It has been an outrageously long time since I last wrote anything here, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The truth is simply that this has been the fullest year I've had since we came back from Auckland, and every time I sat down to write about one part of it, three more things had happened that also needed covering. So: the whole back half of 2019, in one go, which is admittedly an ambitious way to spend the run up to the New Year, especially as I should be packing.

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.

I've been back from Auckland for a week and I'm still not entirely sure what to do with myself. The jet lag is mostly gone but something else is still settling, and I'm going to try to write about it before it does, because once it settles I suspect it will become harder to see clearly. Three weeks in New Zealand. Our first time back since August 2013. Gemma's first time back since she was thirteen. I'm going to have to write this slowly.

There is a particular quality to the months between October and February in London. The light goes early. The Tube smells of damp wool. People begin saying 'it's the run-up to Christmas' from mid-October as though that explains everything, which, fair enough, it sort of does. I either disappear into a duvet for the whole stretch and emerge in March slightly paler, or I spend it on planes. This year: planes.

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