Everyone has lived through their own pandemic, but one entirely common experience is that memory of the last time we inhabited the world without fear or restriction. Depending on where you are in the world or what you do, this will have happened at a different point in the first
• 9 min readIf you have any of those "on this day" features enabled on your social media accounts, you have like me probably started receiving reminders of how one year ago, you were doing a lot of things you took for granted for the last time without knowing it. I've already had
• 5 min readI cannot remember ever watching for the advent of spring so avidly as I have this year. Every dry day, every flash of colour as a crocus pokes out from the sodden grass, every extra minute of daylight past 4pm has detonated a small, juicy bloom of serotonin in my
• 6 min readA short opening notice: I have a few signed copies of my book left for people to buy (because the hardback edition is being gradually retired from sale in favour of the paperback). If you would like one for yourself or as a gift, please use this form to order
• 8 min readI fell over this week. My unreliable left ankle gave way on the second from bottom stair and I toppled forwards, landing on hands and knees on the hard wooden floor of the hall. Somewhere in between I let go of the tea tray I had been carrying and shards
• 6 min readOne unexpected but delightful consequence of this newsletter format I'm doing at the moment is the volume of replies I get. Far more of you than before get in touch to comment on something I've included or to share a related recommendation, and I love it. Probably the biggest single
• 6 min readFor me, life is all about small, iterative improvements at the moment. Big plans are shelved, for obvious reasons. I'm oddly lucky in this regard, because I've had this happen to me before: when I was very ill at the age of 17, I similarly had to just turn off
• 7 min readA stranger wrote to me this week to tell me that while reading my book they had learned a valuable lesson about marine buoyage systems. This surprised me. The Way to the Sea is a personal memoir about growing up with sailor parents. While writing it I didn't feel like
• 7 min readIt's the first day of the new year and as I write this I'm still in my pyjamas. As much as I'm ready for better things to come — vaccines, hugs, concerts, all of that — on the work front I haven't quite wrapped up the last year yet. To do that,
• 8 min readI went to a gig this week. In the horrible new sense of the word "went", but still. I watched The Divine Comedy play an hour's set at the Barbican in London via my slightly greasy laptop screen. I sat in bed drinking a cooling cup of tea. I cried
• 4 min readI read that piece in the Observer last weekend about how fear of a miserable, long, dark winter is mostly in the mind — I'm paraphrasing, but that was roughly it — so of course I have started watching Borgen again from the beginning. I saw this Danish political drama when it
• 4 min readI haven't been on a train since early March, so naturally I've been daydreaming about public transport a lot recently. I'm lucky not to need to use it at the moment, of course, and I'm well aware that for every time I've spent a journey staring out of the window
• 3 min readas well as all the other ones, of course
• 5 min readI didn't write to you last Friday as I had planned. I was busy reenacting this scene: "The Patient" by Vasily Polenov, 1886I had my first really bad migraine in several years. For me, it starts with sparkles at the edge of my vision, like a column of dancing dust
• 4 min readThis is how many words I wrote last week: During the working week 24 — 28 August, I wrote 13,671 words. Which is a lot, far more than I had expected. I also didn't anticipate that fully a quarter of all the words I wrote that week would be in
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