New House, New Letters, and a Semi-Final My Daughter Is Still Not Over

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 as Richard and I are heading off to the Cotswolds in the morning.

So: the back half of 2019, roughly in order. New house, a new set of letters after my name, a project I’m rather proud of, a semi-final that I suspect my daughter has not yet emotionally recovered from, and a weekend in Paris that was entirely mine.

Stradella Road, Properly

We exchanged in May, as planned, and were in by the start of June. Six months on, the house has stopped feeling like a project and started feeling like ours, which I understand is simply what happens with time and is nonetheless satisfying to notice happening. The garden — the one that was considerably larger than two people with a daughter at university strictly needed — has had a proper summer in it now: a vegetable bed that produced more courgettes than any reasonable household requires, a table where we’ve had more dinners outside than I expected London weather to allow, and a corner Richard has more or less annexed for his craft brewing group, who now treat our garden shed with a reverence I find both touching and slightly alarming.

I have found a new colourist — Herne Hill, ten minutes’ walk, considerably better than the last one, may Maria in Horsham forgive me — and a Saturday morning routine that involves the market, a coffee and croissant at the café under the railway arches that does a genuinely excellent flat white, and, on the good weeks, absolutely nothing else planned. I also, after two years and nine recorded sightings, finally bought a black wool coat from John Lewis. I want it on record that I did not need a specific occasion. I simply walked in on a wet Tuesday and bought it, which after two years of deliberation felt less like a decision and more like a formality.

Gemma is into her second year at Exeter and considerably more settled than last year — fewer Sunday texts about being fine, more Sunday texts with actual content in them, which I’ve decided to take as a good sign rather than a concerning one. She’s started thinking seriously about her year abroad for the Spanish half of the degree — Madrid or Buenos Aires, last I heard, with strong opinions on both that changed twice during one phone call. She came home for a long weekend in October and pronounced the house “actually really nice, Mum,” which from Gemma is roughly equivalent to a five-star review.

A Wedding in Essex

On the first of June, with roughly half our belongings still in boxes, we drove out to Essex for a wedding — Richard’s colleague’s eldest son, marrying a genuinely lovely young woman, at the Warren Estate near Woodham Water. It was, without qualification, one of the loveliest wedding days I’ve been to in years: a marquee in proper countryside, blue skies obliging themselves for once, and a couple who were visibly, uncomplicatedly happy about the whole thing.

The groom’s friends, several of whom had evidently known him since primary school, treated the reception as a competitive sport. I watched one man attempt, and fail, three separate times to get through a speech without breaking down entirely. I watched another spend a significant portion of the evening trying to convince a bridesmaid that a particular university anecdote involving a canoe reflected well on him. It did not, in my professional opinion, reflect well on him. Richard and I left at a perfectly reasonable hour and were, I am fairly confident, among the small minority of guests who remembered the whole of it the next morning.

Work: The Year of Three Projects

Beaulieu finally reached practical completion in early spring, which meant the end of the 6am alarms and the Chelmsford commute I will not pretend to miss even slightly. I moved onto a large riverside regeneration scheme in Brentford for an Irish developer — new apartments, a retail precinct, and a beautifully restored old church at the heart of it, which is the part of the project I’m most attached to. The client rep is impressively difficult to read; I genuinely could not tell you, six months in, whether he rates me. His colleagues are lovely and keep a biscuit tin permanently stocked in every meeting, which I’ve decided is the correct way to run a project.

Then, less happily, my Kensington scheme was reassigned to a colleague as the wider team’s workload shifted — which stung more than I expected, mostly because I’d grown fond of the specific post-site-visit pad thai routine at the Churchill Arms, a pub near the site with the most extravagantly flower-covered frontage in London. In its place was an entirely different ultra-luxury conversion in St John’s Wood — a former military barracks, in the spirit of the Chelsea Barracks scheme, being turned into high-end residential with a former riding school converted into a private health club, for a different Malaysian billionaire client to the Kensington one. High-end architects, no expense anywhere, and a delivery strategy complicated enough that I suspect it will still be interesting in three years’ time.

Alongside all of this I finally sat my APC through RICS — the professional competency assessment that moves you from qualified-but-not-quite to properly chartered. Months of case studies, mock interviews, and one entire administrative farce involving a rescheduled assessment centre at a Holiday Inn near Heathrow that I will spare you the details of. I passed. There was, I’m not ashamed to say, some very undignified crying, followed by considerably more dignified champagne. I am now allowed to put letters after my name, which I have already done on my email signature with what Richard describes as ‘slightly excessive enthusiasm.’

And by June, after quietly interviewing for a few months, I’d accepted a client-side role with a proper developer at King’s Cross — the kind of firm whose schemes you actually notice when you’re walking past them. My new boss is Australian, sharp, and we spent the entire interview’s final ten minutes arguing cheerfully about Vegemite versus Marmite, which I’m choosing to interpret as a good omen. I started in October. Six years after coming home and telling anyone who’d listen that what I actually wanted was to build things, not just advise on them — here we finally are.

What Got Me Through It

A year with this much professional upheaval in it needs a coping mechanism, and mine, reliably, is Terry Pratchett. I discovered Discworld properly in my twenties in Auckland — a colleague at Bayleys handed me a battered copy of Mort and said I’d either love it or not get it at all, and there’d be no in-between. I loved it. There is a specific subset, the City Watch books mostly, that I return to whenever a week has gone particularly badly, and this year that meant several very well-thumbed evenings with Sam Vimes during the worst of the APC preparation. I don’t reread them because they’re undemanding — Night Watch is doing something genuinely sophisticated about policing and revolution that I notice more of every time — I reread them because I already know how they end, and there is real relief in that when everything else that week is still uncertain.

Alongside the comfort reading, I finally worked through a small stack of books about women and work I’d been collecting for a couple of years — The Authority Gap, The Likeability Trap, Lean In, eventually, years after everyone else. I came to these later than most women my age, I think, because the Bayleys years genuinely didn’t feel like the thing these books describe. Coming back to London and going through Foxtons, CBRE, and recruitment in my late thirties and early forties, I started noticing things I hadn’t noticed before — meetings where I’d say something and watch it land differently when a man said an almost identical thing four minutes later. Nothing dramatic. Just a low hum you stop noticing until someone points it out, and then can’t stop hearing. The Authority Gap didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t experienced, but it confirmed I wasn’t imagining the pattern, which changed how I categorise it when it happens — from ‘something’s wrong with how I’m coming across’ to ‘ah, that thing again.’ The second one is considerably less exhausting to carry around.

I also finally read Liar’s Poker, mostly out of curiosity about what Richard’s world looked like from the inside in the eighties. Very funny, very alarming, and it explained rather a lot about his occasional inability to switch off in the evenings.

Musically, the year belonged, whether I wanted it to or not, to Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, which has played in every café, taxi, and lift I’ve entered since roughly March, to the point I now associate it primarily with waiting rooms. Gemma has been trying, with limited success, to get me into Billie Eilish. I’ve had rather more luck with Dave’s album, which a colleague pointed me toward after it won the Mercury Prize, and which is genuinely excellent, whatever that’s worth coming from a forty-four-year-old project manager.

The Rugby World Cup, Which Gemma Is Still Not Discussing Calmly

The All Blacks put Ireland away comfortably in the quarter-final, and Richard and I marked it properly with a few old friends at a pub in Angel — loud, entirely unapologetic, the specific pleasure of caring this much about something in a country that mostly doesn’t. Then came the semi-final against England, which Gemma is still, months later, not fully able to discuss with any composure. Nineteen to seven. Comprehensive. Not a bad call or a refereeing controversy for her to be properly angry about, apparently — simply the better team on the day, which is somehow worse. Richard and I watched it at home, and I was diplomatically silent throughout, which, after twenty-two years of marriage to a man whose devotion to New Zealand rugby is considerably more serious than his British passport would suggest is reasonable, is exactly the correct response. Gemma texted from Exeter within about ninety seconds of the final whistle — one word, fully capitalised, which I won’t reproduce here but which said everything that needed saying. Neither of us has brought it up since. We had some friends from New Zealand stay with us the following weekend, and the game was only tentatively brought up after several bottles of Otago Pinot Noir and a full cheeseboard.

Helsinki, Underground

Work sent me to Finland in November to visit the manufacturing plant of one of our lift suppliers — the kind of trip I did not expect to be excited about and was, entirely. We stayed in a converted prison turned five-star hotel with walls thick enough that I heard precisely nothing all night, which after the last few years of party walls felt like witchcraft. The supplier’s campus, an hour outside the city, runs automated manufacturing and has testing shafts sunk two hundred metres down into old limestone mines, built purely to test lift performance at full scale. Two hundred metres straight down into the rock. I have not stopped thinking about it. I also now know there is a speed beyond which a human body cannot travel in a pressurised lift without losing its lunch, which is deeply niche professional knowledge and one I am unreasonably pleased to have.

Paris, Entirely Mine

The last weekend of November was a solo trip to Paris — properly solo, nobody else’s itinerary to accommodate, which I hadn’t done in years and had been quietly wanting to do since the house settled and Gemma stopped needing quite so much of my attention. Eurostar from St Pancras on a crisp Friday evening; Gare du Nord at that particular golden hour that makes the whole city look lit for a film.

Montmartre that first night was properly beautiful — Sacré-Cœur lit from below, almost embarrassingly cinematic. I stood there rather a long while. Then, in the interest of full honesty: Parisian hotel bathrooms are not built for a vigorous hair-wash. The shower tray was approximately sixty centimetres square. I flooded the entire bathroom and a fair portion of the bedroom carpet, and spent ninety minutes on my hands and knees with a hairdryer trying to undo the damage before the hotel noticed. Quite the first night.

Saturday was the Louvre, done properly — I never made it inside on my first Paris trip in my twenties, which was the kind of coach tour that is character-building rather than culturally rich. This time: the audio guide, fully committed. Some people apparently manage the whole museum in two hours. I managed a third of it in six, and would have stayed longer if the Musée d’Orsay hadn’t been booked for the afternoon on Julia’s recommendation, which turned out to be excellent, as her recommendations generally are.

Sunday was slow — more wandering through Montmartre, a café au lait in a square with no particular agenda, people-watching, then home on the Eurostar feeling entirely and pleasantly full in the way only certain cities manage. I’d go back properly, but with Richard. I already know that.

A Building Site in King’s Cross

I’ll close the year with this, since it’s felt appropriate all week: a tour of the Google building going up at King’s Cross — which, since October, is more or less my new professional neighbourhood. Enormous cross-laminated timber floors, structural timber at a scale still genuinely rare in UK commercial construction, seven separate lift cores, and, once finished, a sightline straight through the building end to end, several hundred metres long. I love this job for exactly this kind of moment — the gap between what a city looks like today and what it’s quietly becoming underneath it.

Sasha, Claire, and the Long Overdue Dinners

Sasha came for Sunday lunch in the new garden in August, worked her way through most of a bottle of rosé, and pronounced the courgettes ‘obscene,’ which from Sasha is the highest possible compliment a vegetable can receive. She has already invited herself back for the summer, on the basis that the garden will presumably still exist and the courgettes will presumably still be prolific. Both safe assumptions.

Claire and I did our usual long walk on the Downs in September — the same route we’ve been doing for the better part of two decades, which never once gets old, possibly because we never once take the same conversation twice. This year it was mostly Gemma’s year abroad and Claire’s eldest starting sixth form, which between us covered most of the available parenting anxieties for a two-hour walk.

And Immy, Serena and Julia took me for a very long dinner in October to mark the APC properly — a new place near Borough Market that does the best burrata I’ve had outside actual Italy, and which I’ve now been back to twice on my own account. Four bottles of wine between four women who have all, at various points this decade, talked one another through a professional crisis, a house move, or a genuinely terrible interview. I don’t think I said thank you properly at the time. Consider this that.

So: a new house properly settled, a daughter properly settled at university and eyeing up a year in Madrid or Buenos Aires, three quite different projects, a professional qualification I’m thoroughly proud of, a new job, a rugby result I’m choosing not to discuss further, a limestone mine in Finland, and four days in Paris that belonged entirely to me.

New house. New year. New letters after my name. I’ll take it.

Happy New Year.