The Darling Buds, Some Rosé, and a Small Career Milestone

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. I have been outside considerably more than usual and have the beginnings of a tan on my right arm, my driving arm, which is the British definition of summer.

April was the bigger month emotionally, for reasons I’ll explain. 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.

January: Hamburg

A hen weekend in Hamburg in January, with a group of colleagues. The bride was in her early thirties; the rest of the party ranged from mid-twenties to me. I treasured the invitation genuinely and accepted it without hesitation and I am here to tell you that two nights in Hamburg with a group of women for whom midnight is early is a humbling experience when you are forty-three and have been getting up at six for a Chelmsford train for the past four months.

I had a wonderful time. I also felt every one of my years in a way that was, if not precisely enjoyable, at least clarifying. I did not overindulge, which I count as both a personal and professional achievement. I saw a great deal of Hamburg from unexpected angles at unexpected hours. I came home on the Sunday afternoon and went to bed at eight o’clock, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write, and which I am writing anyway because this blog has a policy of honesty about these things.

I should also record, purely in the interests of full disclosure, that I read Marching Powder on the flights there and back — a true story about a British drug smuggler in a Bolivian prison, which is not a book that pairs especially naturally with a hen weekend, but which I found completely gripping and which I recommend to everyone unreservedly. I was the only person on the return flight reading a paperback. The rest of the group were either asleep or watching something on their phones. I considered this further evidence of the generational divide and turned the page.

February: New Zealand

A friend’s wedding in Auckland in February gave us the excuse — not that we needed much — to book the long-haul flight back. Richard came for part of it; the wedding was in the second week and we went early to have proper time in the city.

We stayed in an Airbnb in Mt Eden rather than a hotel, which was lovely and, in retrospect, a mistake — or rather, not a mistake exactly, but a decision with emotional consequences we should have anticipated. When you stay in a hotel in Auckland you are visiting. When you stay in a house in Mt Eden with a garden and a coffee machine and a route to Circus Circus you know by heart, you are living there, briefly, and the leaving at the end of it is a different kind of hard. I drove past Milton Road. I did not stop. I didn’t need to.

We went to Tawharanui for a day, which is what we always do, because Geoff goes there and because it is still one of the finest places I know. The wedding was wonderful – an inside affair at the Hilton down in the Viaduct, while it was grey and rainy, but a lovely day all the same . We came home to London the following week and landed directly into the Beast from the East, which arrived with the specific passive aggression of English weather greeting you after a New Zealand February. It was minus three. I stood at the front door for a moment and considered my choices. Then I went inside and made tea.

March: Andorra

A girls’ ski trip to Andorra in March — five of us, an overnight flight to Lyon, and then a drive into the mountains through fresh snowfall that made everything look like someone had commissioned a backdrop. I had not been to Andorra before. It is, in the specific way of places that exist largely for ski tourism and duty-free, cheerfully and unapologetically itself.

The skiing was good. The après was, at certain points, rather better than the skiing, and there was one moment on the final afternoon in Encamp where one of our group — who had been considerably more committed to the après than the slopes — discovered that her courage had not survived the champagne and found herself at the top of the final descent requiring moral support. We waited. With patience. For twenty-five minutes. She pizzaed to the bottom with the dignity of someone who has committed to a course of action and is seeing it through regardless of pace. We were supportive. We were also very cold. We flew back via Toulouse, which is an excellent airport to be delayed in, and I came home with aching legs and a renewed appreciation for flat ground.

Also: Still Looking

Two more viewings since the last post — both in Herne Hill, both close but not quite. One had everything except a garden worth the name, which Richard, who grew up with one and has never quite forgiven a house for not having one, ruled out within about four minutes of arriving. The other had the garden and the light and a kitchen I could have moved into on the spot, but the survey would have needed to be extremely forgiving about a roof that wasn’t.

I keep a note on my phone now, started in November, that’s really just a list of things I didn’t know I wanted until I saw a house that didn’t have them. A proper hallway. A kitchen you can stand in with someone else without negotiating. Morning light somewhere that isn’t the bedroom. It’s an odd way to learn what you want — by subtraction, one disappointing viewing at a time — but it’s apparently the only way that actually works.

Nothing yet. We’re not in a hurry, or we’re telling ourselves we’re not, which amounts to roughly the same thing at this stage. But the list is getting shorter and more specific, which I’m choosing to read as progress.

In other news from the commute: IDGAF by Dua Lipa has been on the Chelmsford playlist since February in a way that has become, I think, load-bearing. I am forty-three. I do not care. There is something about that song at seven in the morning on a train through Essex that is exactly the correct amount of defiant for a Tuesday. I have also been listening to Desert Island Discs on the way home, which is a more dignified choice and which I am allowed to use as an offset. I finished Sapiens in April — read the last fifty pages on the train to La Spezia, as it turned out, which gave me quite a lot to think about while looking at five-hundred-year-old Ligurian fishing villages. Harari is brilliant and occasionally infuriating in the way that books are brilliant and infuriating when they make you reconsider things you thought you’d settled. I gave it five stars and then immediately wanted to argue with it.

April: Two Birthdays, One Month

Gemma turned eighteen on the 19th of March. I turned forty-three on the 9th of April. Every year since she was born, our birthdays have arrived within three weeks of each other — she got in early, as I’ve always said, before I started feeling old — and every year we celebrate them as a kind of combined event, usually with a family dinner and the mild argument about whether the shared cake counts as two cakes or one. (It counts as two. We have a cake each. This is not negotiable and never has been.)

Eighteen, though. That one landed differently.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to have a child who grew up in Auckland and then grew up in England, and who has somehow, in the years between thirteen and eighteen, done both. She started Millais not knowing anyone, with an accent that got her noticed and a sporting ability that eventually got her respected, and she has built herself a life here with the same directness she’s applied to everything since the feijoa negotiation at the Mt Eden market when she was seven. She is eighteen. She has A-levels in four weeks. She has opinions about universities and about property development and about the Warriors’ season and about my driving, which she delivers with equal authority and which I receive with varying degrees of grace.

For her birthday: dinner at a restaurant in Battersea, the same one where I had my fortieth, which was either a lovely continuity or a scheduling accident depending on who you ask. Richard made a speech. I cried. Gemma did not cry, as is consistent with her established approach to emotional occasions, but she held my hand under the table when she thought nobody was looking, which I am noting here for the permanent record.

For mine: Immy organised lunch with the full circle, as she has done every year since I got back. Long, excellent, the bottle of wine arriving that Julia had ordered without being asked. Richard came to dinner in the evening. It was a good birthday. Forty-three feels, if I’m honest, like being exactly the age I should be.

May: Work Wine Night

Before Cinque Terre, a work wine night that I organised with the best intentions and which produced unexpected results. The plan was a proper tasting — structured, educational, a chance for the team to engage with something beyond their usual Friday evening white. My two colleagues in their forties were fully committed to this plan. The younger contingent were not.

The tasting lasted approximately twenty minutes before someone connected a phone to the venue’s speakers and the evening reclassified itself. The Director, who had arrived with several bottles of excellent French red and an evident intention to drink them, decided that the booth was the correct position. I agreed with him. We sat and drank very good wine and watched our colleagues dance with the serene detachment of people who are making excellent choices. It was, in its own way, a very successful evening.

Cinque Terre

The following weekend, Richard and I went to Cinque Terre with Julia and Tobias, which had been Julia’s idea since approximately November and which she had organised with the precision you would expect from a Swiss woman who has spent twenty years in real estate. We were met at La Spezia station. We had dinner reservations. The accommodation was exactly what she’d described. Tobias, who is an architect and cannot stop being one even on holiday, gave a running commentary on the vernacular construction of each village as we passed through it that was genuinely interesting and occasionally made us slightly late for things.

The five towns in sequence: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corniglia, Vernazza, Monterosso. Each one perched on the cliff above the sea, painted in terracotta and yellow and the specific dusty pink that seems to exist only in Liguria, connected by hiking trails and by the train that tunnels through the rock between them. The light was extraordinary — late May, full sun, the Ligurian coast doing exactly what it promises on photographs and then slightly exceeding it.

We hiked the Via dell’Amore on the first day — or the section of it that was open, which was not all of it, several trails being closed for restoration. Corniglia to Vernazza the second day, which is the harder walk and the better one: the path goes up steeply through terraced vineyards before it comes down into Vernazza’s harbour, and the view back along the coast at the top is the kind that makes you stop and just look at it in silence for a minute, which our group did, which I appreciated. We are not all Tobias.

We took a boat from Vernazza to Monterosso on the third afternoon to reward ourselves for the hiking, which is a sentence I feel good about. Monterosso has the only proper sandy beach in the five towns and a row of seafood restaurants along the front and we sat there for four hours in the sun eating anchovies and drinking the local white wine, which is Vermentino and which I am now firmly committed to. Richard fell asleep briefly at the table. Tobias sketched something in his notebook. Julia and I talked about whether I was going to ring Steve at Bayleys.

We spent the last morning in Pisa, which I had not been to before and which is — and I say this affectionately — the most good-natured tourist trap in Europe. Everyone there is doing exactly one thing, they all know they’re all doing exactly one thing, and there’s a collective cheerful absurdity to it. We did the photograph. Richard’s is very good. Mine looks like I’m trying to push the tower into a field.

RICS Awards, Black-Tie, Midweek

My firm put two of us forward for the RICS annual awards dinner in late May — me and a senior PM called Alistair who has been in the industry for twenty-two years and treats black-tie evenings with the mild bemusement of someone who signed up for project management and keeps finding himself at the Grosvenor House. He is excellent company at these things because he finds them as absurd as I do but does not allow the absurdity to stop him having a very good time.

I wore a dress I’d bought for a client event two years ago and had been waiting for an occasion to justify. Black, floor-length, simple enough that it works for anything and particular enough that people notice it. Richard saw me in it on the way out and said: “You look properly good.” He doesn’t use superlatives casually. I considered this adequate.

The evening was the usual format — champagne reception, round tables of ten, awards presented by someone who is recognisable but whose name I can’t quite place, a menu that is better than event catering has any right to be. We didn’t win our category, which was fine; being shortlisted at nearly two years into the PM role felt like more than sufficient. Alistair won the table quiz, which he was extremely undignified about for a man who considers awards dinners absurd.

What I did take away, sitting at that table in the Grosvenor House in a room full of people who are doing the work I came back to London to do: a feeling of being, finally, in the right room. Not arrived. Not finished. Just: in the right room. It took five years from the house with the bare floors and the M&S bag from Mum. I’ll take it.

So: Hamburg, a Beast from the East, a friend pizzaing down a mountain, two birthdays, two more disappointing viewings that taught me something useful anyway, five Ligurian villages, and a black-tie dinner.

Gemma is doing her A-levels. She periodically appears in the kitchen to tell me I’m making tea wrong.

She’s not wrong about the tea. But I’m not admitting it.