead, I’m here showing you guys) and I’m looking for excuses to write with it, even the most mundane lists.

I think this might be the most wonderful fountain pen I’ve ever used and it makes writing a meaningful experience instead of an exhausting one. In a world of touch screens and typing, writing has become more important to help us retain our motor skills, so it helps to have a pen that supports this.

So now that I’m thoroughly impressed with it, you can get yourself anything from the website using the code BUSHRA for 20% off. Alternatively, just use this link for an automatic 20% applied to your basket on sitewide Ellington Pens purchases.

It’s come to my attention that where fountain pens have caught up to create a seamless user experience to account for dexterity differences, stationery retailers are still lagging far, FAR behind. I’m not talking about your average shop on the high street or the supermarkets. I mean the big luxury brands that charge a lot for pretty journals but aren’t really worth the money for people like me. As I mentioned earlier: the Papiers, the Paper Republics and dare I say it, even the Louise Carmens.

In an age of inclusivity and a rise in journaling becoming a hobby, it seems more pertinent that the finer, more practical lifestyle aspects around sinistrality be taken more seriously. We might only make up 10% of the population, but when has it ever been a good idea to ignore the needs of a minority group?

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated! You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see more of my content.

For a lot of elder millennials, 2026 is a special year. Us 1986 babies are turning 40 and hitting that big adult milestone that our older elder millennials hit before us feels like an initiation into something huge.

I’ve been feeling 40 looming over me for a good couple of years now. The moment 38 arrived, I began to feel that 40 was right around the corner. It’s a scary number

After all, people say life starts at 40.

Even psychologist and psychotherapist Carl Jung said: “Life really does begin at 40. Up until then you are just doing research.”

Not because it means I’m suddenly old, but it’s like Jung said, everything before 40 is just research. So now I’m in a bit of a crisis of confusion — what have I been researching all these years?

I think I know what Jung means when he says research. Most of life before 40 is adulting and learning on the job. Every choice, every decision, every single bit of strategising we do in our 20s and 30s are part of the experimentation that shapes us to become the ‘adulting’ adults we keep looking to for wisdom. The research of our previous decades makes us the wise, sagacious, intelligent savants that’s supposed to take us into midlife and later on, our old age.

As someone who’s spent the last decade and a half in motherhood, moving countries and career changes, here’s my list of research before I turn 40:

• eating protein and fibre is life’s easiest nutrition hack for your best body and optimum health outcomes.

• start strength training early.

• read. ‘nuff said.

• keep your body moving.

• live abroad somewhere for at 6-12 months (probably not best to do this at the time of writing).

• buy less stuff, it’s hard to carry around and move house if you have too much stuff.

• dress for the life you live, not the life you think you live. it’ll save you money and time everyday.

• be the parent you wish you had before you decide to have children.

• patience and resilience will get you further than anything else in life.

• housework is a must — just do it without making it complicated.

• being organised and planning ahead will shave off hours of your time

• learning how to communicate through writing is a skill. work on it.

• give yourself time to think about your thoughts and opinions.

• you don’t have to get outside everyday, but it really helps.

• work hard to understand your loved ones.

• don’t take the people you love for granted.

• hardship never goes wasted — it always reaps rewards.

• doing something nice without being prompted is an easy way to get a dopamine hit.

• volunteer when you can.

• find your creative side.

• take time out to journal your thoughts.

• parenting shapes you more than you think.

• location always determines the property you buy before anything else.

• you can change careers whenever you want, there’s no particular age for it.

• give yourself time to learn new things, it’s not going to happen right away.

• the way you think shapes you.

• your environment shapes you too, so think carefully if it's helping you become the person you want to be. if it isn’t, makes moves to change it.

• do something hard everyday so you never get too comfortable. a run, weight lifting, reading a page of a difficult book.

• give yourself time to cook good food.

• the more you eat whole foods, the more you won’t want to go out to eat because nothing tastes as nice anymore.

These are literally off the top of my head in the space of 10 minutes. I’m sure there are many more that I can think of if I put my mind to it.

The biggest constant throughout my 30s has been reading. Breathing in the smell of a new book in a bookshop breathes life into me, but reading a story, going into someone else’s world or learning something new about the past makes me an entirely new and different person.

Back when I went through a phase of feeling lost after all of our house and country moves, my husband said I was always a happy person when I was reading and it seemed like I had stopped reading. He wasn’t wrong. Although I was buying books and reading a page here or there, I had stopped reading with joy. This was when I was 37 years old. Only 2 years ago.

I was going through burnout of too many changes; I wasn’t in the frame of mind to read at that point. In hindsight, it was a terrible idea to step away from reading joyfully. I needed to read simply for escapism, not doomscroll my feelings away.

Reading gives me the dopamine fix I don’t get from scrolling, while also feeding my soul. By giving up and letting my reading stagnate, I wasn’t giving myself the mental and emotional nourishment I needed so badly to help me get through the temporarily nomadic nature of our circumstances.

Having already lived 12 years of life without reading, I almost fell back into that pattern. But my determination to not give up entirely came from learning that, at the very least, I should read for my health and life expectancy.

For most people, when things get hard, books anchor them. I seem to be a special case that needs to go a step further. When things get hard, I know books will help me feel better and think clearly, but I need reminding that reading adds 2 years to our lifespan to help me pick up a book. Let’s not get it twisted — reading definitely isn’t a chore for me, but more that I feel so overwhelmed with the burnout that I struggle to identify that I need self-care.

This little health fact reminds me that reading will help me overcome burnout and that positive action leads to better stress management.

As I enter the 40s decade this year, I’m realising that reading is the one constant that keeps me grounded, gives me joy, and helps me understand myself better. With all the mounting responsibilities that life throws, and will continue to throw at me, I know that I can always turn to my books when nothing else seems to make sense.

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated! You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see more of my content.

Whenever the analogue trend has popped up on my feed, I’m always in admiration of people’s creativity with it.

iPods are back, smartphones are swapped for Nokias, film cameras replace the high-resolution smartphone cameras. In this economy, I’m not sure where they’re getting the money for all of these things, but I’m here for it all.

The idea is to reduce contactability, digital overload and consumption in line with the good old days I grew up in. The 1990s and early 2000s years pre-social media and AI were definitely the best years where life felt peaceful, no one could contact you as easily as they can now, let alone comment on your discoverable whereabouts; arguing with you on the internet was there but it wouldn’t turn into a pile-on and people simply got bored and logged off to live real life.

They were simpler times.

The analogue trend is supposed to be an antidote to digital overconsumption where our smart watches are keeping tabs on us, informing us of how much we’ve moved today or how much sleep we’re not getting, while TikTok is telling us what we need to wear, eat and watch, and how we need to do our skincare to avoid premature ageing by the time we hit 40.

In some ways, it feels like the 1990s, but more invasive, pressured, and, dare I say it, aggressive. It’s not like the magazines that we had to go to the shops to pick up and buy, and read to accept the messaging. It’s free and easily accessible for us.

The problem with social media is different to that of magazines: it’s the ease of the algorithm’s accessibility to our attention spans, minds and lifestyle habits.

Our attention is a commodity and social media has exponentially exploited it. In doing so, the apps encroach on our lives until they’re something we can’t live without, which has happened to millions, including myself.

So as the month of Ramadan approached, I realised I wanted more from it.

I call it The Ramadan Reset.

Every year, I follow a guided Quran course where a big cohort of us undergo intensive study. It’s changed everything for me in relation to Ramadan — I’ve come away more disciplined with a stronger, lasting connection to God. However, Ramadan is a month that requires focus with minimal distractions. It’s a good time to re-evaluate the things that are wasting our time, making us feel miserable or are simply a vice that we need to cut out of our lives. Trimming the fat, essentially.

But there’s always been a sticking point for me.

I’ve been using social media for more years than I’d like to admit (hello, MySpace and MSN Messenger veterans!) and it’s only now, as research has emerged about depression and screen time alongside ever-evolving social media algorithms over the subsequent years, that I’m coming to notice the detrimental impact on my own state of mind due to doomscrolling. I’ve never struggled with poor mental health, but I have had sleep issues that went way beyond child-related interruptions and was most definitely due to scrolling, which as research indicates, isn’t exclusive to me.

The way I came to this realisation required a lot of introspection, self-reflection and 2 years’ worth of educating myself on dopamine-reliance.

The thing with Ramadan is that we don’t realise how much we rely on dopamine through food. When food is removed, we look for other distractions to replace the dopamine hit that food, caffeine and drinks provide during the day. In previous years, I was turning to social media during Ramadan, and doomscrolling more than usual to fill the dopamine food void. It didn’t deliver the same results and I always came away feeling even worse, mainly because I make an effort to eat nutritious food so the impact of dopamine’s effects through food aren’t as intense.

But it’s a much greater effort to consume healthy digital content.

The good side effect of fasting is that it forces you to focus and become more disciplined. It makes you push through the discomfort and helps you build resilience against the niggling feeling that you just need another snack, another bite, another sip because the task in front of you feels too uncomfortable. The niggle tells you it’s too much to focus and you want to be distracted to avoid the discomfort. With doomscrolling, I was giving into the niggle because doing anything else didn’t deliver the dopamine stimulation I was accustomed to.

This year — the year of going analogue — I chose to make a change.

I chose to deal with the niggle of social media and deleted Instagram and TikTok from my phone. I even shared a note about it.

It’s not groundbreaking. Plenty has been written about it, but I’ve also been in denial about its impact on me, and now I’m ready to take charge and be okay living without high-stimulation social media.

As a chronic doomscroller, the first few days of Ramadan have been a SERIOUS adjustment. On the first day, I was picking up my phone, checking messages, checking Threads and trying to log into TikTok via my browser (I’m already logged into Instagram, ha ha).

I was a MESS.

But it’s got better. I’m using Threads more, which is text-based and a completely different type of social media to InstaTok (my portmanteau for the two perpetrators of the doomscroll). Undoubtedly, I’m still on social media but I’m tapping into my writing abilities more and forming a community around that. It’s a casual version of Notes and I’m able to express a side of my personality that video and photos can’t quite capture.

After this initial adjustment phase, I’ve now come to the realisation that my real issue is boundaries with checking notifications on the apps. Not the banner notifications on my phone, but obsessively checking likes, views and comments within the InstaTok apps. Most of the time I come away disappointed.

Having come to this realisation, I’m glad I’ve deleted social media from my phone, at least. It also makes sense for me to only scroll on my iPad, because it’s cumbersome, not optimised for apps that are generally used on phones and, most importantly, it’s not as easy to crawl into bed for the pre-sleep spiralling scroll with a clunky iPad in hand.

It’s a great way to break the habits I don’t want while still keeping me connected when I’m sitting down and have time and headspace to deal with social media. It means social media doesn’t dominate my life, it just exists on the side.

I’m still at the beginning of my journey where it’s rather precarious and I could easily cave and re-download InstaTok, so I’m not quite safely on the other side of it at the moment. But even at this early stage, I can see that having these apps on my phone weren’t just mere distractions, they had deceptively and insidiously taken over my mental space.

I’ve always been proud of not being susceptible to the cheesy marketing techniques and perpetual ads selling things I don’t need. But I didn’t realise that consuming had left me too paralysed — stopping me from taking first steps, creating opportunities, acting on ideas, taking that initial action. While I watched others build lives that excited them, who knows how many opportunities I’ve missed simply because of scrolling and obsessive notification checking that have probably (but I hope not) suppressed my brain cells.

As I turn 40 this year, I feel even more determined to keep my mind sharp for years to come. So when going analogue became the trend for 2026, something clicked in me. Reading and journaling aren’t enough. I don’t need iPods, Walkmans and flip phones.

My version of analogue is disconnecting from the harmful effects of visual, high-stimulation social media that drain more than they give. Going analogue isn’t about old tech, it’s about reducing stimulation so I can think, create and discover.

Let’s face it, Threads and Substack aren’t going to have the same impact or dopamine hit as the hyper-visual and addictive feeds of Instagram and TikTok. Even creating content for Substack isn’t as complex as it is for InstaTok.

It takes me 90 minutes to write 1000 words of full-on verbal expression where I explore my mind, reflect on experiences and create. It has, at least once, taken me 2 hours to edit a video that wasn’t satisfying and barely got over 50 likes.

Guess which one is more fulfilling for me?

On this platform, I don’t care how much engagement I get because I love to write. On InstaTok, it feels like a chore. But it goes far deeper than enjoyment with content creation. I’ve been mulling over deleting the apps for many years, yet always resisting my inner urge because…FOMO. And because everyone tells you how important it is be present on these apps, engaging with other creators, replying to comments ASAP, and so on. It’s ridiculous.

Ramadan is often cited as a month of worship, of connecting with God and attaining God-conscious through fasting. But in our complex overly-connected, hyper-stimulating, dopamine-desensitising times, the opportunities Ramadan presents is to also simplify.

Simplifying our lives by cutting out or cutting down the distractions is pivotal in attaining God-consciousness as well as an existential consciousness of our time, our lives and what it all means. I might call it going analogue, but in reality, that’s a superficial term associated with digital algorithms.

At the core of this, it’s about a reclamation of the mind and a reassertion of the truth of our existence.

Wait, I know I just got a little serious there (and maybe a bit abstract!). But there is a point here before I wrap up.

Ramadan is always an opportunity to help me reset my priorities in life, not just for the entire year. Every year, I introspect, go through a mental shift and then build on that shift the following year. The effects are cumulative year on year.

This is also dependent on the season of life I’m in. Right now I’m in the “life as you get older is more complex” season. When the kids were little, though physically taxing, it was easier. Now they’re older, there’s more to think about with them as well as ourselves. I need a solar system’s worth of headspace for mental clarity and doomscrolling InstaTok doesn’t have a place in my life.

I’m not going to stop creating content on there, but I’ll do it at my pace. It’s just not a priority at the moment.

Going analogue in Ramadan also means creating space for the actual analogue activities I want to do after the month is over — the knitting projects, the books I want to read, the cushion covers I need to sew, the recipes I want to try, the plants I want to grow, the garden I want to tend to, the writing I want to…err, write, and so on.

Switching off InstaTok on my phone will allow me to switch on the part of me that’s been waiting in the shadows all these years.

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated! You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see more of my content.

Hey guys, I always love sharing bits about my life and having a chinwag. The B-Roll Scroll is the perfect way to do that. Whether it’s the latest show, a podcast recommendation, books (naturally!) or an article, I’ll be sharing useful links as well as some of my favourite finds.

Just a note that some of the things I share are affiliate links in this post. So…let’s get cracking!

I keep inexplicably skipping my intended posting date, but I finally made it here. The past week (and a bit) has been a haze of disorganisation and sickness as not only did my youngest fall ill the week before, my eldest also came down with same bug at the beginning of last week only to pass it on to me. In spite of my efforts to build immunity — ginger tea, lots of vegetables, supplements, flu jabs, the lot — I’m still very vulnerable to whatever ailment my children happen to come upon. And I fall the hardest with longer recovery periods as I get older. It seems that the only answer is to stay well away when a virus enters the home.

Thankfully I’m up and about now but nothing much to say in the way of going out last week. The past week has involved reading and watching.

What’s coming up?

• my latest read

• Substack recommendation

• what I’ve been watching

• my unassuming planner

A shorter list, but that doesn’t mean I have less to say!

What I’ve been reading

I’ve been reading more than going out due to the malaise that overcame me; it’s genuinely the greatest comfort when I’m very out of sorts.

So what’s my current read? After finishing Generation Sleepless, and feeling triumphant about it, I took a look at my library pile and picked out North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Classics hold a certain attraction to me, even though I’ve read only a handful of them. Having read Tess of the D’Urbervilles many moons ago and loving Oliver Twist as a child, Victorian classics are definitely my thing. There’s something hugely relatable about the Industrial Revolution in today’s overworked world of high cost, less security and everyday working man’s struggles during the reign of one of the most memorable queens of England that makes for enriching and socially conscious reading.

I’m less than 100 pages in at the moment, but North and South is a love story entwined with politics, class and social awareness during the Industrial Revolution where a young girl finds herself moving from the south of the country to a fictionalised version of Manchester. Throw in her father’s misgivings about the way faith is being practiced and his choice to step away from the church, and you’ve got me hooked. The world might have been small back then, but it was rich in experiences, emotions and upheaval.

Substack recommendation

One of my favourite TikTokers joined Substack and I’m so thrilled she has because her videos are soothing, comforting and feel like a warming mug of hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day — just cosy.

’s page exudes elite academia vibes which makes perfect sense seeing as she’s doing a PhD at Oxford. But what immediately caught my eye were her cosy jumpers. As a lover of cosy jumpers, I couldn’t help but follow her. What I stayed for, beyond her journal recommendations, was her books, fragrances and pens.

Her latest Substack offering is about accepting self-doubt. Although the way we experience self-doubt may vary from person to person, it’s a highly recommended read if you feel like you’re the only one dealing with vulnerability and lacking self-belief in a world where everyone seems overly confident. Quite honestly, I’ve suffered from a huge lack of self-belief for many years — something my A level Biology teacher told me over 20 years ago (I feel old!).

I’ve never felt impostor syndrome (something Amy clarifies in the piece); just that I feel a bit lost or maybe I could be doing more. In a highly polarised world, we don’t talk enough about the middle ground between hyper-confidence and impostor syndrome. Most of us probably sit in that middle ground but social media narratives negatively influence us to think we can only have impostor syndrome, instead of a bit of self-doubt.

If you’re looking for a bit of sense to psychology, mixed with super cosy, academia vibes, give Amy a follow.

What I’ve been watching

Did you honestly think I wasn’t going to mention Bridgerton? To be honest, I didn’t think I was even going to watch season 4, let alone talk about it. But now my Threads page is full of, shock horror, my own posts about it.

I’ll tell you how that happened.

My sister, that’s how.

“Bushra, have you watched the latest season of Bridgerton? It’s really good.”

That’s it. That’s all she said. She’s my older sister with pretty high standards — even her name means “of high status”, so when she says something is good, she means it’s bloody fantastic. And it really is.

I spent my sick Sunday binge-watching Bridgerton season 4. Well, only the first 4 episodes are available because the Shondaland team insist on stressing out their viewership with a drip-feed of episodes to create hype. That’s partly why I wasn’t going to watch this season. However, Benedict has been the most unassuming of the 4 brothers (do we even need to count Gregory at this moment?) as he struggles to find the woman who matches his softer, more artistic nature.

It’s a complete Cinderella story and we have a blast from the millennial past with Katie Leung playing a mother to two grown daughters out in society — yes, you read that right.

A planner I’m in LOVE with

January has now passed but it’s still not too late to buy a planner, especially if you bought one at the beginning of the year and it didn’t work out.

This happens to me all the time. I buy a planner and then it’s not doing what I need it to do, which means I start to spiral as my brain begins to spill over. I can’t sleep because of the anxiety of too many things.

Seriously. It’s that bad. A good planner saves my mental health.

I bought The Organised Mums planner and that has served me pretty well so far with its habit tracker, meal planning pages and goal setting system. I feel like I might be able to become the best version of myself with this planner.

But the everyday drudgery of life needs lots of space to write and a planner of its own. The boring bits need writing down — chores, errands, whose lunches need making on what day, when I’m going to the gym and what I’m working out, whether I need to call the dentist for a checkup or a filling. You get the picture.

Many people love the flexibility of having undated pages, but I’m too set in my ways and need everything to be at-a-glance. I need to see the whole year, month, week and hourly breakdowns so I have a full view of my 2026.

As much as I love the look of The Productivity Method, The Organised Mums and I’m even partial to the high-end planners of Papier, Aspinal, Filofax and have considered the luxury of Louise Carmen, nothing meets the perfect layout of the much lower-priced, practical and easy-to-view planner of the Smart Panda 2026 Diary that meets my needs completely for the Boring Home and Life Admin Management Planning we all wished didn’t exist but also acts as an essential cornerstone to the fun parts of life. The perfect routine isn’t possible without a planner to suit it.

Why I love this planner

• It’s A4 sized so plenty of space to write everything

• Being ringbound means I can fold the planner back

• It has a whole year view across two pages — the month view is also the same

• The week view is in date and named day columns with rows from 7am to 8pm, which is PLENTY for me.

• There’s a notes section under each dated column.

• The planner covers are made of soft, high-quality vegan leather, instead of being hardback giving it a smooth, supple and premium feel.

• The hourly rows are in 30 minute slots allowing for very precise planning, which works for the slightly type A side of me.

• The pages are made of 100gsm paper to prevent ink bleeding through — I’m yet to test this with my fountain pen, but I’ll report back as to what the results are.

• It’s becoming my second brain for all the mumwritinghouseholdfreelancementalload stuff swirling around in my brain.

• I can see everyone’s birthdays, school trips, work stuff, deadlines, after school clubs, family events, and other things across 2026 at a glance. Same for each month.

In short: I LOVE THIS PLANNER!!!

And it’s less than £15 making it one of the best, low-cost investments I’ve made for my year.

And on that note, I’m off to plan the rest of my week and add the very minute details of life that are sitting in my head so I can get a restful night’s sleep!

Apologies for the late post this week, I promise I’ll do better. Have a lovely week ahead!

Until next time…

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated! You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see more of my content.

Hey guys, I always love sharing bits about my life and having a chinwag. The B-Roll Scroll is the perfect way to do that. Whether it’s the latest show, a podcast recommendation, books (naturally!) or an article, I’ll be sharing useful links as well as some of my favourite finds.

Just a note that some of the things I share are affiliate links in this post. So…let’s get cracking!

I have a great mug that I found in B&M a couple of months ago that sums up my weeks and months really, REALLY well. Life feels like a blur — a blur of thoughts, energy, events and conversations. I came across the idea of a commonplace notebook where you can jot down whatever comes to mind and I’m SO going to implement it because everyone knows that the mum brain is spilling over with an infinite number of thoughts.

Whether it’s which load of laundry needs to be done today, or whether the tax return has been completed (still working on mine!) or that little nugget of original thought that I need to write a piece on, my brain is like a box of random things that needs to be decluttered.

With that, I also think this is a great way to create a digital weekly journal, but more curated. A place where I can share what I’ve been doing on a weekly basis, whether that’s eating out, a great recipe, a book (of course!), something new I’ve tried or a podcast. The bit behind the scenes; the true b-roll.

What’s coming up?

• podcast recommendation

• breakfasting out

• my latest read

• a favourite bag I’ve been absolutely in LOVE with.

• giving a padel a try

What I’m listening to right now

I don’t listen to many podcasts, not even Diary of a CEO, which EVERYBODY seems to listen to. I’m more of a ‘sit in silence and ruminate’ sort of person, but also with two children and phone calls from family in between, podcasts fall to the backburner. I was beginning to feel a bit isolated at one point, as well as lost, because there were so many amazing podcasts I wanted to listen to, but not enough time.

I suddenly realised that the pockets of time where I have some silence is when I’m getting ready for the day. And upon this very realisation, the perfect podcast made its appearance.

Empire: World History first started back in Covid and I’ve been absolutely HOOKED. I haven’t listened to every single episode but enough to say that the quality of podcasts out there pale in comparison to what Empire has to offer. Putting aside the powerhouse duo presenters that are journalist Anita Anand and author William Dalrymple, the depth of discussion, the rapport and the laser-sharp witticisms around the history of the British Empire puts this podcast way above the others out there.

If you find history boring like I do, this will get you interested.

Episode recommendation: slightly gory but necessary recommendation for learning, this episode about King Leopold’s colonial empire and the depth of the brutality is a must-listen. It’s a celebration of photographer Alice Seeley-Harris and how she bravely took on a king simply through her photography.

Where I’ve been eating

My husband said “let’s go to The Ivy” and I said “hell, yes!”

The Ivy Nottingham Brasserie opened back in October, and in the midst of moving house and getting things organised, we never got around to visiting soon after its opening night. Recently crowned as Britain’s best-loved restaurant chain (with Nando’s as the runner-up!), its cultural reputation stems from the original restaurant in Covent Garden that used to attract celebrities, sometimes for the hidden Ivy Club.

Names like Robert DeNiro, Benedict Cumberbatch, Nicole Kidman with Tom Cruise (who then later went there again with Katie Holmes), Kate Moss, Beyonce and more have made their appearances at the historic establishment.

Childcare, and maybe the fact that I want to be tucked up in bed earlier than my children, has always prevented us from going there for dinner. However, I was pleased to see they have an extensive breakfast menu, particularly one that included a pancake stack, so we made our way to the city centre. Neither of us knew exactly where, but as someone who knows the area better than my husband and with a sense of direction that is measured by bookshops and libraries, I know that it’s just past the 4-floor Waterstones.

Formerly the home of Hugo Boss in a Victorian building that dates back to 1885, The Ivy Nottingham is a replica of the original one in London with an orangery-esque interior that also reminds me of a now closed restaurant in Marble Arch in London, La Portes Des Indes, serving French-inspired Indian cuisine.

The Ivy has its own vibe though, and the food and service were impeccable. Polite, attentive and helpful, the staff match the reputation of the restaurant, but the food is where it truly shines.

In dire need of a second coffee and definitely some breakfast, my husband chose a flat white and The Ivy Vegetarian Breakfast while I chose the vanilla turmeric latte and buttermilk pancakes.

If I was ever in doubt about the quality of the food or that the portions might be too big (yes, this is a concern for us both as diners), all my doubts were completely cleared after the first bite.

Fluffy, fruity and flavoursome, the pancakes with the fruit and accompanying red berry sauce tasted delicious and light mixed with the very slight tang of the Greek yoghurt. After the first few bites, I was already full and offered the rest to my husband. But I wasn’t so full that I couldn’t have a taste of his breakfast.

I was immediately full of regret.

Regret that I didn’t order the same breakfast but equally conflicted that I still would have wanted my pancakes. So much for me being decisive.

The hollandaise sauce with the potato rosti, grilled halloumi, and avocado topped with mushrooms were UTTERLY beautiful. Chef’s kiss beautiful.

I can’t rave about this breakfast enough. The pictures don’t do it justice and, having tried breakfast places between New York, Sydney and Auckland, I don’t think anything can ever come close to breakfast on home turf at The Ivy Nottingham.

If you want to see more about this, check it out over on my Instagram page.

What I’ve been reading

Аlthough I’d resolved to read less this year, I couldn’t help myself during a quick browse at the library. I’m in the phase of seriously serious parenting right now, where I’m trying to figure out if my teen is actually angry or going through a mood swing, and whether I’ll get an eye-roll when I ask him to help me load the dishwasher or he’ll turn into The Hulk.

Treading on eggshells is putting it mildly.

Naturally this has made me realise I don’t know a lot, but especially that, as the youngest of 4 sisters, I know NOTHING about parenting teen boys so, as always, it’s time to turn to the books.

Generation Sleepless caught my eye because sleep has become a problem in the home. More me than him, to be honest. The thing no one tells you about the transition to teenhood is that they go from being torturously early risers at 6am to a slothful waking that leaves you wondering if you’ll ever leave the house that day.

The most impactful part of this is them staying up late. I almost cried when I realised the 8pm bedtimes and my evening me-time were completely over. But I do love the half-asleep chats we have about school, life and what time the sun rises in Yakutsk and what phase the moon is in. Apparently I’m raising an encyclopaedia of astronomy.

The book is currently helping me through all of that without ripping my hair out in the evenings. Review to come soon but you can take a quick look at it here.

My latest favourite buy

Bags are aplenty in my wardrobe, but not a Barbour bag. An impulse buy from the Barbour Outlet near me but it turned out to be the MOST PERFECT shoulder bag I’ve ever had. It fits over my very, very puffy coat during winter, carries my hefty organiser (check out what else I carry in my bag!) and looks fabulous for the school run and anywhere else. I don’t think I’ve ever loved a bag as much as I do this one, and I own a couple of cute Michael Kors and Kate Spades.

But the Barbour Healy Quilted Tote tops them all. It comes in other colours but personally, I think the olive green is true to the essence of the brand and you can see how I use it here.

Trying something new

Yet another one of my racquet sport playing husband’s ideas, we tried out padel for the first time this week.

TLDR; I’m going back, no notes.

I haven’t played any sort of racquet sport since I was in year 8 at school as a fresh-faced 13 year old, completely fluffing up my tennis lessons because I was too busy chatting to my friends. But this time, I made sure to take padel seriously and LOVED it. I was still terrible at it, but by the end of my first session, my husband and I had a few rallies between us. It’s not the same as tennis, but it may as well be for those who have little experience, like myself.

As a squash player, my husband’s been looking for something with lower impact on his knees, especially as he’s had to step away from his favourite sport after a mild ACL injury. Padel is a great alternative and perfect for the family, too. We plan to introduce the kids to it this weekend and see if we can make it a weekly thing for us.

We went to play at Advantage Padel. An off-peak session for a singles court is £22 for an hour.

That’s all for this week! I’ll be spending the weekend pottering about the house, buying a new microwave (our current one was only 1.5 years old!), going for padel with the kids, and for long walks on my own.

Have a lovely weekend, and week ahead too. Until next time…

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated! You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see more of my content.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to post this week because I didn’t know what to write. But then I thought why not do it anyway? Overthinking is one of my biggest struggles and has always held me back from doing more, taking the leap and putting my thoughts out there.

In the midst of overthinking, my thoughts often get muddled and I lack clarity, hence this is how (and why) my Substack came about. So let’s crack on with this week’s thoughts, reflections and revisiting the past.

When I first rediscovered reading as an adult, it was due to the influence of social media. I was a mum with young children, constantly scrolling on my feed which, back then, was the Facebook mums groups. After reading a whole bunch of posts seeking help and receiving toxic judgement from other mothers, I’d always come away feeling frustrated and down in the dumps. Mostly about the fact that all the mummy groups and motherhood communities were so horribly unsupportive of each other at a time when I felt very lonely and isolated, and partly that something was missing.

There had to be more to motherhood beyond the loneliness, and I couldn’t see any respite from the isolation even if I returned to work. Lost and my confidence dipping, I continued to scroll and scroll, not realising the negative impact it was all having on me.

Motherhood isn’t enough for many women and I agree with this. But it was, and still is, a joy for me. I truly mean that.

By some stroke of sheer will and, now I look back on it, determined habit-building energy in my 20s and early 30s, I’d also managed to make time for fitness. The imagery of fit, strong women on American fitness DVDs worked on me.

Insanity (and the whole Beachbody enterprise), Jillian Michaels (who has become increasingly odious with time), and Bodybuilding.com had shown me that strong and fit was what I needed wanted to be. I was tired of feeling weak after having children.

If I’m being completely honest, I just didn’t want to take up running, which is hugely ironic because running on the treadmill is how I started my journey at the gym when I eventually got there. When I first started, I was doing home workouts because I couldn’t get to the gym and it was too costly to pay for one that had a créche.

(Another irony to note here — one of the many things that is supposed to help new mums feel like happy, normal human beings is prohibitively expensive for them.)

I hated cardio with such intense, detestable passion that I wanted an alternative narrative even if it meant being an outlier among the vast majority of women on Facebook groups trying to lose the baby weight through the cardio-only route. To my pleasant surprise, I found enjoyment in weight training and building muscle at a time where women were still being told that cardio was the best way for women to stay fit.

When I first entered the gym, women in the weights section were a very slow growing group but it was nowhere near the numbers that I happily and most gratefully see today. The real and most dramatic change has taken place over the last 5 years, especially after Covid when most gyms had to shut down. It also helps that Gen Z, the generation that’s spent their childhood consuming social media, have finally shifted the narrative online as they fled in droves towards fitness with gym memberships almost doubling since 2020.

Despite being in a good routine enjoying fitness and the studies telling me that exercise is beneficial for brain function, something, just some THING, felt missing. I didn’t feel lonely anymore and my confidence had skyrocketed knowing that I was looking after my health. But I couldn’t quite pinpoint exactly what was missing. Just that there was.

Instagram was still in its infancy at the time, but gradually building traction with how it was being used. Accounts were growing with picture-perfect visuals. People had shifted over from Facebook to Instagram for fewer arguments and useless memes to more visually appealing content. Within that, communities were beginning to crop up here and there.

Around 2018, I came across bookstagram on my fitness account and it’s like a lightbulb lit up in my head. OF COURSE! How, how HOW on Earth had I forgotten that I used to be a voracious reader? How could I have let adulting and motherhood and everyone else tell me that I had to leave my favourite things behind? Books shaped me, moulded me, helped me find myself, and nourished me. They had always given me energy when I was younger and had been a source of immense comfort and a strong deterrent against boredom.

Following one or two accounts helped me find more and more and soon I was down the rabbit hole of rediscovering books. But this time as an adult whose tastes had changed, who had some experience of life, and ACTUAL opinions. I browsed the bookstagram feed, followed publishers, looked up the latest reads — intense immersion was necessary to help me find what I wanted to read, what I had missed out on, and what everyone was loving. I went to bookshops, smelt books, bought a couple.

I was in a frenzy of literary discovery. I found LitHub and realised that in more than a decade of not reading, an entire generation of readers had emerged and we were now able to talk to each other, hype over books we loved when we were younger. It was a whole new world and I wanted to break into song like Aladdin. I felt like I was clawing back pieces of myself that had been stripped away by the expectations of adulthood.

Most women say motherhood made them lose themselves. This needs a finer point.

Motherhood makes us question the idea we had of ourselves, and everything we thought we were.

I realised that the image that I had built up in my head of the kind of woman I’d be as a mother after the kids was an illusion. I can’t quite remember the image I had conjured up but it wasn’t realistic and filled with perfectionism. Entering parenthood was stressful with immensely crippling anxiety and along with it came a tonne of confidence issues. Perfection and ideals had to fall away. And with that, so did the illusion.

In its place came something else. A happy, fulfilled mum with happy, thriving children. Not the kind of 1950s imagery of the Stepford wife and mum in the kitchen with well-dressed, well-behaved robot offspring by her side, but real bonding, sharing and connection.

The reality of motherhood made me want to be better as a person for my children and that included feeding my brain and my mental wellbeing with books. There is a problem I suffer with though: action.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, overthinking has always held me back and for some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up a book. I couldn’t bring myself to act, to commit to reading; I think I was scared of trying something new after fitness.

Yet again, it was a research study that pushed me. Research from Yale found that people who read a chapter a day increased their lifespan by almost two years was the impetus I needed to spur me on. The rest is history.

I look back and wonder what had made me give up reading in the first place. There isn’t one key point, but I know where it began to slow down: the onset of GCSEs, A levels, university and impending adult life. My love for books had diminished and I was told I needed to leave it behind if I wanted to succeed in life, instead of being reminded that books were the reason for all of my successes and achievements.

In a world that undermines looking after ourselves and encourages hustle for others at the expense of our physical and mental health, at the risk of burnout, motherhood — one of the most taxing tasks — taught me I needed to look after myself for a greater goal; that to have a sharp brain and good physical health would make me a better mother and an overall happy and positive person.

This isn’t about self-sacrifice. It’s that I unlearned the messaging of societal conditioning through parenting and realised that self-development for one’s own children becomes personal fulfilment. At first, you do it for the kids, then you realise this is what you were meant to be doing anyway and suddenly, it clicks that you can be a good parent AND be kind to yourself. Who knew?!

But more importantly, you discover a side of yourself that you thought you’d said goodbye to. Instead, you find yourself waving a hello to the person you were always meant to be.

Thanks for reading and supporting The B-Roll. If you like reading my work here, and found it valuable enough that others should know about it too, then I’d be grateful if you could share, like or drop a comment on this post. It’s hugely appreciated! You can follow me on Instagram or TikTok to see more of my content.