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 March where you sit down to write and realise that the last twelve months have been so relentlessly full that you don't quite know where to start, and then find yourself starting with the thing you least expected to be writing about: a house. Specifically, our house. Specifically, the one we've just bought on Stradella Road in Herne Hill, and which we will actually be in by May.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's been a year and a bit since the last post, which was not the plan. I sat down to write something in the spring and then again in the summer and both times got about three paragraphs in and thought, this needs more space than I've got this evening, and then didn't come back to it. So: here's the whole thing, the day before Christmas Eve, a glass of something decent at my elbow, the house quiet because Gemma is upstairs packing for Bansko in a manner that can only be descr

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