May, as it does, arrived with the aggressive optimism of a month that knows it's the best month and intends to make sure you know it too. Blossom on everything. The evenings suddenly going light until nine. The city remembering how to be pleasant. April was the bigger month emotionally. But there's a run-up to get through first — Hamburg, Auckland, and a ski trip I am still finding evidence of in my washbag. Here's the year so far.

There is a particular kind of late-December lull — the days between Christmas and New Year that don't quite belong to either — where you finally sit down and realise you haven't written anything since the clocks went back. So: October to now, properly, before the year actually closes and I lose the thread of it entirely. A weekend in the Cotswolds in October, which Richard and I had been meaning to do for the better part of three years.

The last time I posted, I mentioned something brewing professionally. I'll get to that. It's now resolved, and the resolution is good, and it turns out the road to it went through Ibiza and Crete and a moment in Manchester that I will not be detailing but that I've filed under: formative. Here's what the last eight months looked like.

Right. I’ve been neglecting this. I know. In my defence, the months between February and May have been somewhat full, and every time I sat down to write a proper post I found I’d either done too much to cover in one go or I was too tired to do any of it justice. So instead I did what any reasonable person does in that situation, which is: nothing, and then felt guilty about it. So here is the catch-up version. Shorter sections. Roughly chronological. No promises about the pho

So. Brazil. I have been back from Rio for two and a half weeks and I am still finding sand in jumpers I haven’t worn since I landed. The tan is fading. The mosquito bites are nearly gone. The 4am Carnival songs still surface occasionally in the queue at Pret, which is a disorienting experience for everyone involved. Twelve days. Two cities. One apartment neither of us had ever been in before, belonging to a colleague of Richard’s who was away and lent us his keys with the che

It’s late September. The window’s open in the sitting room and there’s that particular West Sussex evening air coming in — cold enough to need a jumper, still carrying something of a summer I barely remember having. A few months ago I was on a cliff path in Cornwall with wind in my hair and Sasha telling me I was circling. Now the plane tree outside is turning and the light goes at six and I’m forty, which I mention not for sympathy but because it’s sitting in the corner of t

February in West Sussex is a bleak little month, and nobody pretends otherwise. The trees are still bare. The sky sits about three feet above your head. The pavements are wet in a way that seeps into your socks regardless of what you’ve spent on boots. It’s the month where you realise the novelty of the London winter wore off approximately six weeks ago and you’ve still got a solid chunk of it to go. So I did what any reasonable person does when the weather is unrelenting, th

We landed at Heathrow on a Tuesday morning in late August, and Richard was in a cab to the City before I'd properly found my feet on English soil. I stood there with two suitcases, a hand luggage bag, and a thirteen-year-old who was looking at England with the careful, guarded expression of someone who has been told this is going to be wonderful and is reserving judgement. She was born in Auckland. She has never lived anywhere else. England, to Gemma, is a place her parents a