more is more and less is a bore — iris apfel

i. the accusation: you’re a lot, aren’t you?

there’s a tone they use. not the words. you already know the words. too much. too loud. too hungry. aren’t you satisfied. the words are almost beside the point now, worn smooth with use, like the glassy stones I once kept in a bowl on my windowsill, rubbed until they had no edges left.

it’s the tone.

the slight exhale. the fractional tilt of the head. the performance of patience in the face of your catastrophic, unmanageable wanting.

i heard it first in my own kitchen, as a teenager, reaching for a biscuit.

you must weigh thirteen stone by now, my dad said. not every time, but often enough that i began to feel the sentence before i reached for anything. and my mum, who loved me completely, would tell me the calories of whatever i was eating. a chocolate digestive. a dairylea triangle. quietly, accurately, as though my body were a project we were managing together. not unkind exactly. observational. which in some ways is worse, because it made a fact of something that should have been a pleasure, and a problem of something that should have been a biscuit.

i’ve been learning not to want since i was seven years old.

so have you.

we were taught it in layers so thin we never felt them landing. a mum who pushed the bread basket to the other side of the table before you’d finished. the PE teacher who used the word heavy as a synonym for wrong. the man at twenty-three who said you were wonderful but a bit intense, which was another way of saying your appetite for life was making him feel his own smallness, and that was unforgivable.

the diets. the wellness plans. the therapists who called your wanting dysregulation. the shops that didn’t carry your size. the homes in magazines where three objects stood in a large room and the caption said serene.

i once tried to make a room tasteful.

god help me, i bought oatmeal. oatmeal curtains, oatmeal cushions, a rug the colour of emotional compromise, a single orchid. everyone said it was calm. i felt as though i had been buried in respectable biscuit.

the tone says: pipe down, want less, be small, be grateful, be manageable.

it has been saying this for our entire lives.

we are done listening. i am done listening.

ii. the lie of less

here is the argument they have been running since we were old enough to count calories:

less is more. restraint is sophistication. appetite is pleasure disorder. the pared-back life is the elevated life. the woman who wants everything has something wrong with her.

the wellness coach with the cheekbones and the discount code will tell you this. the beige hotel room will tell you this in its silent, expensive way. the instagram kitchen with one lemon in glazed pottery tells you this every single morning, lying through its carefully staged teeth. your well-meaning mum told you this while she passed you the ryvita instead of the bread, which was love, her kind of love, which was also fear, which is what happens when women have been teaching women to fear their hunger for long enough that the lesson looks like care.

the lie has many names. wellness clean living intentional consumption less but better.

all of them mean the same thing.

your wanting is the problem.

and we have bought it, collectively and expensively, in the form of:

the cost analysis (emotional maths only, the other kind can be disputed from the cheap seats)

cost of the capsule wardrobe: three hundred pounds saved. every morning standing in front of six tasteful items wondering why getting dressed feels like mild bereavement. total: the daily small death of a woman who is not allowed to love clothes out loud.

cost of the velvet cushion not bought: forty-five pounds saved. ten years of not running your fingers across peacock blue while you drink your tea. 912 mornings without one small uncomplicated thing that made your heart do that lifting thing. total: 912 obediences. a life slightly less yours.

cost of the second helping refused: the particular pleasure of satiation. which is not greed. which is the body saying thank you, at last, this was worth being alive for. total: the feast you attended as a guest of yourself and never once ate from.

they made the lie beautiful, which is how you know it works. they gave it clean lines and honest materials and the language of liberation. then they sold it back to us at premium prices and called it freedom.

now.

i am not making an argument against the monk’s cell, the painter’s white studio, the woman who genuinely breathes better with nothing on the mantelpiece but a bowl of lemons and a view of rain. bless her. may her lemons always be waxed and her nervous system forever soothed.

i am making an argument against the moralising of less. the superiority of the empty room. the idea that a woman with seven cushions has failed some spiritual examination that a woman with one cushion has passed. the idea that restraint is sophisticated and appetite is common and the edited life is somehow more honest than the life where things have accumulated because they were wanted.

freedom isn’t an empty room.

freedom is a room so full of things you love that you can barely move through it without touching something good.

and swooning. because muchly women swoon and shriek and faint and moan and scream and whisper and they don’t censor a goddamn word.

iii. the gospel of appetite

on food

i want the pasta with cream and butter and too much pepper and a quantity of parmesan that would alarm a nutritionist. i want to twirl it slowly and close my eyes. i want the bread still warm from the oven, and i want actual salty butter, not the scrape of butter, not the gesture of butter, but butter.

i want cheese that smells like complicated argument. i want the chocolate that costs too much and is too dark and melts bitter on the back of the tongue and makes you feel obscurely intelligent. chocolate as moral choice. i want the tomatoes in august that split when you cut them and run everywhere and taste like the word yes. melon that runs down my cleavage.

i want seconds.

not because i am broken. not because i am filling a void (a phrase that belongs in a recycling bin with journey and wellness and every other word that was taken from somewhere good and rinsed until it meant nothing and i use liberally myself and want to hang my head in shame) because eating with real appetite, is one of the ways we insist that our bodies are not problems requiring management but experiences requiring inhabiting.

the women i know who binge are the women who have been restricting since they were twelve. the women eating with appetite, eating with joy, licking their fingers, asking for the recipe, moaning when it’s good? they eat until they’re full and then they get on with living.

that’s all.

radical, mais oui?

prescription for eating with appetite

take one plate of whatever you actually want. remove all thoughts of tomorrow’s correction. add the pleasure of tasting. close your eyes when it’s good. make sounds if you want to. take seconds. lick your fingers.

possible side effects include: hunger recognised, body inhabited, dinner table conversation about something other than calories. this is not a detox. this is not a protocol. this is just dinner, finally.

on sex

they tried to make this one shameful too. of course they did.

the acceptable version goes like this: responsive, never initiating, enjoyed but not too enthusiastically, over before it becomes demanding, grateful for the attention. the muchly woman’s version is something else entirely. something that involves wanting loudly and saying so and taking what she wants and giving what she wants to give and not, not, NOT apologising for any of it.

the french have jouissance. which means pleasure. which means orgasm. which also means the ecstatic joy of being alive, because they understood that these are the same thing and we apparently had to be convinced.

we say came like something that happened to us, rather than something we did with our whole bodies and wanted done again.

ask for what you want.

take it.

on beauty

the hunting, the gathering, the bringing-of-beautiful-things-home: they made this shallow too. the void-filling accusation. the materialism charge. as if wanting beautiful objects around you is less valid than any other form of pleasure, as if the void exists because you buy things rather than because they have been telling you you are empty since you were born.

acquiring beauty is a spiritual practice. it is the act of saying yes to loveliness. it is the refusal to live in a space designed by someone who forgot you were going to live there.

i want the antique mirror with the gilt frame even though i have nowhere to hang it. i want it because a person made it a hundred years ago and when i look in it i want to see myself reflected in gold rather than in clinical accuracy.

the seventh scarf. the fortieth book. the candle that costs thirty pounds and smells like a paris library i have never visited but can imagine perfectly because of this smell, burning right now, today, not saved for something that would somehow justify it.

this isn’t consumption. it is curation. it is a woman saying: i deserve to live inside beauty, not inside a simulation of what beauty would look like if it had been approved by a committee.

i hate committees.

on words

they have been trying to make us write less for as long as we have been writing.

shorter sentences. tighter edits. hook in the first line or you’ve lost them. content, not essays. posts, not confessions. something optimised, something scannable, something that won’t ask too much of the reader’s attention because attention is scarce now and you should be GRATEFUL for whatever fraction of it you can get.

the substack law says: four hundred words. a clear premise. a call to action. leave them wanting more.

the muchly writer says: i will leave them wanting more by giving them everything.

i know the kind of writing i mean. you know it too. you’ve read it at midnight when you should have been sleeping, one hand around a cold cup of tea, the other scrolling and scrolling because the woman on the other end of the page is cracking something open and you can’t look away. her sentences run long and then cut short and then run long again like a someone who keeps remembering something else, something connected, something that changes the meaning of what she just said. she goes somewhere you didn’t expect. she puts her hands into the wound of the thing. she tells you what she actually thinks, not the acceptable version, not the version she tested for likability, but the true one, the one that made her hands shake a little while she typed it.

she breaks every rule.

and she does it on purpose.

the muchly writer is not producing content. she is pouring excessive thought onto a page and trusting that the excess is the point, that the rambling is not a flaw in the argument but the argument itself, that the digression which takes her three paragraphs away from her premise will circle back carrying something the direct route could never have found.

she knows that brevity is sometimes courage and sometimes cowardice and she knows the difference.

she knows that the essay which goes on too long and touches too many things and refuses to wrap up neatly is often the one that splits the truth open, not because of the length but because of the willingness, the willingness to stay in the room with the complicated thing and keep writing even after the moment when a sensible person would have stopped.

keep it punchy know your niche content pillars repurpose across platforms

she repurposes nothing. each piece is the whole of her at the moment of writing it, poured out, excessive, unmanaged, alive.

and what they say about her: self-indulgent. navel-gazing. she doesn’t know when to stop. who does she think she is.

she thinks she is a woman with something to say and a page to say it on and no intention of measuring her thoughts into palatable portions for people who wanted a snack and got a feast.

she is right.

iv. the muchly women

(seven patron saints of excess, offered as incantation not biography)

frida comes first, obviously.

frida with the flowers like small detonations. frida who painted herself over and over not from vanity but because she needed somewhere to put all the muchness, and canvas was the only container large enough to try.

she painted her broken spine. she painted her bleeding heart. she painted the monkey and the hummingbird and the diego and the other women and all the blood. she decorated her pain the way you decorate a house: because even agony deserved a frame, a ribbon, a blue wall behind it.

what they said: too emotional, too wounded, too mexican, her husband is the real artist.

she painted bigger. wore more flowers. added another monkey.

colette knew that an orange was erotic.

she knew it the way she knew everything physical: through her entire body at once. she wrote about appetite with such shameless sensuality they banned her books. she left her husband and performed nearly naked on stage at forty and took lovers of every variety and understood that the senses, all of them, were not indulgence but the whole point. she said what a wonderful life i have had, i only wish i had realised it sooner, which is the war cry of every muchly woman who wasted a single morning pretending to want less.

what they said: scandalous, indecent, unnatural, shameless.

she wrote more. loved more. ate more.

josephine baker arrived in paris with nothing and proceeded to want everything.

the château. the twelve adopted children. the leopard named chiquita. the costumes made of bananas, because she understood that if you were going to exist you might as well exist so loudly that nobody in the room could look away. she danced nearly naked and didn’t apologise and collected husbands and houses and life with both hands, knowing that being too much was the only way to be enough.

what they said: primitive, exotic, spectacle, too much, too black, too naked.

she bought the château. adopted more children. danced harder.

iris apfel wore more necklaces at one hundred and two than most women dare to own.

still adding. still layering. she said more is more and less is a bore and she meant it as a life philosophy and a political position and possibly also a threat. she left the world in march 2024 in palm beach, florida, wearing more rings than she could count, which is exactly right, which is how you want to go: still accumulating, still reaching, still wanting one more beautiful ridiculous thing.

what they said: eccentric, trying too hard, age-inappropriate, too much.

she wore more anyway.

she still wins.

louise bourgeois made spiders the size of buildings.

because her mother repaired tapestries. because women’s work is never small, even when it pretends to be. she said art is a guarantee of sanity, which means that making things, wanting things, creating in the presence of your own muchness, is what keeps us alive. she made art until she was ninety-eight. she made the spiders bigger every time.

what they said: too psychological, her work is therapy not art, too much childhood trauma.

she kept making. the spiders are in every major museum now.

julia child understood that butter was not the enemy.

she understood that appetite is not dysfunction. that the people who love to eat are always the best people, which is another way of saying that people who are not afraid of their hunger are always the best people. she changed how an entire country thought about food by the simple radical act of cooking with joy, with generosity, with more cream than the recipe required, and laughing loudly when things went wrong.

what they said: too much butter, too tall, too loud, she’ll make everyone fat. lord save us from fat. and julia.

she used more butter. she laughed louder. she taught millions.

diane vreeland said that pink is the navy blue of india.

she lacquered her apartment red. she invented the idea that a fashion editor could be a visionary rather than a reporter. she filled every room she entered with her own ideas until the ideas were the room. she understood that style is the refusal to blend in, which is another way of saying that style is the refusal to disappear.

what they said: affected, pretentious, out of touch, living in fantasy.

she made the red walls redder. she defined taste for a generation.

what the muchly women understood, all of them, is this: the world did not diminish when they burned through it. the world got larger. there was more of everything after they had been in it.

THAT is the gospel.

v. the house that says yes

there are houses you visit and immediately feel that you have been given permission for something.

my house, if i had one, would be trying to be one of those. our narrowboat will be all this and more.

velvet cushions in jewel tones piled on every surface, not matching, because matching is for people afraid of what happens when beautiful things meet. mirrors catching candlelight: bergamot, wild fig, the one that smells like vanilla and newspaper and old men and impossible nostalgia, the one called tobacco and bay leaf that smells like someone you once loved in a reckless winter. books stacked on books. flowers in the wrong vases. a drawerful of velvet ribbon i have never used for anything but cannot discard. an antique key collection that has unlocked nothing for twenty years.

a lampshade with fringe like a tired showgirl.

a red glass vase that makes tulips look drunk.

a chipped tureen full of receipts and seed packets and a button that will never be sewn back on.

a chair nobody sits in because it is occupied by piano shawls and welsh blankets and a tiny jumper.

a mantelpiece that looks like a tiny theatre.

a kitchen table that has heard things.

this is not interior. it’s evidence. proof that a woman has been here, wanting things, accumulating the physical weight of all the times she said yes. the design magazines would call it cluttered. the staging professionals would arrive with boxes and the expression of someone who has decided your life needs editing before it can be sold.

the home that says yes is permission made physical. you walk through the too-many candles and the too-many mirrors and the chair entirely occupied by shawls and something in your nervous system exhales, because you are in the presence of a woman who stopped asking permission, and that permission is contagious.

you walk in and think: oh. this is allowed?

it was always allowed.

they just convinced you otherwise.

vi. the body that refuses reduction

here is where i want to be careful.

not careful careful the way i have been careful my whole life, folding myself smaller, speaking softly, asking permission before i took up space. no. careful the way you are careful when you’re touching something real and don’t want to damage it.

because bodies are complicated.

because some women are managing illness, or recovering from years of restriction, or navigating pain that makes the whole conversation about appetite feel abstract and beside the point. because some women use the injectable appetite suppressants and it is their body and their choice and this manifesto is not here to make anyone feel worse about a decision made in the privacy of their own impossible life.

what i am here to ask is this:

why is the cultural conversation always about reduction? why is the answer always smaller? why do we never, NEVER talk about what it might mean to nourish a body properly, to move in ways that feel like dancing rather than punishment, to want abundance rather than to manage deficit?

the real cost:

three and a third years of your life thinking about food instead of tasting it. three and a third years of counting, managing, correcting, planning the compensation, feeling the shame of the deviation, starting again monday. three and a third years that could have been three and a third years of eating the pasta and getting on with your life.

what would you have done with them?

the muchly body does not want to be optimal. it wants to be inhabited. it wants food that tastes of something. it wants to move through the world claiming space. it wants to be exactly the size it is without performing gratitude for being allowed to exist in it. it wants sex that leaves it stunned. it wants to be outside in weather.

i choose lush.

lushy lushity lushiness. face over bum lushiness. living out loud don’t try and stop me lushy muchiness.

not the grim sustainability of beige virtue. the sensuously sustained life. the one that keeps blooming without requiring you to set yourself on fire for applause.

vii. the permission slip

recipe for becoming ungovernable (spell, not recipe)

take your entire self: all of it, including the parts you refuse to look at.

remove all apologies. compost them. let them feed something with roots.

add one want: the specific one, the unreasonable one, the one you have been reasoning yourself out of for longer than you can remember.

add the courage to disappoint people who preferred you manageable.

fold in every excess you have denied yourself.

do not bake.

let it ferment.

let it rise until it threatens the bowl.

do not stop it from overflowing.

serves: every woman who watches you become ungovernable and quietly thinks: oh, so that is allowed.

the banned words:

wellness PLEASURE journey APPETITE self-care SELF-INDULGENCE (we are taking it back) mindful RAVENOUS balance SENSUOUSLY SUSTAINED moderation ABUNDANCE curated ACCUMULATED WITH FEELING minimalist MAXIMALIST intentional IMPULSIVE enough MORE gratitude for scraps DEMANDING THE FEAST

permission slip

i, _________________________________, give myself permission to:

want _________________________________

and _________________________________

without apology, without justification, without making myself smaller to fit inside anyone else’s idea of appropriate female appetite.

i give myself permission to be too much.

i give myself permission to want more.

i give myself permission to fill my life with _________________________________

even though _________________________________.

i am done performing scarcity.

signed: _________________________________

witnessed by: frida, colette, josephine, iris, louise, julia, diane, and the universe itself, which is not minimal, and is currently making seventy billion galaxies without any apparent concern for whether it is being excessive.

your shopping list for a larger life:

☐ one velvet thing. cushion, dress, ribbon. it does not matter. just velvet.

☐ one book you are not smart enough for yet. buy it. grow into it.

☐ one dress for nowhere. wear it on a tuesday. wear it to buy milk. there is no occasion not good enough.

☐ one second helping. of anything. pasta, pleasure, sleep, time.

☐ one out-loud demand for what you want in bed.

☐ one candle that costs too much. burn it today. not for special. today is special.

☐ one complicated friendship that refuses to stay on the surface.

☐ one texture for every room: rough, soft, aged, inexplicably.

☐ one conversation that goes until you lose track of what time it is.

☐ one object that serves no purpose except it makes your heart do that lifting thing.

☐ one morning of wanting without justifying any of it.

☐ one lifetime of being muchly.

and here is your permission

permission to dance until your body forgets it has an age, until your hair is wet with it and your feet hurt and your dress is stuck to you and you don’t care, you don’t CARE, the music is inside your ribcage now and something has come loose that was screwed down tight for years, something animal, something that remembers what it was before it learned to be respectable, and you are not stopping, you are not sitting down with your sensible drink because your knees, because tomorrow, because what must people think, you are dancing until your head falls off and even then your body will keep moving because this is what bodies are FOR, this gorgeous stupid sweating living thing you walk around in, this is what it was always for

permission to spend an entire day in bed with another body

the whole day

morning light and then afternoon light and then the particular gold of late afternoon that makes everything look like a painting you want to live inside, and the sheets getting complicated, and the smell of skin, the specific smell of another person’s skin that you want to put your face against and just breathe, just stay, the weight of them, so much warm ordinary miraculous flesh pressed against yours, the way two bodies in a bed for a whole day make their own tiny society, their own logic, their own little world with its own rules which are mostly yes and also yes and occasionally yes please and the afternoon becomes evening becomes neither of you having moved anywhere that matters and the evidence everywhere, the magnificent domestic wreckage of a day spent entirely in pleasure, not guilty pleasure, not pleasure you’ll pay for later, just PLEASURE, the real kind, the kind that makes you feel that you have used the day correctly

permission to open the fridge at midnight and shove food into your mouth standing in the cold light of it

the leftover pasta cold from the bowl with your hands because you can’t be bothered with a fork. the cheese that you were saving for something. the olives eaten one after another after another, fingers glistening. the chocolate from the back of the shelf, the good kind, eaten in four large pieces because you are hungry and it is there and your body is telling you something true and you are for ONCE going to listen to it without negotiating, without the internal committee meeting about whether this is really what you want or whether you’re sad or tired or thirsty really, you’re hungry and it’s midnight and the fridge is full of good things and this is not a problem this is a GIFT

permission to swear like a fishwife

because intelligent women know how and the ones who pretend they don’t are lying or frightened or both, and you are neither, you are a woman who has read enough to know that language is power and profanity is part of language and that the f word deployed correctly is more precise than a paragraph of careful prose, is sometimes the only word with enough weight to hold what you’re actually feeling, and the women who clutch their pearls at it are usually clutching something else too, their tongue, their appetite, their loudness, their selves, and you are not clutching anything anymore, you have put it all down, the self-censorship and the delicacy and the apologetic laugh after you say anything too true, and in its place you have this: your full vocabulary, ALL of it, used without flinching, because you are a woman who is not so scared of herself that she has to sand her own edges before she can be in a room with other people

permission for the terrible or the filthy underwear

because sometimes a glorious night means your good knickers are somewhere you can’t remember and you are sleeping in the ones with the hole and the bobbled elastic and honestly, honestly, this is not failure this is evidence, this is the physical proof of a life being lived rather than performed, and the curated underwear drawer belongs to a woman who is saving herself for something that never quite comes, and you are done saving, you are done being preserved in tissue paper and brought out for special, you are special, tuesday is special, the ordinary wednesday night that turned into something that required three attempts to find a taxi home is special, and the underwear left on the floor is the flag you are planting

permission for the gloriously messy night

the one that starts as supper and becomes something else entirely, the table that never quite got cleared, the second bottle that someone went to find and then there were four of you in the kitchen while someone fried eggs at midnight and someone was telling the story, the real one, the one she has never told in a restaurant before, the one that needed this particular hour and this particular wine and these particular women who have stopped performing being fine, and someone is singing, badly, beautifully, and someone has taken their shoes off and is dancing on the tiles, and the neighbours will hear, the neighbours ARE hearing, and not one of you is leaving, not yet, not while this thing that has no name is still happening, this specific alchemy of women together in a kitchen at the wrong hour, loud and alive and smelling of wine and garlic and the particular perfume that someone put on this morning for a life that turned into a completely different and better life

permission to live OUT LOUD

not the curated version, not the version with the flattering filter and the composed expression and the caption that sounds spontaneous but took twenty minutes, but out loud the way children do it before someone teaches them not to, the way your body wants to, the way you have been pressing down for years with both hands because loud was too much, joyful was embarrassing, wanting was shameful and pleasure was something you took in small approved doses in private and were grateful for

you are not grateful

you are RAVENOUS

and you are done being quiet about it

eat the thing. bed the person. dance until you can’t. say the word. say. nothing at all. be disconcerting. strange even. open your mouth too much. say the thing. state your case. set the challenge. wear the knickers with the hole. stay until midnight becomes morning, and fill the room with your voice and your smell and your appetite and your laughter and your absolute refusal to take up less space than the full catastrophic gorgeous fact of you requires

this is not permission to be reckless

this is permission to be REAL and MUCHY and more than they can take.

(which they have been confusing with reckless and greedy since the dairylea triangle days)

you were right then and you are right now

take it

viii. the roar

(short, because a long roar becomes a vacuum cleaner)

here it is. unadorned.

you were born into a body capable of appetite, desire, hunger for beauty, for sensation, for experience so layered it demands rereading. you were born into a world that is itself excessive, baroque, almost offensively abundant, a world that makes fruit fall from trees and light behave differently in autumn and gives the peacock a tail like THAT. not for efficiency. for more.

and then someone handed you a smaller portion and called it wisdom.

you don’t have to want less.

you never had to want less. the wanting, the gloriously messy overflowing wanting, was not the problem.

the wanting was the REASON

so: eat the pasta. buy the dress. light the too-expensive candle right now tonight. ask for more. fill your home with things that have stories. read books that make you feel intellectually underdressed. demand depth. take up space. say yes before you have time to reason yourself out of it.

be too much. because life is hellish short.

be feral and excessive and full of appetite and gorgeously, unapologetically, irreversibly muchly.

and when someone says, in that tone, you’re a lot, aren’t you,

look them in the eye

and say:

yes.

i’m exactly that.

lushy lushity lushiness. face over bum lusty lushiness. living out loud don’t try and stop me lushy muchiness.

THE END, which is probably THE BEGINNING, which is just the moment you stop apologising for how much you want.

At the beginning of the year, I created a course called The Glorious Mess. It was divided into two parts: The Glorious Mess itself - eight weeks of intense permission to loosen your grip on what life should be and to instead allow yourself to live out loud in all your emotional and historical mess… and The Kept Hours, a gentler, more whimsical invitation to inhabit your home as your wholly messy self, wild and true and as aware of your own needs as you need to be.

You see I want you to find yourself, one afternoon soon, sitting on your own sofa, simply feeling that things are just how they should be. That you are at home both physically and emotionally and that you feel centred, and at peace.

Most women have stolen an afternoon like this at least once.

Nothing is happening in it. There is no occasion, no productivity, no one being looked after or impressed or fed on time. It is simply an afternoon in a house that is yours, in a life that is yours, with nowhere you absolutely have to be for the next few hours. The light is gentle. Something is simmering, even if it is only a few herbs to scent the air and there is a book with its spine broken open on the arm of the chair.

You might have had one of these afternoons, briefly, accidentally, and then felt obscurely guilty about it, as though you had used time that wasn’t really yours to use.

The Kept Hours is about changing that.

Perhaps you’ve already done some burning. Maybe you’ve already stood in the glorious mess of a life being unmade and remade and thought: right. Okay. What now? Or perhaps you’ve arrived here fresh, without the bonfire, just with the quiet and growing sense that something in your life needs tending rather than performing. Either way, you’re in the right place. The Kept Hours doesn’t ask where you’ve been. It only asks what you want the next hours to feel like.

Here is what they can feel like: hours that are kept for you rather than spent on everything else. Hours that tend to the inner life the way a good kitchen tends to hunger: practically, warmly, and without fuss. Hours that accumulate, quietly, into a life that actually feels like yours.

Here is how we are going to do it, once the Glorious Mess is completed…

We will begin at the threshold, which is where all good things begin, with May Sarton and the question of what it actually means to come home to yourself. Not to go back. To arrive, possibly for the first time. From there we move into the kitchen, because the kitchen is always where the real conversation happens, and M.F.K. Fisher is waiting there with something wonderful and the absolute conviction that feeding yourself well, alone, on a Tuesday, is not sad. It is, she would tell you, the full expression of self-regard. If the glorious mess was about stopping the performance, this is about learning what you actually want to eat.

Week Three takes us to the larder, which sounds unpromising and is in fact where everything gets interesting. Elizabeth David will help you think about what you actually want filling your cupboards, your shelves, your hours, and what you have simply been keeping out of habit, or guilt, or the vague sense that you ought to. Week Four is the sitting room. Laurie Colwin, warm and entirely unimpressed by fuss, has things to say about the radical art of staying in. The right lamp. The good evening. Nothing required of you except presence. Not the presence you perform for other people. The kind that is just you, in a room, being quietly and entirely yourself.

Halfway through, we go outside, just as far as the garden wall, because Colette is there and she will not come indoors, and honestly you probably need the air. Week Five is about what you tend and what you let grow wild, in a garden and in a self. Colette as your muse for the overgrown parts you’ve been apologising for. The gloriously messy self needs a garden that matches her, it turns out. From the garden we come back inside to the writing desk, where Katherine Mansfield is waiting to tell you that noticing is enough. That your interior life is not a luxury or a hobby. That the room your thoughts live in deserves the same attention as every other room in the house.

Week Seven is the linen cupboard, which is, unexpectedly, I think, the most spiritual stop on the tour. Kathleen Norris found the sacred in laundry. In repetition. In the small daily acts that most of us do on autopilot and most productivity culture tells us to outsource. She called it the quotidian mysteries and she was right. Week Eight is the bedroom, and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and the subject of rest as something you are allowed. Sleep. The slow morning. Stillness that is not laziness but attention. The bedroom as the room where you are, finally, no one’s anything except your own. Belonging, finally, to yourself, knowing that after all that magnificent mess, this is what rest actually feels like.

Week Nine brings us to the whole house, all of it, seen fresh, and Alexandra Stoddard, who spent her entire career arguing that beauty is not an aesthetic project but a daily act of love toward yourself. What does your house know about you that you’ve been ignoring? And then Week Ten. The inner room. Rumer Godden wrote that every person contains four rooms: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and that most of us never open the fourth. Ten weeks of kept hours have been leading here. This is the one you finally unlock. And unlike every other room you’ve ever tidied for company, this one you get to leave exactly as you find it.

The women keeping you company through all of this are not life coaches or wellness advocates or anyone with a morning routine to sell you. They are writers and sensualists and fierce keepers of the domestic as a serious human endeavour. They already knew what you are in the process of learning: that a tended life, a life in which you pay attention to the quality of the light and the warmth of the cup and the slow pleasure of an afternoon that belongs entirely to you, is not a small life. It is not a lesser life than the loud, burning, glorious one that brought you here. It is, in fact, the whole thing.

A note though, about what this is not: It is not about making your home beautiful in the magazine sense, though beauty will come into it. It is not about simplifying, decluttering, optimising. The Kept Hours has no interest in turning your ordinary life into a wellness project. What it is interested in is this: the particular pleasure of being a woman in a house that knows her. The sensory, specific, unambitious joy of a day that fits…

You don’t need to have done anything in particular before arriving here. You don’t need to have burned everything down, though perhaps you have. You need only to be a woman who suspects, somewhere under the noise and the obligation and the years of magnificent usefulness, that there are hours with your name on them.

Hours that have been waiting, just for you.

Ready to get started?

The Glorious Mess + The Kept Hours Bundles: 18 weeks of guided essays, workbooks, to-do lists, resources and more is your for just $49.00.

Divided into two stand-alone courses, that you can do consecutively or entirely separately, both designed to help you understand that a tidy life isn’t always an authentic one, and its only when we give ourselves permission to sink into the velvet comfort of our most authentic selves that we will finally enjoy some semblance of peace…

Should you decide to join today you will find The Glorious Mess complete and The Kept Hours just beginning, so you can choose your path depending on what feels most urgent right now: a deep dive into examining your life and all the ways you have been trying to keep life as tidy as can be at the expense of your heart, OR taking that heart into your home and making a sanctuary that doesn’t make a pin-cushion out of you…

Join today for $49.00

PS: The Glorious Mess + The Kept Hours comes as part of my lovely LIBRARY subscription and should you be interested in starting your very own Brocante journey, then you can join today from just $29.00 per month for all my courses and downloads…

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“They are what make one day different from other days, one hour from other hours.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

There’s a moss-green velvet pouch in my bedside drawer that holds nothing useful. No spare key or running away money. No sensible little packet of plasters. Inside it is a sprig of rosemary from a garden that no longer belongs to me, a few small stones from a walk I took the morning after everything changed, and a scrap of paper that says, in the darling authority of my son’s slightly unhinged handwriting, you really are rock’n’roll, Mum.

It lives among the usual bedside debris: lip balm, a book I keep meaning to finish, old receipts, the peculiar shrapnel of being a woman who has lived through too much and still insists on keeping a drawer-full of tweezers, lest the un-arched brow be the death of her. Before I’m properly awake, before the day has started its nonsense, I open the drawer and see it and something inside me settles.

That’s a ritual. A small one, certainly. Private enough to feel slightly ridiculous when described out loud. Necessary enough that I keep doing it. It says: I am still here. I have crossed things. Here, here is the evidence…

Perhaps that is where all real ritual begins. Not with robes or bells or some elaborate performance under a theatrical moon, but with a woman opening a drawer and remembering herself before the world gets in? A little green pouch. A relic. A domestic reliquary, if you must.

Anthropologists have spent a long time trying to understand why human beings, across cultures and centuries, keep making ceremonies out of thresholds: birth, blood, marriage, death, harvest, departure, return, the moment a person becomes someone else even if no one has moved house, signed a form, cut their hair, or changed their name. Arnold van Gennep described rites of passage as a movement out of ordinary life, into the charged in-between, and then back into the world changed. Victor Turner gave us liminality, that threshold state where you are no longer who you were, but not yet who you’ll become.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning.”
T. S. Eliot

Ritual matters because it keeps that hallway between selves open long enough for the soul to catch up. Without it, we stumble from one life into another with no witness, no language, no cake afterwards. We change, but we don’t always become changed. The mind can keep pretending, but the body is always harder to fool.

It knows when something has happened. It knows when a house has stopped being home, when love has gone sour in the walls. When the child no longer needs you in the way your whole self had grown around. (Oh how I know that feeling). It knows when the body you once believed you were in charge of has begun issuing its own strange, hormonal decrees from the basement. The body keeps its own weather. the body, as the best-selling book assures us, keeps the score.

That’s why ritual needs action. Thinking about an ending is not the same as marking it. Journaling about a beginning is not the same as stepping into it. The therapist’s couch has its place, and I know that from extensive experience, but sometimes the body has to be involved in the understanding? Something must be touched, washed, carried to the garden in the dark, lit, buried, folded away, spoken over, cooked slowly, given back to earth, or taken out of the drawer after years of not being looked at. Ritual gives the body a sentence it can understand. It says: this is over. This matters. You may come back from the threshold, but you won’t come back unchanged.

Every real ritual has bones underneath whatever culture dressed it in. First, ordinary time is interrupted. A signal is given. The room changes mood. The day is no longer merely the day. That’s why weddings rarely happen in the middle of someone doing the hoovering! Why vigils last through the night. Why people light candles before writing, praying, grieving, confessing, or making decisions they already know will change everything.

Something says: pay different attention now.

Then comes the threshold act itself, the thing done that can’t be entirely undone. Vows spoken. Cloth torn. Hair cut. Wine poured into earth. A photograph burned over a bowl in the sink because you are practical, and also because you don’t want to set fire to the curtains. Sometimes there is discomfort: fasting, walking, keeping watch, staying awake when the body wants escape. It isn’t because suffering is holy. It’s because the body needs convincing. The mind can manufacture a thousand evasions before breakfast. But the body won’t believe it until something is felt somewhere between the senses.

Afterwards there is a return. Food. Witness. A new name. A clean dress. The party after the funeral. The birthday cake. The cup of tea after bad news. Someone puts a plate in your hand and says eat, love, and that too is ritual. You’re brought back to ordinary time, but fed. Recognised. No longer floating loose in whatever happened. Miss that final movement and you stay haunted. Miss the threshold act and nothing actually lands. Miss the opening and the whole thing feels like theatre, and not even good theatre, more like an am-dram production with one committed, fiesty woman carrying the entire cast…

“Ritual is poetry in action.”
Rabbi Hayim Herring

Modern life though is full of unmarked crossings. Birthdays arrive and are ignored because getting old. Deaths are marked with paperwork, casseroles, admin, and the bewildering decision of whether the person who has died would have wanted lilies. Divorce is handled by legal letters and the sudden division of teaspoons. Menopause comes with leaflets, jokes, prescriptions, rage, sleep disturbance, and a cultural instruction to keep looking sexy if at all possible.

Shame on you for not caring enough to try, the whole world tsk’s.

There is no ceremony for the last time your child reaches for your hand in public. No ceremony for the morning you understand that the old version of ambition has rotted from the inside. No ceremony for the body that refuses to carry the story you wrote for it at thirty-two. No ceremony for the friendship that thinned until it became a ghost. No ceremony for the day you finally stop being available for every emotional spillage just because you’re good with a cloth.

We are expected to absorb these changes privately. Maybe buy a journal? Or listen to a life affirming podcast. Or just get on with it, for Gawds sake!! But the body doesn’t get on with it, rather it stores the unmarked thing under the ribs, in the jaw, in the hip that aches every time you have to sit next to someone you have spiritually outgrown, in the shoulders lifted against an old danger that no longer lives in the room but still seems to have a key. Nothing disappears simply because we were too busy to kneel beside it.

Too many of us have lost our ritual literacy. Or perhaps it was taken from us - mocked, flattened, made too narrow, turned into product, and then sold back in clean fonts with a workbook, a bonus audio and a shouty Zoom call. The old forms weren’t always kind, and we shouldn’t get sentimental and imagine the women before us wandering about in harmonious sisterhood, blessing each other between loaves, because it is true that while some were held, many were trapped by church, family, class, opinion, hunger, and the small local tyrannies that can make a woman’s life feel too much like a locked cupboard.

Still, they had markers that we have lost. The church year moved time through their bodies whether they believed or not. Seasons had specific and necessary tasks. Birth and death were not usually outsourced to strangers in wipe-clean rooms. Women gathered because life required it, not because someone had branded gathering as a feminine leadership container and charged accordingly. Now many of us live with unprecedented freedom and almost no ceremony for what that freedom costs.

Midlife, especially, is thick with crossings no one names. The last school run. The first hot flush. The morning you realise you are no longer willing to be pleasant at the expense of your soul. The day you understand that being desired and being seen were never the same thing. The first time invisibility feels less like erasure and more like a cloak. The moment you stop mistaking endurance for love.

There should be bells for this! There should be women in doorways sprinkling flowers in our hair! There should be bread broken, songs sung badly, old names dropped into flame, and someone asking, with absolute seriousness: what have you survived, and what are you no longer willing to carry?

But no-one asks, Damnit! So those of who need or want to bear witness to our own lives have to invent ritual, and apply meaning of our own, because the alternative is to drift through transformations that deserved witness and wonder why, years later, we still feel strangely unfinished.

Let’s consider then, aesthetic sensibility as philosophy, because it matters here. Not aesthetics as prettifying. Not “make your suffering photogenic and place it next to a pear.” I mean the deeper instinct: the dried herbs, the stone floor, the preserving jars, the old table with knife marks in it, the slippers warming by the fire, the jug with one crack, the wool blanket folded at the end of the bed like a promise you can lie under. All of it…

Cottagecore as aesthetic and more pertinently as a way of life, speaks to women because it gives shape to a hunger that had been sneered at. A hunger for texture. For seasonality. For a life where objects are gathered with intention rather than delivered by a man in a van while you’re half dressed and ashamed of your recycling. And burrowcore, cottagecore’s more introverted cousin, has its own quiet genius: low lamps, hobbit instincts, a room that says the world may continue its nonsense outside, but in here the soup is on and the books know your name. The burrow is not escapism when built honestly. It is protected space. It is the place where the performed self is allowed to unfurl and there is so much inside us that we have been keeping too tight in the bud.

Both sensibilities understand something our culture keeps forgetting: objects aren’t neutral. Small repeated acts accumulate. A room can hold you or insult you. A cup can become a bell. A drawer can become an altar if the right grief is placed inside it. Because real ritual is made from real things and true stories, which is where most people go wrong. They go shopping. Trying to turn the commercial into the spiritual. So they buy the candle, the bowl, the feather, the velvet cloth, the special deck, the ethically ambiguous bundle of something dried and imported. And suddenly the ritual looks atmospheric but has no blood in it. It lacks the meaning, we recognise in the objects that tell our stories.

So don’t start looking for the objects that will contain the ritual in TK Maxx. Start with your actual things: the dress you wore when you said yes to something your body had already refused. The keys to a house you were glad to leave but sometimes still reach for in the dark. The rejection letter from the door you thought would save you. The perfume you wore in the year you abandoned yourself. The manuscript of the book you’ve stopped writing because it was dragging too much from the wound and not enough from the truth. The cardigan from the week you kept saying you were fine and everyone believed you because you are, unfortunately, quite convincing.

These things are already charged. They don’t need to be made mystical. They have been waiting, quietly and rather accusingly, for you to do something honest with them. A thing kept without meaning becomes clutter. A thing handled with intention becomes witness, so the patina is the point. The wear shows the handling. The stain remembers the day. The crack in the cup is not romantic because it’s a crack. It is emotionally moving because something survived being broken and is still allowed in the cupboard because somehow it still matters.

You cannot buy ritual. So go instead to to the drawer you haven’t opened since the last time things changed. Go to the wardrobe, or the box under the bed. Or go to the laundry room.

Yes, the laundry room. I know. It sounds absurd. It sounds like the least holy place in the house, unless you are one of those women who has managed to make even laundry look like a Scandinavian slow-living reel. But the laundry knows. The laundry always knows.

It holds the dress from the dinner that changed the atmosphere of a marriage, the shirt worn to the appointment where you finally heard what you’d been suspecting, the cardigan you had on when something ended quietly in a room with the television still talking to itself, the pyjamas from the week you could not quite get dressed, the sheets from the bed where grief made its nest and refused to leave. We handle our lives through fabric long before we understand them in language.

Which means sorting, soaking, washing, pegging out, mending and folding aren’t neutral acts when done with attention. They are small negotiations with the evidence of living. This can be kept. This needs mending. This is stained but beloved. This no longer fits the woman I am becoming. This has served its time.

Laundry then, is a threshold ceremony in disguise. Something comes in marked by the world: sweat, food, blood, rain, perfume, sleep, hospital air, other people’s smoke, your own sorrow. It passes through water, transformation’s oldest accomplice. And it is turned, wrung, lifted, and exposed to air. Then it returns to the drawer altered. Not new. Never new again. Cleansed enough to continue.

And perhaps that is all any of us can ask after certain passages. The white linen on the line, the snap of cotton in wind, the smell of sheets dried outside in late afternoon, these things endure in paintings and poems and memory because they are genuinely beautiful and beauty isn’t incidental to ritual. Beauty gives the body courage. It says life is still worth arranging tenderly, even after the terrible awful unspeakable bad thing, even after the ordinary disappointments, the goblin-ugly days and the ones that rip your heart out. Still there is laundry. To ground you in the ordinary beauty we all need to make life worth toelrable.

So the folding, if you let it, is meditation. The putting away is a small reinstatement of order. The pile on the floor is a portrait of your actual life: what you have been doing, what you have been wearing for protection, what you can’t bring yourself to put on, what needs to be released because it belongs to a woman who no longer lives here. What does your laundry know about you that you haven’t admitted yet? What has the routine continued to manage while the ritual quietly died?

“The danger is in the acceptance of the monotonous.”
Rabbi Hayim Herring, On Being

For the neurodivergent woman, ritual can be more than meaning-making. It can be the backbone of our days. Not so much discipline, because ritual is not that, ritual is in many ways, fundamentally different. A routine says: do this or you have failed. A ritual says: do this and return to yourself. It creates bridges between states, and some of us need bridges more than others: between sleep and morning, work and home, public self and private self, being touched all day by everybody else’s needs and remembering that your body belongs to you. A candle, a song, a cup, a walk, a folded cloth, a sentence spoken aloud: these aren’t frills. They are signals to the nervous system. They say we are leaving one state now and entering another. You don’t have to drag the whole day behind you like a dead wedding dress.

This is why small daily rituals matter - because not every ritual can be a grand threshold ceremony, thank heavens. You simply can’t be in sacred time all the time. You’d become unbearable by Tuesday and start obnoxiously things like “the universe invited me” when you merely wanted another biscuit.

“Sacred time… makes possible the other time, ordinary time.”
Mircea Eliade

There are the threshold rituals, which mark significant crossings: a marriage ending, a house left, a body changed, a child grown, a grief finally named, a decision made after years of not-making it. These require preparation. They need a beginning. They need a closing. They may need witnesses. And they often need food afterwards because the body is a creature of soup and cake as much as revelation.

Then there are daily rituals, the little hinges of a deliberate life: the kettle filled before you can bring yourself to speak to anyone, the notebook opened before the screen starts shouting, the particular tea in the particular cup that means I am allowed to think now, the same morning walk taken not because you lack imagination but because sameness can is a safe container for the mind. The window opened while cooking. The song that changes cleaning from punishment into weather. The hand on the doorframe before leaving the house. The tiny pause before answering a message that has already irritated your blood.

These are not decorative habits. They are the warm infrastructure of your actual life. Burrow-magic! The peeking at my velvet pouch is one of these. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t make the world kinder. It doesn’t pay a bill or heal a wound or change the fact that some gardens stop belonging to us. But it reminds me: you have crossed before. You came through. You kept what mattered.

So how do you build ritual for yourself? Part of me wants to say you don’t. Not entirely. The best ones seem to form at the edge of your life like mushrooms after rain. You notice that you always touch the same photograph before difficult phone calls. You notice that you can’t leave a house without standing in the kitchen one last time. You notice that you’ve been keeping a stone in your coat pocket for six months and somehow it has become a small, cold witness.

Meaning grows in repetition.

Still, chosen action matters. Deliberate ritual says: I am not merely being dragged through this. I am taking part in my own becoming. So begin with the question: what needs marking? Not what would make a nice ceremony. Nor what would look good written in a caption under candlelight. What transition are you actually inside that has no language? What ending has already happened but not been witnessed? What have you become without being welcomed? What have you lost that everyone else thinks you should be over by now?

Of course, not everything needs ritual. Going to the gym doesn’t need consecrating. But the first time you go after divorce might. Buying new sheets doesn’t need a ceremony. But changing the bed after someone has left and won’t be coming back probably does. Clearing a wardrobe might be one more task on your to-do list. But removing the clothes of a woman you performed for years might require something stronger than bin bags.

The test is physical. Does your stomach drop slightly when you think of it? Do your eyes sting before language arrives? Does some part of you whisper, absurdly and with great authority, oh? That’s the place.

Choose objects that already know the story. Choose a time that carries its own charge: dawn, dusk, the anniversary of the day you knew, the first morning in the new house, a full moon if that matters to you, a rainy Tuesday if that is when the truth finally stops waiting.

You need a beginning: something that tells the body ordinary time has been interrupted: a bath drawn, a cloth spread on the table, shoes removed, a candle lit, a particular route walked, the kettle boiled in silence, a door opened and closed with care.

You need an act. Not thinking. Not planning. Not spiralling beautifully in your notebook until you have made grief look like stationery. Something must happen in the world. Cut, wash, bury, burn, cook, carry, plant, pour away, walk toward, walk away from. Let the body do the sentence. The act should cost you something, though not money if you can help it. Money is often the least interesting thing we have. It should cost you the comfort of vagueness, the little narcotic of maybe, the old silky lie that you don’t really know what you know.

And then you need a return. And this is where most invented rituals fail. They open the door to the threshold and then leave you standing there in your bare feet. Close the ritual. Blow out the candle. Wash your hands. Eat something. Call someone safe. Sleep. Put the object away. Walk home by a different route. Change your clothes. Say aloud: it is done. The closing matters because it returns you to ordinary life.

But never the same ordinary again.

Some possibilities, because sometimes the imagination needs a little tickling: burn every photograph from a chapter of your life and speak one true sentence about each as it burns. Walk to a high place and tell your secret to the horizon. Write your old name on your skin in ink and wash it off while speaking the name you actually recognise, not necessarily the one on your passport, but the one that lives in the private inside. Read your own eulogy aloud to an empty chair, then write a birth notice for the woman still alive. Cook the meal that matters most to you, the real one rather than the impressive one, and eat it alone with the good dishes, no phone, no apology.

Ritual doesn’t have to be tasteful. In fact, it may be better if it isn’t entirely tasteful. A ritual that is too elegant can sometimes avoid the wound. A ritual that includes crying in slippers beside the recycling bin might be far closer to God.

The rules of invented ritual are simple, but not necessarily gentle: It must be true. It must mark something real, not something you are pretending to have finished. It must involve the body. A ritual can’t live entirely in your head. Something has to be touched, carried, cut, washed, cooked, buried, burned, worn, poured away, planted, spoken, eaten, walked toward or walked away from. It must cost you something, but not dignity. It should cost you denial. It must be witnessed by a friend, a sister, a circle, a photograph, a sentence in a notebook, the moon over the wheelie bins. Someone or something must be able to say: yes, this happened.

And it must end. That last one matters. You can’t live permanently in the threshold. Eventually someone has to make the tea.

There is always a risk, of course, that we turn even this into content. That we make the ritual beautiful before we make it true. Arranging the candle, the linen, the notebook, the bowl of pears, and forgetting to say the frightening sentence. So let this be said plainly: if it looks beautiful but lets you keep lying to yourself, it is not ritual. It is styling.

Styling has its place. I am not immune. I have been emotionally manipulated by a terracotta jug full of Baby’s Breath more than once. But ritual has to go further than atmosphere. It has to touch the wound or it’s nothing.

Here then, are some invented rituals, all of which I mean seriously, while fully acknowledging their absurdity

The Croning

For the woman entering her fifties, or any age at which she realises she is done auditioning.

Gather women who knew you in different versions of your life. Not necessarily the neat witnesses. Choose the ones who remember your earlier selves with tenderness, accuracy, or both. Ask each woman to bring an object that represents who you were when she first knew you: a photograph, a lipstick, a song written on paper, a cheap bangle, a bus ticket, a recipe, something ordinary enough to be dangerous.

Make a fire if you can. If you can’t, gather around candles and let symbolism do what logistics can’t. Each woman speaks her memory of you, not a speech, not praise, but a true remembering. You speak last. Name what you are done performing. Name what you are no longer available for. Name what you are taking into the next life.

Then feast. Wear something you would once have thought too much. Dance to music from the years you were becoming. Accept gifts. Don’t deflect them. Don’t make yourself smaller to keep the room comfortable. Go home and sleep with the window open. Let the night recognise you.

The Unmarrying

For the end of a marriage, a long love, or any bond that shaped you so deeply it needs more than paperwork to release.

Return to the place where you married, if you can. If not, choose a threshold: a bridge, a doorway, the entrance to a park where you once made a decision you didn’t understand yet. Go at dawn. Walk through the threshold backwards. Yes, backwards. Ritual is allowed to look strange. In fact, if no dog walker briefly questions your choices, you may not be trying hard enough.

Speak aloud one thing you are taking with you. Then speak one thing you are leaving behind. If you have a ring, wear it on a different finger for a month. Let the body feel the displacement. Let habit reach and find alteration. At the end of the month, remove it deliberately.

Bury it somewhere beautiful, unless it needs to be sold because life is expensive and symbolism doesn’t pay the council tax. If you sell it, use some of the money for something that marks your return to yourself: a coat, a course, a bed, a train ticket, an absurd lunch with oysters if oysters are your thing. Plant something if you buried it. Note what grows. Note what doesn’t. Let it all be story.

The Ambition Consecration

For claiming the power you’ve been apologising for, minimising, making palatable, or wrapping in a little lace napkin so nobody feels threatened by it.

Fast from apology for one day. Not from food unless that is safe and right for you. Fast from softening your sentences. Fast from making your desire smaller in case someone else feels exposed by it. Fast from the little laugh after saying something true. At the end of the day, dress as the woman you are becoming, not the acceptable version of her. Wear the earrings. Wear the boots. Wear the lipstick that makes you feel faintly dangerous.

Write your current biography, the one you use when you are trying not to frighten people. Burn it safely. Then write the real one, the audacious one, the one that makes your hands sweat. Read it aloud. Frame it. Put it somewhere you will have to face it. Then take yourself to dinner somewhere that feels slightly beyond you. Order what you actually want. Don’t explain your presence to the waiter with a book, a phone, or a pretend text conversation. Sit there as if your own company were the appointment.

The Body Treaty

For illness, ageing, menopause, weight change, surgery, grief, or any season in which the body has become unfamiliar.

Stand before a mirror when the house is quiet. Speak to each part of yourself that has changed, disappointed you, frightened you, or refused to obey the old story. Tell the truth first: the rage, the grief, the humiliation, the betrayal, the shock of having to live inside a body with its own plans. Don’t rush to gratitude. Gratitude that arrives too early is often fear in a nicer dress.

Then apologise to your body for the violence of your expectations. Make one promise you can actually keep. Not a self-improvement promise. Not a thinner-by-summer promise. A peace treaty. Mark your skin with something beautiful that will fade: lipstick, henna, body paint, a temporary tattoo, a streak of gold across the belly you have spent years trying not to inhabit. Sleep without washing it off. In the morning, photograph yourself before you arrange your face for the world.

The Inheritance Ritual

For what was passed down by the women before you, whether they meant to pass it down or not.

Gather what you have inherited: jewellery, recipes, phrases, fears, domestic patterns, stories, silences, ways of apologising, ways of surviving, ways of disappearing in your own kitchen. Make two piles. What will continue. What ends here. Be honest. Some things that look like love are fear in an apron, while some things that look old-fashioned are wisdom dusted in flour.

Wash the things you will carry forward. Polish them, mend them, cook from them, wear them, use them immediately. Don’t keep inheritance behind glass if it was made for hands. For the ending pile, thank each item or pattern for whatever it protected the women before you from having to face directly. Then release it. Donate, burn, bury, gift outside the bloodline, or write it down and tear it up. Tell someone what you’ve done, or write the letter you’ll never send.

The House-Leaving

For the woman leaving a home that held too much, too little, or both.

Before you go, walk through every room alone. Touch one wall in each room and say what happened there, without making it pretty. This is where I waited. This is where I lied. This is where I loved him. This is where I became small. This is where I laughed so hard I nearly dropped the pan. This is where I should have left sooner. This is where I kept going.

Take one small thing that belongs to the life you are carrying forward: a spoon, a stone from the garden, a key you won’t use again, a pressed leaf, a chipped mug, a scrap of wallpaper from behind a cupboard if the house allows such theft. Leave one thing behind deliberately, even if it is only a sentence written on paper and tucked under a floorboard, behind a radiator, or in the soil. Sweep the threshold last. Not because the new people need it clean, though that would be nice, but because your body needs to know you are no longer dragging the old dust with you.

When you close the door, don’t rush. Put your hand on it. Say thank you if you can. Say goodbye if you can’t. Either will do.

The Glorious Mess Rite

For the woman who has spent a lifetime trying to become more acceptable and has finally begun to suspect that acceptability was the trap.

Choose a room that tells the truth about you. Not the staged room. Not the one with the best light. The one where the evidence gathers: books, shoes, receipts, half-made plans, lip balm, grief, socks, ambition, dust. Stand in the middle of it and resist the urge to apologise, even to yourself.

Set a timer for thirty minutes and clean nothing. This is harder than it sounds. Instead, move through the room as if you are an archaeologist of your own life. Pick things up. Ask what they are trying to tell you. The unopened letter. The book with twelve pages folded down. The dress on the chair. The mug beside the bed. The pile that has become part of the furniture because something in you couldn’t decide what future it belonged to.

At the end, choose one object to release, one to restore, one to honour, and one to place somewhere visible. Then clean only what will help you breathe. Leave one small, deliberate imperfection in plain sight. A ribbon tied around a stack of papers. A cracked cup holding pens. A note on the mirror that says still here, still dangerous. This is not surrender to chaos. It is refusing to make tidiness the price of belonging to yourself.

****

“Ritual recognises the potency of disorder.”
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger

Invented ritual is a choose-your-own-adventure for the soul, but not in a twee sense. More like: you are in a dark wood wearing inappropriate shoes, carrying an old key, and the owl has started gossiping at you. You can go back to the cottage and pretend nothing happened, or you can follow a path that smells faintly of wild garlic and terror. The good news is that you don’t need permission. The bad news is that not needing permission means you are responsible for what you choose.

A warning, though. Rituals work. Not as metaphor, or as theatre, and definitely not as a charming little exercise to make you feel witchy on a slow Thursday. You are a grown-woman and there is nothing sacred in playing endless games of pretend. Because it isn’t necessary - rituals change consciousness without play-acting. They create obligations the way decision alone often fails to do and they make the private undeniable. So don’t perform a ritual for the sake of imagining you are someone you are not, or for an ending you haven’t actually ended. Nor to mark a beginning you aren’t willing to inhabit. Don’t burn the bridge and then complain about having to swim across the river. Have integrity and commit to the outcome, by way of the ritual itself because ritual is found in the formal acknowledgment of what already is, or what you are genuinely committed to becoming and honesty is the entry fee. Once performed, it can’t be unperformed. You can abandon it or forget it, so mock it later if you must, but it happened. The woman who performed it existed. You can’t go back to not knowing what you knew when you stood there. That’s the point, and that too is the trouble?

Right now we are living through one of the most ritually significant passages of our lives, and contemporary culture can’t decide whether to ignore us or applaud us for looking good for our age. But it offers almost nothing to mark the real crossing. No ceremony for menopause. No consecration of the power that comes from surviving your own life so far. No witness to the death of the self you performed for years. No proper welcome for the tentative, extraordinary, gloriously messy, but ever so slightly feral woman emerging in her place.

So we invent. Because the alternative is to drift through transformations that deserve but do not get cathedral bells, witness fires, good dishes, clean sheets, dreadful singing, and someone asking: who are you becoming?

You’re allowed to ask it of yourself. You’re allowed to answer strangely. You’re allowed to use what you have: the drawer, the dress, the stone, the old key, the letter, the laundry basket, the rosemary from the garden that no longer belongs to you.

Build the ceremony from the evidence of your life.

So light a candle tonight. Not because candles are magic, (though I suspect they are), but because flame is one of the oldest ways we have of telling the body: pay different attention now. Then say aloud, to the kitchen, the dark, the dogs, the unpaid bill on the table, and whatever else is listening: I am looking for what needs marking.

Then wait. The ritual will find you. You’ll know it by the drop in your stomach, by the sudden heat behind your eyes, by the strange combination of dread and relief. You’ll know it because some part of you has been standing at a threshold for years, holding its little bundle, waiting for permission to cross.

Give it permission. Then cross. And afterwards, for God’s sake, eat something sweet.

For women who have always known they were their own priests, and are only now beginning to act accordingly: it’s time.

Last Monday I convinced myself it was a bank holiday. I was absolutely certain of it. Rang Finley, announced we were coming, made the whole thing feel ceremonial and significant and swept Ben along with me in the general air of occasion.

But it wasn’t a bank holiday.

Finley didn’t ask why I was making such a fuss of a Monday. He just worried quietly, looking at us anxiously when we arrived, apparently convinced we were rocking up to share news of our imminent demise or ill-advised intention to start a new life in Brazil (of all places). Looking at me the way he has looked at me since he was about fifteen: with fond, slightly bewildered amusement, as if he is the parent and I am the wayward, occasionally baffling child who has turned up again with another improbable idea and needs to be fed and humoured. Watching me and Ben across the table with something in his face that I can only describe as relief. And laughing. A bemused chuckle because le laughs at us often. In a way that is entirely kind and only slightly a lot at our expense.

We ate and then Finn’s best friend, Harry, arrived and sat down and said little and I love him because he is serious and beautiful and takes everything in with a quality of attention that feels, always like well-mannered, beautifully brought up courtesy. And Finn himself: wild ringlets, talking ten to the dozen, eating even faster than he talks, which is saying something. Gesturing with his fork. Not quite finishing sentences before starting new ones, leaping between subjects with the gorgeous agility of a twenty-two year old mind that has not yet learned to slow itself down for other people. The same energy he had at seven, at twelve, at sixteen, directed now toward a life that is entirely his own and showing every sign of being a good one.

I sat across from him and felt it. That lit thing. That thing that has been burning for twenty-two years and has absolutely no intention of going out, and that I would not extinguish even if I could, even on the days it scorches.

The actual bank holiday is tomorrow. I know that now. I have made a note.

Penelope Fitzgerald wrote, in Offshore, that decision is torment for anyone with imagination. That when you decide, you multiply the things you might have done and now never can.

I have been thinking about this constantly.

We have fallen headlong into narrowboats. Not politely but with a kind of obsessive, savage interest. We are in it, completely, bone-deep, arguing via WhatsApp at ten in the morning about whether a sixty-eight footer is too ambitious for two people who have barely steered a dinghy. Sending each other listings at midnight. Whole evenings given to the question of stern design: cruiser or traditional, which is secretly a question about who we think we are and whether we are brave enough to fully commit to the answer. Every decision multiplying the things we might have done and now never will.

And Ben has noticed, with a smirk and forensic accuracy, that every single boat I send him contains a washing machine. Which is quite a stretch because so many of them don’t. He has noticed that I appear entirely oblivious to whether the rest of the vessel is held together with canal water and optimism, so long as there is a washing machine! This might be true (but don’t tell him), because I am a vintage housekeeper. I have spent twenty-one years writing about the small domestic rituals that make a life lovelier, about the joy of clean linen dried in good air so I need a washing machine. It’s not preference or aesthetic choice. Its non-negotiable in the way that the books are non-negotiable, which is to say: we may talk about it but we both know how it ends.

He doesn’t want a washing machine. He’s got objections involving water and space and what I suspect is a philosophical position about the nature of narrowboat life that he has not yet fully articulated. As if a washing machine somehow compromises the off-griddiness of the whole kaboodle, but installing Starlink doesn’t?? And I respect this position enormously. I do. But I am having a washing machine.

So we have agreed to keep discussing it. And let me hereby state that I am happy to discuss it till we are blue in the face but no washing machine = no Alison on the boat. Laundry, done properly is, I am afraid, the hill I am willing to die upon

That is of course if we ever get there. For the house sale is becoming a saga now. Because there is a man somewhere in the world who has STILL not yet signed whatever it is that needs signing and is going about his days apparently untroubled, while I feel the kind of low, constant, slightly nauseating hum of waiting I remember from pregnancy: the weird anxiety of waiting to birth a new life.

So in the meantime I’m obsessing about the storage unit, because I have got to keep my mind occupied and neurosis is as good an occupation as any methinks?So yes, I think about it when I can’t sleep. The fluorescent darkness of it, the specific smell of stored and waiting things. Somewhere in there are boxes of Finley’s childhood, things I couldn’t put down when he left them behind: drawings and Pokemon cards and the beautiful detritus of a boy becoming a person, lots of things he no longer needs and that I cannot release because they are evidence. Evidence that it happened. That he was small once and is large now and I was there for all of it.

There is furniture from the first shop I ever owned. A blue apothecary chest, deep-drawered and entirely impractical and absolutely coming with me onto the boat, . A teak box painted red with Indian flowers, from my Mum’s house, that smells still of somewhere like home. Books in quantities that no reasonable person could defend and that I will defend to the last. Kitchen things I am not yet sure we will need, but that I am not ready to decide about because deciding about them means deciding about the life that once used them. And I don’t want to have to decide about that, I simply want to acknowledge it and move on.

Soon, I will stand in that unit and I will have to choose, regardless.

Gaston Bachelard wrote that a house is first and foremost a space for daydreaming, assembled from its contents as much as its walls. What does it mean to reduce all of that to seven feet wide? What makes the cut? What do I hold and what do I leave in the fluorescent dark? The apothecary chest. Obviously the apothecary chest. The teak box with the Indian flowers. The books. All of the books. Every last one. And Finley’s childhood. The essence of it. Where will I put that? Is it enough to carry it with me, to carry it in my heart?

What I want, what I think I have been trying to articulate for weeks, is not a still room in a tumble down cottage. I have long give up wanting the cottagecore dream. Rather, I want the boat to be a still room. The whole thing. I want it to feel like a floating apothecary: low-ceilinged and fragrant and useful in every inch, every surface quietly doing its work. Mason jars of dried chamomile and rose hip syrup and wild garlic salt and elderflower cordial lined along the galley shelf. Bundles of lavender hanging wherever lavender can be hung. The blue apothecary chest fitting, somehow, into a space that was made for it. The books in every nook and cranny and horizontal surface the boat will offer, bookshelves built into the places most people would put something sensible.

I dream about a specific meal. Not the junk food of these transitional weeks, the quick and shameful and forgiven things we have been eating while our brains are elsewhere. I mean the meal the boat will make possible: celeriac mashed with too much butter, truffled and silky, walnuts roasting in the little oven until the whole boat fills with that warm woody sweetness, something slow on the stove, the dark outside the portholes. Ben across the table with my black glasses pushing his hair back, fairylights twinkling along the length of the boat and dogs arranged in piles the way they do when they know the evening has settled.

Whether the mason jars survive the locks is a question I keep adding to the list of things I don’t know. Do things fall off the roof frequently? Do they slide about inside? Do people on boats have ironing boards or are they just resigned to crumpled? Will icicles droop off my nose in the middle of the night, come December?

I haven’t a clue, there is so much I don’t know, but I do know that there is a speed limit on the canals. Who knew? Four miles per hour, and I find this so deeply comforting I can barely explain it to anyone who hasn’t felt the particular exhaustion of trying too hard to live at the speed of society she does’t understand. Four miles per hour. The whole country performing velocity and urgency and productivity, and us moving at four miles per hour with chamomile on the shelf and nasturtiums on the roof and a washing machine that Ben has accepted but not yet made peace with, going at four miles per hour toward somewhere we haven’t decided yet.

Tilda cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness.

Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald

I read that line and felt it like a small, gentle reproach. And then like an instruction. And then like permission. I have always needed permission you know? Always sought it from anyone willing to provide it, with the kind of reassurance that says yes, you are ok, go ahead.

The roof of the boat will be covered in plants. Trailing nasturtiums and pots of mint and rosemary: extravagant, and wobbly, the whole travelling garden arriving in new places with its riot of green and blossom. Ben will forage from the towpath, because he is the kind of person who knows where the wild garlic grows and will come back with muddy boots and something edible and the quiet satisfaction of a man who has been useful in a way that connects to something old and true, and I want to be the person who knows what to do with it. Who has the jar ready. Who has the butter softening.

We agree about almost everything that matters.

We just have to sort out the washing machine.

So yes, we have done our research. We have stood on towpaths and watched the floating world go past at four miles per hour and I have studied it with the fervour of a woman who has found her new special interest and intends, as I always intend, to know everything about it before I am ready.

Ben studies technical boaty things I don’t yet understand and I study the people.

The man under the pram canopy of his exhausted, paint-blistered boat on a grey Wednesday afternoon, drinking a bottle of prosecco alone in the quietly terrible way of someone who has made a series of complicated decisions and arrived, finally, at the right time for prosecco. I understood him with my whole body: despair and lonely mess. Once glorious or not yet glorious, but either way, tired.

The barefooted couples, chaotic and gorgeous and moving in the synchronised way of people who have long since stopped explaining themselves to each other. One at the helm, one at the bow, the rope already in the right hand. Something in me looking at them and knowing the word for what I felt: not envy exactly. Recognition. Wanting to say: yes, that, we are trying to get to that.

The serious older pairs in their matching hats. Sensible, sometime silly hats. Moving along the water with the quiet efficiency of people who cracked some code the rest of us are still puzzling over and who are now simply getting on with it, together, in the right hats. I want their competence. I want their ease. I might even want a hat though let it be known that I am the kind of woman who looks like she has had her head hammered into her neck whenever I so much as debate one and that Ben will probably have to leave should I decide I want to be the kind of boater who wants to wave at passers-by as we sail down the canal smug and certain.

The woman in the yellow anorak steaming along the towpath at a pace that suggested an argument recently vacated or possibly one being rehearsed for later, looking at me when I said hello as if I had said something entirely inadmissible. I think about her and hope she found what she was looking for at the end of that towpath.

And finally a man on the roof of his tatty, glorious, completely magnificent boat. Wild beard, bare feet, arms slightly out from his sides in the posture of someone who has absolutely nothing left to prove to anyone. He didn’t notice me at all and I could not stop staring at him. A pirate of a man. A wild thing. As free as I want Ben to be

I don’t know which of these people we are going to be, though I suspect I am secretly auditioning for all of them. We are too old, probably, for the beautiful barefooted bohemians, or at least past the age of doing it without a flicker of self-consciousness. Too young, definitely, for the matching hats. (Too chaotic. Too much hair). And maybe the pirate on the roof is the dream but being him requires a level of not-caring we haven’t quite achieved. Because I think we might be fussing about things not yet ready to reveal themselves?

Case in point: the Dryrobe thing. From a purely freezing point of view we want the kind of Dryrobes we sometimes borrow in Abersoch. We want them because we are always cold, because warmth is the thing I pursue above almost everything else, and because the vision I return to most often is standing on the towpath in something enormous and fleece-lined and completely, unashamedly cosy while the canal goes past at four miles per hour. But Dryrobes feel bougie. And people make entire Instagrams about people who wear them anywhere other than on a beach. Will the real narrowboaters look at us, with our carefully curated apothecary jars and our orange Le Creuset kettle and our Dryrobes, and simply know? Will the pirate on the roof see us coming and move along the water away from us, knowing we are pretenders, that we have the right objects but not the right history, that we chose this rather than arriving at it through necessity or long slow accumulation of canal knowledge?

I care about this more than is probably reasonable.

“Decision is torment for anyone with imagination.”

What it will mean to be together, the two of us, in seven feet of width, all day and all the hours of the night?

People ask with that delighted alarm, as if this is the detail we have overlooked in our enthusiasm. We haven’t. We have discussed it for at least as long as we have discussed the shocking price of canal-side launderettes. Because here is what I know: we have foraged this life together from whatever grew in the lives we had before we met. His life and my life, the things that survived and the things we put down and left in the past they belonged to. We composted some of it and were glad to. And from what remained we have made something that feeds us, something that is specifically ours, that nobody else could have made from these exact ingredients.

The person you can be in seven feet with.

Ben pushes his hair back from his face when he is thinking, digs his fingers into his scalp, a gesture I have memorised without meaning to, that I would know in the dark. He makes me cups of tea at the exact right moment, which sounds small and is a little bit everything and he laughs at me, laughs at things I say that I was not entirely sure were funny, which does more good for my nervous system than he knows. All of this a kind of fluency it takes years to build, and we haven’t had years and I do not take that for granted.

Seven feet seems, on reflection, like plenty.

Now, tonight, on this specific cloudy Sunday in May. I am alone, writing this.

The clouds have been low all day, the kind of grey that sits just above the rooftops and makes everything feel interior and close and bewildering and we have eaten something terrible for lunch. The kind of thing that sinks to the bottom of your tummy and won’t let you forget that your diet has entirely slipped. I have been mildly, persistently stressy about this, and I know the stress is only partly about the food. It is harder than usual, lately, to untangle what I am feeling from what I am not feeling from what I am feeling about what I am feeling. This is the muddle of a neurodivergent nervous system under pressure: the emotions don’t come labelled. Something is happening in my chest that could be excitement or could be dread or could be a third thing without a name, something akin to anticipation, tingly and slightly unsteady, like standing at the edge of something very high up and not being entirely sure if you came here to jump or just to look.

I know this is the right direction. I know we are in the right place. I just sometimes can’t tell joy from vertigo, and I have had to teach myself to trust the direction even when the feeling is illegible?

And now he is back, whistling and carrying arms full of fallen blossom branches gathered on his walk. Arranging them in a jug without making a ceremony of it. So I find myself leaning in into him, the smell of him, dogs and aftershave and something green and outside, something that smells like the whole world should, and I am giddy about the blossom in the way that is slightly embarrassing and completely genuine, the way of a woman who has not yet become too blasé to be undone by small and freely offered things.

The branches are everywhere in this room now. This imperfect, temporary room that is not yet the boat and not anymore the before. Blossom floating over the table, loose and extravagant, and pale pink and fuzzy and smelling of something sweet and alive and fleetingly here.

Outside the window the canal exists somewhere. Four miles per hour and the plants on the roof and the jars on the shelf and the wild garlic on the towpath. Inside this room the blossom is falling open and the cats are arguing and the clouds are pressing soft and grey against the glass and nothing is settled or signed or resolved.

But I am learning, slowly, to follow Tilda’s example. To let the future be the future. To find the happiness that is available right now in this room, in this light, in these branches, in the smell of this specific person.

It is, I think, a practice. Like everything worth having.

Tomorrow is the actual bank holiday. We might drive out to a canal we haven’t visited yet, and stand on the towpath, and look.

Just look.

Four miles per hour. So it’s going to take years to reach Brazil, Finn. I promise.

This week, The Commonplace takes us all back to our Brocante roots, with a nostalgic list of terribly old-fashioned little pleasures, from sweet peas, to Victoria sponges, swirly dresses and more. All the tiny somethings that used to consume my days when I lived in my little cottage when Finn was tiny. If you are reading this, you too probably own at least three floral aprons, grow sweet peas and can throw together a delicious pie faster than most can pour a bowl of cereal. But we are not delusional, over-romanticising the past, or escaping our own reality, we have simply decided, with full and cheerful awareness of our own absurdity, that pretty joys are still values worth defending in a world that keeps trying to make everything utilitarian and grey.

So welcome to one hundred ways to make life feel prettier. Books from the golden age of domestic fiction, recipes for the kind of food that should always be eaten outside on a blanket, bathroom rituals involving rose water and very old soap, ideas for dresses and hair and the sweet scent of roses and lavender. All of it slightly impractical. All of it completely worth it, for joys sake!

The first twenty-five are for everyone. The rest are for the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. The door is, as always, open.

1. Buy sweet peas. Not for any reason except that they are the prettiest flowers available between June and August and they smell like the word delicate made botanical. They require a vase with a narrow neck and a windowsill with morning light and absolutely nothing else. If you have never grown them yourself, next year buy a packet of Matucana seeds in January and push them into compost in February and by July you will have more than you know what to do with. The growing is not the point. The cutting and bringing inside is.

2. READ: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson (1938). A dowdy governess stumbles into the glamorous life of a nightclub singer for one extraordinary day in 1930s London. Funny, warm, entirely charming, and containing within it a quiet argument that beauty and pleasure are not frivolous but necessary and that the woman who reaches for them, even impractically, even improbably, is doing something important. Published, forgotten, and republished in 2000 to immediate and well-deserved delight. Miss Pettigrew is all of us.

3. RECIPE: Proper cucumber sandwiches, made the correct way, which is to say: white bread, thinly sliced, crusts removed, very cold unsalted butter applied so thickly it is almost embarrassing, cucumber peeled and sliced on the diagonal so thin you can see through it, a very small amount of white wine vinegar, salt, and white pepper. Cut into fingers. Arranged on a plate lined with a paper doily if you have one and not mad about it if you don’t. Eaten immediately before the bread has time to become the wrong texture.

4. RITUAL: The morning face wash with cold water and a bar of proper soap. Not a gel, a foam, a balm or anything that comes from a pump dispenser with a Scandi-minimal label. A bar of soap in a proper soap dish, something with lavender or rose or violet or nothing at all except glycerine. Maybe buy a bar of Pears and transport yourself back to your childhood? Then wash your face with cold water and nostalgia every morning this week…

5. Grow something in a pot on a windowsill that you can eat. Not for self-sufficiency purposes. For the specific prettiness of a terracotta pot of herbs on a kitchen windowsill, which is one of the most reliably pleasant domestic sights available and has been since the Romans. Basil, thyme, a small rosemary, a pot of chives with their purple flowers left to develop because the flowers are edible and extremely pretty on a salad. The pot does not have to be terracotta, but I think it helps enormously if it is?

6. READ: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 by Cleone Knox, which purports to be the diary of an eighteenth-century girl but is almost certainly the work of a young Irishwoman called Magdalen King-Hall, who was twenty-two when it was published in 1925 and apparently enjoyed the conceit enormously. But it doesn’t matter. It is witty, warm, full of descriptions of dresses and assemblies and country house visits and the particular comedy of a woman navigating society with intelligence, style and ludicrously memorable lines like: “Men are such Damnable Fools, there us no saying what they will do in a fury!”

7. RECIPE: Victoria sponge, made correctly, which means equal weights of eggs, butter, sugar and flour, beaten by hand or by mixer until pale and airy, baked in two tins at 180 degrees for twenty-five minutes, cooled completely before filling with whipped cream and the best strawberry jam you can find. The sponge should be served on a plate that is slightly too beautiful for the occasion, dusted with icing sugar applied through a small sieve, and eaten in the garden if the weather permits.

8. BATHROOM RITUAL: The rosewater splash. Keep a bottle of triple-strength rosewater, the kind from a Middle Eastern grocer (or Tesco in the cosmetics aisle, no really) in the bathroom cabinet. After washing your face, pour a small amount into your palms and press it against your face and neck and breathe in for three seconds. The smell of it is the smell of a bathroom that belongs to a woman who takes small pleasures seriously.

9. Buy a floral apron and wear it without irony. Cos-play for homemakers…

10. READ: Miss Read’s Thrush Green series, beginning with Thrush Green (1959). A village, its inhabitants, the slow turning of the seasons, a doctor, a schoolmistress, a vicar’s wife, several gardens, and the particular quality of life in a small community where everyone knows each other’s business and everyone is, underneath the gossip, essentially kind. Miss Read (pen name of Dora Saint) wrote thirty-three books about Thrush Green and its neighbouring village Fairacre. They are comfort reading of the highest order and contain within them a quietly radical argument that the small, local, domestic life is as worthy of literature as any other.

11. RECIPE: Potted shrimps on toast, made with brown shrimps from Morecambe Bay if you can find them, warmed gently in a great deal of butter with a pinch of mace, a pinch of cayenne, a little nutmeg, and tipped into small ramekins to set. Turned out onto hot brown toast with a wedge of lemon and eat at the kitchen table or, ideally, outside at a table covered with a cloth. J’adore…

12. HAIR RITUAL: A weekly hair oil treatment, applied the old-fashioned way. Warm a tablespoon of sweet almond oil or coconut oil between your palms, work it through dry hair from mid-length to ends, wrap your hair in a warm towel that has been held briefly over a radiator, and leave it for forty-five minutes while doing something pleasant. Read. Listen to something. Sit in the garden if the temperature allows. The oil treatment is not primarily about the hair, though the hair will be the better for it. It is about the forty-five minutes of deliberate, unapologetic doing nothing, occupied with the specific pleasure of attending to oneself.

13. Find a vintage tablecloth at a car boot sale or a charity shop or on eBay and use it for picnics. Not the wipe-clean kind. A proper cotton one, ideally with a printed pattern of some sort, cherries or checks or a faded floral, slightly worn at the folds from decades of previous use, and carrying in its fibres the memory of a hundred other afternoons on a hundred other lawns.

14. READ: Mrs Tim of the Regiment by D.E. Stevenson (1932). The diary of a British army wife in 1930s Scotland, managing a small household, a pair of children, and a series of social situations with a wit and warmth and complete inability to take herself seriously that makes it one of the funniest domestic novels of the century. Mrs Tim Carries On is the second in the series and possibly even better.

15. RECIPE: Strawberry jam, made in July when the strawberries are the correct kind of ridiculous, which is to say plentiful and slightly past their best for eating raw and absolutely at their peak for jam. Equal weights of fruit and sugar, the fruit hulled and halved, the sugar warmed in the oven, the two combined in a wide heavy pan, brought to a rolling boil and tested on a cold saucer for set. Ladled into warmed jars and labelled in your best handwriting. Then kept on a shelf where it looks, for the rest of the year, like evidence that you are the kind of woman who makes jam. So yeah, move over Meghan.

16. BEDROOM RITUAL: Fresh flowers on the dressing table. Not necessarily expensive ones, not even necessarily from a florist. Whatever is available and pretty: a stem of cow parsley in a small bottle, three sweet peas in a bud vase, a handful of lavender tied with a piece of ribbon, two stems of white allium. The dressing table with a small vase of something seasonal on it is one of the prettiest domestic arrangements available and it costs between nothing and three pounds and changes the character of the room entirely. This should happen every week without fail from April to October. Make it domestic law.

17. Wear a dress on a day you would normally wear something functional. Not for a special occasion, not for work, or for anyone in particular, but for the pleasure of moving through your own house and garden in something that swirls, something with a print, something that makes you feel, when you catch your own reflection in the kitchen window, like the heroine of your own story rather than a supporting character in everyone else’s. A summer dress worn in the garden while doing ordinary things is one of the small and entirely available pleasures of being a woman. Just make sure it has pockets, obvs.

18. READ: The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann (1936). Olivia, divorced, living in a bedsit in London, falls into a love affair with a married man and the novel follows the whole of it, the beginning and the middle and the end, with a closeness and an honesty that was almost shocking in 1936 and remains completely, uncomfortably real. I have long regarded Lehmann as one of the great under-read novelists of the century and this is her best.

19. RECIPE: Lemon drizzle cake: a loaf cake made with the zest of two lemons in the batter, baked until golden and immediately, while still hot, pierced all over with a skewer and soaked with a mixture of lemon juice and caster sugar that seeps into every hole and sets into a sugary crust on the top. Eaten slightly warm with a cup of properly made tea. Kept wrapped in baking paper in a tin. (Nb: Gets better on the second day, and perfectly ripe on the third).

20. SCENT: The classic English floral perfume is not lavender, which is too medicinal in its undiluted state, and not rose, which everyone expects, but sweet pea, which almost nobody makes successfully, and the reason for that is fascinating: the actual flower produces a stress hormone when cut that destroys its own fragrance, which is why every sweet pea perfume is an interpretation rather than an extraction, a perfumer's best guess at something that refuses to be bottled. When the guess is good it smells exactly right: light, slightly powdery, vanishing before you have fully apprehended it, so pretty it is almost impossible not to smile. Look for Jo Malone's English Pear and Sweet Pea, or Demeter's Sweet Pea.

21. Get a wicker basket for shopping. Not an insulated bag, or a tote bag with something written on it, and definitely not a supermarket bag for life, ye-gads! A proper wicker basket with a handle, large enough to carry vegetables and a small loaf of bread, light enough to carry on one arm, beautiful enough to hang on the back of a kitchen door when not in use.

22. READ: The Provincial Lady in Wartime by E.M. Delafield (1940). The funniest and most human of the Provincial Lady series, in which our heroine attempts to contribute to the war effort with the same cheerful competence and self-deflating humour she brings to everything else.

23. RECIPE: Egg and cress sandwiches, made with the crustiest granary bread you can find, hard-boiled eggs mashed with just enough mayonnaise to bind, a small amount of English mustard, salt, white pepper, and a generous amount of mustard and cress grown in a tray on the kitchen windowsill specifically for this purpose…

24. BATHROOM RITUAL: A proper bath, once a week, made into the occasion it deserves to be. Not a quick one. A bath filled deep and hot with a handful of Epsom salts, which cost £2 from any chemist and soften the water in a way that expensive bath oils approximate but do not equal. A few drops of neroli or ylang ylang added for the scent. A good book propped on the bath rack if you have one, a folded towel on the rim if you don’t. A glass of something cold on the floor beside the bath. The room heated before you get in. No phone. The bath this week as a ritual rather than a function, which means: no hurrying, no thinking about what comes next, no checking anything. Simply the hot water and the quiet and the specific luxury of a warm room and nothing required.

25. (NOTE): The romanticisation of daily life is not delusional. It is not naive. It is not the province of women who have not read enough or thought enough or suffered enough. It is a philosophical choice, made in full awareness of everything that is difficult, to insist that beauty is worth attending to and that the pretty dress worn in the garden on an ordinary afternoon is not a distraction from the serious business of living. It is the serious business of living. The woman who makes a Victoria sponge and arranges sweet peas in a vase and reads a novel on a rug in the garden is not escaping her life. She is furnishing it. This is the whole argument. It fits on a Post-it note.

The remaining seventy-five are for paid subscribers. The door is open.

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The Seasonal Practice: Introduction | March Edition | April Edition |

May is almost here. Which means blossom and impermanence. The cruelty of everything blooming at once and lasting barely long enough to notice.

So today, I'm sharing the May edition of The Seasonal Practice: a year-long daily practice guide that runs from March through February, following the actual rhythm of the seasons rather than the artificial reset of January…

Know this though… as I said last month, these practices are not meant to be revelatory.

You won’t read "sit under a cherry tree and watch petals fall" and suddenly understand the meaning of life. You will not be told anything you don't already know. There is no secret, hack or one weird trick (still damning you, internet!). What there is: Repetition. Rhythm. Reminders. The basic good stuff of life, organised by season and offered daily in tiny paragraphs, so you might actually do it.

Because here's the truth no one wants to say about May: it's hard. Everyone else is posting about garden parties and long evenings and aren't-we-lucky-the-weather's-nice, and you're standing in front of a cherry tree trying not to cry because the blossom is already falling and you only just noticed it was there.

May looks easy from the outside. It’s all light and warmth and flowers and optimism. But May is exhausting. May is the pressure to be happy because the weather's nice. May is watching everything bloom knowing it won't last. May is feeling joy and grief simultaneously and not knowing which one to let win?

The Seasonal Practice acknowledges this. It doesn't pretend May is all picnics and ease. It doesn't ask you to perform gratitude for good weather. Instead, it offers practices that meet May where it actually is. In the abundance that feels overwhelming. In the beauty that makes you ache. In the impermanence that reminds you everything ends.

WHY DAILY? WHY SEASONAL?

Because your May body is different from your April body. Warmer. More exposed. More self-conscious as summer approaches.

Because your May home needs different things than your April home. Lighter fabrics. More flowers. More air. More light staying longer.

Because your May heart carries different weight than your April heart. Comparison to other people's blooming gardens. Envy and joy mixed together.

YOU are seasonal. Your energy shifts. Your capacity changes. What you need in May is not what you need in November.

So like I said, The Seasonal Practice acknowledges this. It doesn't ask you to maintain the same pace year-round. It doesn't pretend that January and July require the same things from you.

Instead, it offers practices that shift with the seasons.

So in May, you're asked to bring blossom inside even though it won't last. To eat outside in longer light. To witness beauty while knowing it's temporary. To rest even when everything is growing. These aren't profound instructions. They're honest ones. The blossom is falling. Notice it before it's gone.

THE CASE FOR SEASONAL HONESTY

Here's what I've learned after two decades of writing about home and life and the work of being a woman in midlife: most people think seasonal living means having the right wreath on the door. It doesn't. Seasonal living means acknowledging that you have different capacity in different months. That what you need in May is not what you need in January.

That your body, your home, your heart, and your soul all respond to light and temperature and the particular quality of air in different seasons. May asks different things of you than January asks. January asks you to survive. May asks you to witness. January lets you hide. May makes you visible. January is rest. May is restlessness. So the practices shift accordingly. You don't do the same things in May that you did in March. You don't tend your home the same way. You don't move your body the same way. You don't feed your soul the same things. You adapt. You shift. You respond to what the season is actually asking. This is seasonal living. Not wreaths. Responsiveness.

THE WORK OF IMPERMANENCE

May is the month that teaches impermanence whether you want to learn it or not. Blossom lasts just three days, or maybe five if you're lucky. Then it's gone. The light at nine p.m. only happens for a few weeks. Then it starts retreating. The particular green of new leaves only exists for a moment before it darkens into summer green. Everything in May is temporary. And that temporariness is cause for both contemplation and celebration…

Because if you can learn to witness May's beauty while knowing it won't last, if you can learn to feel joy and grief simultaneously, and if you can learn to be present with impermanence, then you've learned something that matters for everything else.

Your children won't be this age again. Your mother won't be here forever. Your own body won't look like this in five years. Your life as it is right now won't last. Nothing lasts. May teaches this gently. With blossom. With light and warmth that feels like promise.

So witness things while they're here. Notice them. Document them. Sit with them. Let them be temporary. Let yourself ache about their temporariness.

This is the work of May. Let yourself be captivated, no matter how temporary.

HOW TO USE THE MAY PRACTICE

The May practice contains 28 days of prompts, organised into weekly themes that rotate through Home, Heart, Body, and Soul.

You can:

- Do one practice per day, following the numbers in order

- Choose the practices that speak to you each week and skip the rest

- Return to the practices that work and repeat them as needed

- Adapt anything that doesn't fit your life

- Skip days when you need to skip days

- Start mid-month if that's when you're reading this There is no wrong way to use this.

The only failure is not starting because you're worried about doing it perfectly. May doesn't require perfection (Honestly? NOTHING at Brocante does). May requires presence. So start wherever you are. I promise you no-one is coming to tell you you are doing it wrong.

FOR THE WOMAN WHO FINDS MAY HARD

This practice is for you if you're tired of pretending to be happy because the weather's nice. If you watch blossom fall and feel grief, not just joy. If you're exhausted by the pressure to make the most of long evenings. If your garden is more weeds than flowers and you feel shame about it. If you compare your May to other people's May and come up lacking. If you need permission to find beauty difficult. This is not about performing May perfectly. This is about living May honestly: with all its beauty and all its difficulty. With joy and grief held together. With presence even when impermanence hurts.

This is May. This is the practice. This is the life that's happening right now while you're paying attention. Or not.

May will do its work on you either way. You might as well notice.

After the paywall… your lovely Seasonal Practice for April: A downloadable PDF to tick off each task you complete throughout the month.

Looking For My May Puttery Treats?

Find It On Etsy Here

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It’s a grey Sunday afternoon and I’m still in my dressing gown, nibbling cheese on toast. Here is what has been living in my phone this week. Some of it is useful. Some of it is just where my mind has been.

Dwelling on…

The graveyard of all the women

“You will become a graveyard of all the women you once were” - A line from Pavana Reddy’s collection Rangoli (aff). I screenshotted it and have opened it billions of times since, because it makes the accumulation of all those former selves feel less like loss and more like surgery of the soul. Like there is something worth splitting ourselves open to squint at? I’m not sure I’m ready to get the scalpel out yet. But I keep coming back to this line.

Reading…

Two books I am rationing the anticipation of

Philippa Perry has written a murder mystery called Shrink Solves Murder (aff) and I feel about this the way I feel about finding a twenty-pound note in an old coat. She’s gloriously, unapologetically messy - she writes on Substack, she says the quiet parts out loud, she’s the kind of woman who makes you feel less strange for being yourself. A murder mystery feels exactly right for her. So yep, can’t wait, for I really cannot resist a cosy mystery to get snuggled up with on the days when the world feels a bit too much. Also: Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, which is about the tyranny of the TradWife movement, and yes, I am mildly obsessed with Nara Smith in the way you can be obsessed with something that disturbs you. What does it take to be her? What does it cost? Burke, I think, is going to have thoughts, so Yesteryear is the first of my Read-a-Longs in my Library Community…

Coveting…

LaundryB and the question of clothes you can’t feel

I don’t know if this is an age thing or a neurodivergent thing or just finally being honest about what I need, but I cannot bear to feel clothes on my skin anymore. I want loose. I want free. I want to move without noticing I’m dressed. LaundryB’s one-size pieces are cut with that kind of intelligence, the assumption that a woman’s body is something to move in, not something to contain. I’ve been looking at the same few things all week. Might just be perfect for life on a narrowboat…

Watching…

Différente, Lola Doillon

I’ve been trying to understand myself through an autistic lens lately, slowly, without rushing toward conclusions, and something about this film feels like it might help. So I’m holding out for the particular relief of watching someone else be the way I am and having it treated as simply, quietly, normal. Hopefully it will pop up on one of the UK streaming thingies soon…

This Week’s Rabbit Holes…

Collagen, BurrowCore and Lettuce

Obsessing about finding a collagen I can stomach and finding a billion recommendations for Wild Nutrition Collagen 500 Plus - investigated with the energy of a woman who has finally decided to do something about it. Because I feel raddled. Next, A shredded lettuce recipe with garlic and vinegar, screenshotted at midnight and stashed in my head for the days when proper salad is again a possibility. And BurrowCore , a word I saw in House & Garden described as the art of living as if inside a storybook hideaway. I mean really, what could be lovelier than living inside a Beatrix Potter cottage? I’ve been thinking about why this aesthetic is having its moment right now, and I think it’s this: the world feels dangerous in a way that is hard to fathom, and some part of us wants to go to ground. To feel safe in the same way we were safe when we could lose ourselves so completely in a story. And to pull something cosy over our heads and hope it all goes away. All of it just a reasonable response to being human in a frightening time, surely?

See also: My Month In the TradWife World| Window-Swap.Com/ Prioritise This: A Practical Guide for Thriving in a World That Won’t Slow Down by Lily Silverton (aff) and | my new obsession because I can make it and feel gourmet while still living in a building site: loaded hummus.

Have a lovely new week won’t you?

Love Alison.x

Because Tuesday evenings matters as much as Saturdays. And because the interior of your daily life has always deserved your full attention…

So it is time to stop apologising for your home and simply own the loveliness you have probably become a little blind to: the wobbly pile of linen on the shelf you look at, and think: yes, exactly. The moment the candlelight makes the kitchen look like a painting by Vermeer and you think: I did that. I arranged the light in this room. I chose this.

The domestic sublime is not a decorating style. It is a state of mind available to any woman who has decided, quietly, without making an announcement, that the interior of her daily life deserves the same quality of attention she has been giving to everything else for decades. The dinner parties. The children. The career. The careful management of everyone else’s comfort. All of it entirely worthy. All of it oh so earnest, but none of it quite as sustaining as the Tuesday evening when the candles are lit at six o’clock for no reason except that the light they make is incomparably beautiful and this is your house and you are allowed.

One hundred things. Beautifully sourced, carefully considered, and utterly, unapologetically domestic.

The first twenty-five are for everyone. The rest are for the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. You know where the door is.

No:5: The Sublime Domestic

1. Begin with the understanding that the domestic sublime is not about money. Rather is about discernment, the slow deliberate accumulation of things that are genuinely good rather than merely expensive, in a home that has been arranged with the kind of attention that most people reserve for their public lives. The Swedish call this lagom, not too much, not too little, exactly right, and they apply it to everything from the number of candles on a table to the weight of a duvet... The rest of us have no word for it but recognise it instantly when we walk into someone else’s house and feel, without being able to say why, that everything is exactly as it should be.

2. Put books where domestic tasks happen. A poetry book near the kettle. A cookbook by the sofa. An essay collection in the laundry room if you are feeling wildly optimistic. Let reading ambush and seduce you and make works an intuitive part of your domestic landscape.

3. On linen: the hierarchy, plainly stated. At the top, without serious competition, is Irish linen, specifically that produced by the last remaining mills in Northern Ireland, where the flax is still retted in the traditional manner and the resulting fabric has a weight and a particular slubbed texture that no Italian or Belgian mill has quite replicated. Below that, stonewashed French linen from the Basque region. Below that, good Portuguese cotton-linen blends. Below that, everything else. Linen gets better with every wash. It requires no ironing if you fold it immediately and with attention. It lasts, genuinely, for decades. It is the only bedding really worth having and the only domestic investment that consistently outlives its cost. Save up, don’t skimp.

4. READ: Bella Figura by Kamin Mohammadi. A British-Iranian journalist who moves to Florence for a year and learns, slowly and occasionally humiliatingly, what the Italians actually mean by living well, which has very little to do with expense and almost everything to do with the specific gravity given to daily pleasures. Shopping for pasta. Choosing the wine. The table set with the same care on a Wednesday as on a Sunday. For the woman who suspects the Italians are right about most things and would like to understand precisely why.

5. Keep a house knife for flowers and string. Not a scary one. A small, sharp, useful but elegant thing. Cut twine, trim stems, slice lemons, open parcels. It should live in a drawer and make you feel quietly capable.

6. SHOPPING LIST: The domestic sublime. A box of Broste Copenhagen taper candles in one of their clay-pigment colours, the grey, the ochre, the particular green that looks like it was mixed from something found in a Scandinavian forest. A linen tablecloth in undyed natural which will be on your table in thirty years and look better then than it does now. A bottle of Cirio San Marzano tomatoes, because the domestic sublime does not distinguish between the beautiful object and the beautiful ingredient. A bunch of whatever is seasonal from the market, not the supermarket…

7. Make a tiny place for letters. Real letters, cards, postcards, notes, invitations, the school slip that made you roll your eyes, the thank-you card you forgot to send. Paper life is still life. Digital life has no soul…

8. On the Italian domestic interior: the Italians have a concept, la dolce vita domestica, that has no precise English equivalent but describes the specific sweetness of the well-ordered domestic life. The Sunday lunch that takes four hours. The coffee made in the moka pot on the stove rather than the machine on the counter. The tablecloth that comes out every Friday without discussion. The beautiful domestic life, in Italy, is not a reward for getting everything else right. It is the framework in which everything else exists.

9. SHOP: Buy a candle that smells of smoke, not cake. Hearth, cedar, black tea, beeswax, vetiver, old chapel, wet leaves. You want atmosphere, not the olfactory equivalent of being trapped inside a cupcake.

10. RITUAL: The Sunday table. Not for guests, for yourself, for your household, for the weekly insistence that Sunday lunch is a ceremony rather than a meal. A cloth, always. Cloth napkins, always. Flowers from the garden or the market, in a jug rather than a vase because a jug is less formal and more alive. The good glasses, always, because the good glasses are for Sundays and this is Sunday. This ritual costs nothing except the decision to take your own domestic life seriously and add a full stop to the week with ritual.

11. READ: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. For the Radlett family home, Alconleigh, draughty, eccentric, entirely particular, organised around the tastes and obsessions of the people who live in it rather than any conventional notion of good housekeeping. The domestic sublime, English version: slightly chaotic, intellectually alive, heated by arguments and passions rather than central heating, and more comfortable than any house decorated by a professional could ever be.

12. Let the bathroom become herbaceous rather than glamorous. A bar of soap smelling of bay, nettle, milk, or bitter orange. A small jug of eucalyptus cuttings. Towels that feel slightly rough at first and then bliss. This the is true elegance.

13. SOURCE: For the Yorkshire domestic aesthetic done properly: Vintage Elspeth Gibson for linen in the colours of the moors, those particular greys and greens and the specific brown that is not quite brown. Skye Mcalpine Textiles for tablecloths with the weight of Italian linen and exquisite design.

14. Have one room that goes dark early: Blinds lowered, lamps on, candles lit, a low hum of radio or music. Day should drift into night beautifully, not simply collapse into screens?

15. On beeswax: the case for beeswax candles over paraffin is not only aesthetic, though the aesthetic case is decisive, the warmer more golden flame, the faint honey scent on extinguishing, the slower burn that makes the expense eventually comparable. The practical case is that paraffin candles release petrochemicals into the air of a room in quantities that are, over time, measurable. Beeswax burns cleanly, naturally, and has done so in domestic interiors since before the Romans. The woman who burns only beeswax in her home has made a quiet and entirely reasonable decision that her interior air quality is worth an additional £4 per candle. And she is right.

16. RITUAL: The scent of the evening. Before the candles and after the cooking smells have settled, burn a single stick of good Japanese incense in the room where the evening will be spent. Not the synthetic kind. Proper sandalwood or kyara from a specialist supplier such as Nippon Kodo or Shoyeido. The smoke takes three minutes to do its work and leaves a ghost of fragrance that lingers for hours, not aggressively, just there, just enough. The Japanese have a name for the ceremony of incense, kodo, the way of fragrance, and they give it the same gravity as the tea ceremony.

17. READ: The Fancy Dress Party by Alberto Moravia. A slim Italian novel from 1941 about a gathering in a Roman apartment that becomes a study in the relationship between interior spaces and interior lives, the furniture as character, the rooms as psychological states, the domestic setting as the only honest stage available for the human comedy. For the woman who suspects that a novelist paying close attention to a well-furnished room is doing something more serious than interior decoration.

18. WRITE IT DOWN: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci said it about painting. Apply it to the tablecloth. The candle. The single stem in the small vase. The dressed-down room that contains, on examination, three objects of quiet perfection. The domestic sublime is never maximalist. It is always the result of knowing when to stop.

19. Make your own house vinegar. White vinegar, citrus peel, rosemary, time. It cleans beautifully and allows you to feel like a practical Italian grandmother, even if you also ordered takeaway last night.

20. SCENT MOMENT: On a Sunday morning, before anyone else is up, warm a small amount of sweet almond oil in your palms and rub it slowly into your hands, then press both palms briefly against your face and breathe in. Add two drops of neroli if you have it. Neroli, distilled from bitter orange blossom, has documented anxiolytic properties and a fragrance that is simultaneously clean and deeply sensuous, the smell of somewhere warmer and slower and more attended to than wherever you currently are. The Victorians used it in smelling salts. You are using it as a five-second holiday on a Friday night.

21. On the Italian relationship with the table: in Italy the table is never incidental. The Sunday lunch table in a Roman apartment is laid the night before. The Tuesday evening table in a Florentine kitchen is set with the same cloth and the same ceramic as the Sunday one. The distinction between ordinary and special that the English use to justify their everyday plates and their seldom-used good ones does not exist in Italian domestic culture, because every meal is, by definition, a special one. It is being eaten at this table, by these people, on this particular evening that will not come again. This is the argument for the good plates on a Wednesday.

22. SHOP: Buy a proper apron. Linen, cross-back, deep pockets. Not frilly. Not “hostess.” A work garment for a woman who may make soup, write a book, prune roses, or hide chocolate in the pocket.

23. NOTE: The domestic sublime requires one thing above all others and it is not money, not taste, not a Victorian terrace in Islington or a farmhouse in the Dales, though all of these help. It requires the decision, made once, clearly, and revisited regularly, that the interior of your daily life is worth attending to. That the Tuesday evening matters as much as the Saturday one. That the cloth on the table and the candle on the counter and the linen folded with care in the cupboard are not luxuries or indulgences or the province of people with more time and money than you have. They are the infrastructure of a life being lived with full attention. Make the decision. The rest follows.

24. READ: A House in Sicily by Daphne Phelps. An Englishwoman who inherits a crumbling villa above Taormina in 1947 and proceeds to live in it, impractically and magnificently, for the rest of her life, receiving writers, artists and assorted European intellectuals in a house that is always slightly falling apart and always completely itself. And discover in its pages that the the most extraordinary domestic interiors are the ones inhabited with complete conviction rather than total competence…

25. RITUAL: The morning coffee ceremony. Not the Italian way, that is a different ritual for a different list, but the Nordic way: coffee made in a proper pot, not a machine. Ground fresh if possible. Brewed slowly. Poured into a cup that is worth drinking from, something tactile and right. Taken somewhere specific: the kitchen table, the armchair by the window, or the back step if the morning allows it. Ten minutes. Nothing else happening. The coffee ceremony is the Nordic version of the Japanese tea ceremony, an act of deliberate attention applied to an ordinary pleasure, which is, I think, how ordinary pleasures become extraordinary ones.

The remaining seventy-five are for paid subscribers. The door, as always, is open.

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We might have reached peak preposterous.

In this life, there are two things most of us rarely, if ever, lose. Their place in our days is both defined and specific and we rarely go a-wandering with either the kettle or our toothbrush. And yet this week, Ben and I managed to mislay both, somewhere in the muddle of dismantling the temporary landing-kitchen and the particular dark chaos that a bathroom becomes when you are living inside a renovation and have stopped knowing which end is up.

I was on the phone to Finn, reporting the mysterious disappearance of my pink toothbrush, when Ben came in and announced that he had LOST THE KETTLE.

(And without it, he would DIE.)

Finn paused mid-speech. “What did he just say?”

“He has lost the kettle.”

“No, he hasn’t.”

But oh yes he had. The Toothbrush had run away with the Kettle and we were perplexed and so tired we could only wander around gawping at each other, trying to decide if one of us was gaslighting the other in the most traditional sense of the word, or if something supernatural was having a chuckle at our expense and would at any minute start throwing coins at our heads.

Finn tutted. He despairs of us, and he is probably right to. “They will turn up,” he said, and he was of course right, because turn up they did: the toothbrush standing to attention in a plant pot in one of the bedrooms, and I kid you not, the kettle being used to prop a door open in the hall. Neither of us has any explanation for either situation beyond a sort of shared amnesia, and the perpetual air of bewilderment we both wear now, in lieu of the certainty we once had about the ordinary shape of a day.

Because if we cannot keep track of the kettle, how on earth are we going to keep track of oblique matters like purpose and meaning and future?

Anyway. It has been a busy week.

In celebration of sunny mornings, we have been getting in the car and following the canal network to pretty places. Marple, most recently, wandering the towpaths with the dogs kerfuffling at our feet, discussing in long, looping, circular conversations the merits and possible downfalls of life on a narrowboat. Establishing which canals would mean we could get to the kids in both Lancashire and Manchester without too great a faff. Arguing over willow trees versus moorings with good amenities. Standing on bridges and measuring boats with our eyes, trying to decide whether we could manage something as long as seventy feet, which would give us the two bedrooms we need, and still not feel like we were living inside a pencil.

Because it has been decided. We are going to buy a narrowboat.

An extended summer on the cut, tootling. A project to consume our days completely as we gut a boat and make from it, however temporarily, a home. A thing that may stay a summer holiday or may quietly become a whole different kind of life. We are holding it loosely, which is easier than it sounds when you have lost the kettle and no longer trust yourself with certainties.

I have been so very torn.

On one hand, the canal has become, over the past two years, something of a special interest. I hoard images of beautiful boats the way I used to collect interiors magazines. I watch bohemian women fashioning calm, creative lives on the water, their boats full of trailing plants and good lamps and paintwork in colours that make you stop. I have entire Pinterest boards dedicated to dark wood floorboards and cool cream walls and Moroccan tiles in a galley kitchen. I have peeked at Instagram accounts stuffed with narrowboat lives until I swooned.

And on the other hand, I have had the oddest, most persistent sense that I wouldn’t dare. That it isn’t for me. That a house should not be that shape. That the whole enterprise is fraught with danger in the form of marauding swans and the horror of heavy locks and spiders in every crevice and belongings nicked from the roof and the let’s-not-talk-about-it situation with boat toilets.

But here’s the thing: It doesn’t have to be for always, does it?

If we hate it, we sell it and go back to land. If I hate it and Ben loves it, we find a plan that accommodates both truths. Nothing about this decision is permanent. Nothing about any decision is permanent, though we spend an extraordinary amount of our lives behaving as if it is.

And more than that. I am always urging you to be the woman who says yes to the oblique idea. The woman full of derring-do and gloriously messy adventure, because life is short and time is marching and love, above all else, matters.

I should probably do that then, mais oui? Drink my own medicine. Be brave and wild and true!

So here it begins. Our gloriously messy adventure.

We have already spotted a boat we are considering making an offer on. We have chosen which pair of canals to start our continuing cruising journey. For those who don’t know: there are two ways to live on the water. You can have a Continuous Cruising licence, which allows you to travel any canal as long as you keep moving and don’t stay in one spot for longer than a fortnight. Or you can have a permanent mooring, a fixed home base you come and go from at will. We will likely start as continuous cruisers, feeling our way along, and revisit the mooring question in the autumn.

Nothing is set in stone. We are both just feeling our way to peace after all manner of grief and sadness, and it takes longer than you think, and the remedies are stranger. A narrowboat is, it turns out, quite possibly one of mine. So I am choosing to look at it as a gorgeous project. I am filling notebooks with questions about water filtration systems and inverters and how much solar panel a person actually needs. I am conducting long debates about washing machines and wondering whether the unspoken law of the canals really does require the ownership of an orange Le Creuset stove-top kettle, so ubiquitous on every boat we pass that I genuinely suspect they write it into the licensing terms.

Till then, still here. Still waiting for the slowest solicitors in the land to find their urgency. Tonight there are pitta pocket pizzas planned, because we have cheese and Italian meats left over from a picnic tea we ate last night after returning home, tired and happy.

Then later, an early night, coming to the end of a book I have been deep inside for weeks and having big thoughts I haven’t quite arranged into sentences yet. Letting my eye wander over every single object I own and asking do I need it? Really? Not in a minimalist, clear-the-decks way. In the way of a woman who is about to live in seventy feet.

Candles lit. Stars to be wished upon later.

Bright orange kettles are, at least, hard to lose.

Every object in your home as a statement about who you are, who you were, and who you have not yet decided to stop becoming.

There is a woman somewhere reading this in a room she has stopped seeing. The lamp that belonged to her mother. The print she bought in a market twenty years ago and never quite got around to framing properly. The bowl on the hall table containing three dead batteries, a foreign coin, a rawl plug, and something she can no longer identify. She has walked past all of it a thousand times and seen none of it, because familiarity is the enemy of looking and most of us stopped looking at our homes years before we stopped looking at ourselves.

This week, The Commonplace asks you to look. To walk through every room as if you have never been inside them before. To see not a house, not a flat, not a rented space or a mortgaged obligation, but a self-portrait in three dimensions. Because that is what it is? Every object you have chosen, kept, inherited, tolerated, or failed to remove is a line in the autobiography you are writing without knowing it. So read it. All of it. Even the chapters you wish you could have edited out.

One hundred things. Quotes worth writing down, films worth watching, books worth reading, small deliberate acts of domestic philosophy and journal prompts for the excavation only you can do. Some will comfort you. Some will not sit quietly at all.

The first twenty-five are free. The rest are for the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. The door, as always, is open.

No.4: The House as Self Portrait

1. This week, walk through every room in your home and remove one thing you have been keeping out of guilt. Not sentiment. Guilt. The things that belong to a story someone else told about you, a version of yourself you were performing for an audience that has long since left the building. The people pleasing displays. Remove them without ceremony. Notice how the room breathes differently afterwards. And make no apology. Or even explanation.

2. JOURNAL: Stand in the room you love most in your home. Make two lists: in the first note every object in it that you chose deliberately, and in the second list every object that arrived by accident, by inheritance or default. What is the ratio? What does it tell you?

3. WRITE IT DOWN: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” (William Morris). You have known this for thirty years. Walk the house and ask, of every single thing: useful or beautiful? If neither, write its name down and consider the conversation you are avoiding.

4. Elsie de Wolfe, the first professional interior decorator, said that a room should always look as if it had been lived in by an interesting person. Not a tidy person. Or a wealthy person. An interesting one. Walk through yours and ask honestly: does this room look as if an interesting woman lives here? And if not, what is she afraid of?

5. READ: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. A French philosopher’s meditation on what rooms, corners, drawers, and nests mean to the human soul. He will make you see your own house as if it were a poem written in your sleep.

6. The French have a word, dépaysement, for the disorienting, vertiginous feeling of being in a place that is not home. Seek it this week inside your own house. Sit in a room you never sit in, at a time of day you are never there. Eat your breakfast in the chair kept for guests. Read in the bath. Sleep on the other side of the bed. The house you have stopped noticing will briefly become strange again, and strangeness is very close to wonder.

7. LISTEN: Everything But The Girl’s Amplified Heart, the whole album, while doing something that requires your hands but not your full attention. Tracey Thorn’s voice is one of the great domestic voices in popular music: intimate, precise, entirely unperforming. She sounds like a woman thinking aloud in her own kitchen, which is to say she sounds like the truest version of yourself on an ordinary evening when nobody is watching and the house is quiet enough to hear yourself think. The album was made in 1994 and contains, in its quietest moments, the specific sound of a woman deciding what she actually believes about love, about home, about the life she is building inside four walls she has chosen. Let it ask you the same questions while you stack towels and pair socks.

8. WRITE IT DOWN: “The home should be the treasure chest of living.” (Le Corbusier). Name three treasures in your home that are not decorative objects but experiences contained in objects. Write the experience inside each one.

9. QUESTION: There is a difference between a house that contains your life and a house that reflects it. The first is a vessel. The second is a statement. Which one are you living in?

10.There is a kind of object that arrives in a home as an aspiration: bought to signal a version of the self that was intended but never quite inhabited. The painting chosen because it seemed like the sort of thing a certain kind of woman would have. The books arranged by colour rather than read. The linen that has never been on a bed. These objects are not wrong. They are early drafts of the self, and early drafts have their place. But there comes a point in a home as in a life when the aspirational object and the actual one must be reconciled, when the house must be whittled down to the self that actually lives there, with her specific and particular and irreplaceable tastes, rather than the self she was auditioning for. Walk through your rooms this week with that question: which of these is me, and which is a previous candidate for the role?

11. RECIPE: Pasta e fagioli, the Roman dish of pasta and white beans that sustained entire neighbourhoods for centuries and costs almost nothing to make. Fry a little pancetta with garlic and rosemary until the fat runs, add a tin of good cannellini beans, crush half of them roughly with the back of a spoon, add stock and bring it to a simmer, then cook small pasta directly in the broth until it thickens into something that is neither soup nor pasta but entirely itself. Finish with the best olive oil you have and black pepper. This is what it means to feed yourself with intelligence rather than effort. Eat it from a wide bowl, at the table, in whatever you are wearing.

12. WRITE IT DOWN: “A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.” (Benjamin Franklin). Where is the food for the mind in your house? Where is the fire? If you cannot answer immediately, this week’s task has found you.

13. Find the most neglected corner of your home. Not the untidiest, the most neglected. The corner that has become invisible through inattention. Spend one hour with it. Not cleaning it. Attending to it. Note that there is a difference.

14. JOURNAL: The object in your home that contains the most complicated feelings. Write the object first. Then write the feelings. Then write whether it has earned its place, whatever that means to you.

15. Try this once, this week: choose one room and sit in it for fifteen minutes doing nothing except looking. Not assessing, not planning, not making a mental list. Looking. At the quality of the light at that particular hour. At the shadow the lamp throws on the wall. At the small collection of things on the shelf that no one arranged deliberately but that have, over time, arranged themselves into something that is entirely and unmistakably you. Attention is generosity. Give it to the room that has been holding you all this time without acknowledgement.

16. LISTEN: Frankie Ballard’s Homebody. A country song about the specific and underrated pleasure of not wanting to be anywhere other than where you are: the person, the place, the quiet evening, the life that fits. Put it on in the room you love most in your house and let it confirm something you may have been slightly embarrassed to admit, that staying in, staying home, staying close to the particular atmosphere you have spent years building around yourself, is not a failure of ambition. The homebody isn’t woman who couldn’t escape. She is the woman who looked around and decided she had already arrived.

17. NOTE: The objects you have inherited that you do not love are not debts. You are allowed to release them. Honouring the dead does not require housing everything they left behind.

18. This week, go to a museum, a gallery, an auction house, a good, but probably over-priced antique market, somewhere objects are looked at seriously, and spend an hour among things that are not yours. Notice what stops you. Notice the moment you think: I would live with that. That moment is information about who you actually are, underneath the house you accidentally built around yourself.

19. WRITE IT DOWN: “Your home is a living portrait of yourself, so make it speak well of you but above all make it speak true.” Write this somewhere you will read it every day for a month.

20. WATCH: Volver (2006, Pedro Almodóvar). The houses in this film are not backgrounds. They are characters. They contain secrets, histories, the layered evidence of women’s lives. Watch the rooms as carefully as you watch the women.

21. There is a theory, proposed by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and lived quietly by almost every woman who has ever made a home, that a house is not a container for the self but a continuation of it. That the walls hold not just the weather out but the memory in. That the room you return to at the end of a difficult day is not neutral space but something that knows you, something that has absorbed the particular frequency of your presence over years until it hums with it. Walk into your home today and ask not what it looks like but what it knows about you. What it has witnessed. What it has held that no one else saw. The answer, if you listen for it, is the most honest biography you will ever read.Let it both hug and hurt.

22. The things you have been meaning to change about your home for three years are not waiting for money or time. They are waiting for a decision about who you are and what you deserve to live among. Make the decision first. The rest will follow.

23. JOURNAL: Imagine a woman you have never met walks into your home for the first time. She knows nothing about you. Write what she concludes from what she sees. All of it. The flattering parts and the ones that make you wince.

24. READ: Home by Witold Rybczynski. A history of the domestic interior and the idea of comfort — where it came from, what it means, why the feeling of being at home is one of the most complicated and most human feelings available to us.

25. NOTE: The art you have on your walls is a conversation your home is having with everyone who enters it. Are you happy with what it is saying?

— The remaining seventy-five are for paid subscribers —

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Hysteria has set in. We start our mornings giggling and we go to bed still laughing and in-between we sing and dance and make merry with various dodgy meals cobbled together from whatever is available in the local garage. A quote from A Tale of Two Cities, “It was the worst of times and the best of times” always just a moment away from our lips, for what could be more apt?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Last night, just for a moment, while Ben took the dogs outside for a quick bedtime mooch over the cobbles, I stood in the main window and looked out. The Victorian street lights on the unadopted road threw pools of soft yellow light that made everything look deliberate, theatrical, …

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Monday morning and the world is ending again. Or possibly not. Probably not, if you put down the phone and consult something other than the part of your brain that has been running scenarios since before you were fully conscious. But possibly, and it’s the possibly that does it. Gets into everything. Flavours the tea. Follows you from room to room.

I don’t think war is imminent. I want to say that upfront, because this isn’t that kind of post. I have never done politics here and that will never change. But I do think we are in a time when war feels possible in a way it hasn’t for most of our lives, and that possible is a different thing from probable, but it turns out to be quite bad enough on its own. Possible gets into your sleep. Possible has you looking up from whatever you’re reading to read something appalling out loud. Possible is the word that si…

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Drumroll please, because I am downright delighted to announce that The BrocanteHome Library is BACK this MONDAY in the format you once knew and loved and to welcome you all back inside, I am throwing the doors open with a gloriously generous set of opening offers, for ONE WEEK ONLY.

Shall we get started?

First up… if you don’t know what The Library is, pop over to this page on my course and membership platform to discover exactly what I offer inside my gorgeous BrocanteHome membership, then head back to grab your 50% discount….

Discover the Library Here

And now the offers…

I offer three ways to become a fully-fledged member of The BrocanteHome Library:

1.Rose Monthly Membership - $29.00 every month for premium posts, access to all my courses, an invitation into my community with some gorgeous new weekly challenges on the way, a huge library of printables, and of course direct access to Brocante Betty, our AI best friend…

But for this week ONLY, you can choose to sign up for 1/2 price and LOCK IN your subscription fo…

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Once upon a time, a few months or maybe even years ago, who knows, I dreamt that I was keeping a spider down my bra I had christened “Little Jimmy” and ever after, every spider I come across is a “Little Jimmy” and right now the Jimmy’s are inundating Chez Brocante and trying to set up home wherever they see fit.

So colour me appalled. For while I am a woman often dallying with ludicrous notions in my dreams I wouldn’t tolerate in real life, a clutter of spiders is not something I’m willing to entertain at all, having only recently managed to persuade the mice that ours was a hostile environment complete with lazy cats who might just work up enough energy to swipe them into next week. And yet all of a sudden we are indeed inundated with Little Jimmys visiting in droves and I have gone a bit high maintenance about the matter so Ben is having to climb ladders and do his bailiff bit and I feel wildly proud of his bravado and disproportionately ashamed of what has been something of a life-…

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Read Edition One Here. | Read Edition 2 Here |

Most women arrive at Easter the same way they arrive at everything: slightly unprepared, quietly hopeful, and carrying more than they meant to. It feels compicated and weighted with sweet expectation. The way the long weekend sits there with its unusual permission, no ordinary weekend logic applies, no productivity is expected, the shops kee funny hours and the diary is briefly empty, so most of us fill it with chocolate and family obligation and entirely miss what it is quietly offering.

Which is this: four days at the hinge of the year. Winter releasing its grip with visible reluctance. The light doing something it hasn’t done since October. The body remembering, without being told, that it is animal and seasonal and subject to forces considerably older than any of us.

This week, The Commonplace turns its attention to the Easter that belongs to messy women who have stopped performing spring and started inhabiting it. Who know by now that a long weekend is not a gap in real life but a form of real life in itsef, and that how you choose to fill it is a quiet statement of values. One hundred things. Films worth watching, poems worth reading, recipes worth making, rituals borrowed from cultures that still know how to mark a season, small practical beauty rooted in the belief that how you tend to your house and your body and your attention is a form of philosophy. Some entries are serious. Some are an instruction to eat chocolate and sup wine before anyone else is awake and feel absolutely no remorse about it.

This is not a list for the woman who wants a productive Easter. It is a list for the woman who wants one stuffed with meaning.

The first twenty-five are free, for everyone. The remaining seventy-five are for my paid subscribers, the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If you would like to come inside, you know where to find the door.

No.3: Easter, the BrocanteHome way

1. Dye eggs using red onion skins simmered for an hour, they will come out the colour of old garnets…

2. When I was a little girl, a new dress for Easter Sunday was almost law. This weekend treat yourself to something that makes you feel fresh and pretty.

3. LISTEN: to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, all of it, (or just the opening chorus), on Good Friday evening

4. BAKE: a Greek tsoureki, the braided Easter bread scented with mastic and mahlab, even if it takes all morning

5. READ: "Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon, for Good Friday rather than Sunday. because Kenyon is the poet of the domestic ordinary made sacred, and this one is quietly devastating.

6. READ: Begin Good Friday with The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy and coffee drunk from a bowl. Paris, appetite, female mischief and bad decisions.

7. Blow an egg clean and write one true thing you wish to let go of on its shell, then bury it. Make it an annual ritual.

8. On Saturday head out in search of a good baguette, then spread it thickly with salted Breton butter, and eat it reading something wonderful.

9. Find a yellow gingham anything.

10. Decant your olive oil into a small jug with a sprig of thyme inside. Make a habit of including it at every table for drizzling on bread.

11. Make saffron butter by working a pinch into softened salted butter: scrumptious on new potatoes on Easter Sunday.

12. Plant something in a pot on Good Friday, an old European tradition for strong growth.

13. Arrange dyed eggs in a shallow bowl of dried lavender for a centrepiece that speaks of Spring.

14. Make a lunch of radishes, butter, bread, and soft cheese and read a chapter of French Country Cooking by Mimi Thorisson. Then lose the afternoon dreaming.

15. Wear red on Good Friday as a quiet nod to the old tradition of wearing it in parts of southern Europe.

16. EAT: Source a very good piece of aged Comte and eat it with a pear and nothing else for lunch one day. Teach yourself to appreciate the exquisite, slowly and patiently.

17. Make a warm compress of chamomile tea bags and rest it over your eyes for ten minutes.

18. RITUAL: Learn about the Hungarian locsolkodas, the Easter Monday sprinkling of he womenfolk, and do a tiny version with flower water.

19. Go through your linen cupboard and refold everything, pulling out each piece and shaking before making it neat again: a domestic act with an inexplicably calming effect.

20. Put a small dish of salt near your front door on Good Friday, a purifying household blessing from old German custom.

21. READ: "Won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton - a woman taking stock of what she has survived and deciding that survival is worth celebrating. Perfect for Easter Sunday.

22. Write a recipe card for a dish you make from memory and decorate the edges with ribbons and Easter eggs.

23. Stir rose harissa into a yoghurt sauce and serve it with whatever roasted vegetable you have. Fragrant bliss.

24. Open a bottle of orange wine and drink a glass before anyone else is awake. Consider it the all grown-up woman’s equivalent of having an Easter egg for breakfast. I won’t tell if you won’t.

25. LISTEN: to Hildegard von Bingen, “A Feather on the Breath of God”, preferably the Gothic Voices recording. Twelfth-century sacred music by a woman who was also a herbalist, a visionary, and an abbess. Perfect for Good Friday.

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The Seasonal Practice: Introduction | March Edition |

April is here. Which means restlessness and longer days. Shy warmth that speaks of possibility. So today, I'm sharing the April edition of The Seasonal Practice: a year-long daily practice guide that runs from March through February, following the actual rhythm of the seasons rather than the artificial reset of January…

Know this though… these practices are not meant to be revelatory.

You will not read "buy yourself flowers on a Tuesday" and have your entire life restructured by cosmic insight. You will not be told anything you don't already know. There is no secret., hack or one weird trick (damn you internet!).

What there is: Repetition. Rhythm. Reminders. The basic good stuff of life, organised by season and offered daily in tiny paragraphs, so you might actually do it.

Because here's the truth we don't talk about enough: good habits escape us. Not because we don't know what they are. We know. Of course we know! We've always known. We know we should open windows and eat fruit in season and move our bodies and write down what we're actually feeling and rest when we're tired and tell people we love them and notice beauty and fix the broken drawer. We know. But knowing and doing are entirely different countries, and the bridge between them is built from small, repeated actions that feel almost embarrassingly simple. And honestly I’m not sorry.

WHY DAILY? WHY SEASONAL?

Because your April body is different from your January body. Because your November needs are different from your June needs. Because you are not a machine that should perform identically in all weather, all light, all temperatures.

You are seasonal. Your energy shifts. Your capacity changes. What you need in March is not what you need in September. The Seasonal Practice acknowledges this. It doesn't ask you to maintain the same pace year-round. It doesn't pretend that January and July require the same things from you.

Instead, it offers practices that shift with the seasons. So in April, you're asked to tend your home with lighter fabrics and longer evening light. To acknowledge the restlessness that comes with spring. To move your body in warming air. To feed your soul with beauty as the world blooms. These aren't profound instructions. They're seasonal reminders” Open the windows. The light is different now. Notice it.

THE CASE FOR INCREMENTAL CHANGE

Here's what I've learned after two decades of writing about home and life and the work of being a woman in midlife: transformation doesn't happen in dramatic leaps. It happens in the accumulation of tiny shifts. One clear surface. One honest sentence written down. One evening walk. One moment of noticing light.

These small actions don't feel significant in the moment. They feel almost trivial. And there is a bit me that feels ridiculous sharing them? Surely real change requires more than buying flowers or humming while you cook or sitting in sunlight for ten minutes? But it doesn't. Real change, the kind that actually lasts, comes from building a life where good things happen regularly.

Where beauty isn't a special occasion. Where rest isn't something you have to earn. Where honest feeling is a daily practice, not a crisis intervention.

The Seasonal Practice is designed to make this easier. Not by giving you revolutionary new information, but by giving you a daily prompt to do one good thing. To reflect on one true thing. To tend one aspect of your whole self, home, heart, body, or soul.

One practice. Once a day. For a whole turning year. And in the repetition, in the rhythm, in the seasonal adjustments, something shifts. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But by the time you reach April again next year, you're different.

You've practiced opening windows for a year. Eating seasonally for a year. Moving for a year. Resting for a year. Being honest for a year. You've practiced tending all of you: not just the parts that are acceptable or productive or visible, for an entire cycle of seasons. And that accumulation of small, repeated, seasonal actions? That's how you become the muchier version of yourself.

Not by revelation. But by repetition. Not by knowing what to do. By actually doing it.

HOW TO USE THE APRIL PRACTICE

The April practice contains 30 days of prompts, organized into weekly themes that rotate through Home, Heart, Body, and Soul. You can:

- Do one practice per day, following the numbers in order

- Choose the practices that speak to you each week and skip the rest

- Return to the practices that work and repeat them as needed

- Adapt anything that doesn't fit your life

There is no wrong way to use this.

The only failure is not starting because you're worried about doing it perfectly. So start messy. Start inconsistent. Start wherever April finds you. I promise you no-one is coming to tell you you are doing it wrong.

After the paywall… your lovely Seasonal Practice for April: A downloadable PDF to tick off each task you complete throughout the month.

Seasonal Practice April

546KB ∙ PDF file

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Read Edition One Here.

The women who told you about ageing left out the best parts. Not the physical things, though those arrive with their own particular surprises (Hello weird womb vibration?). The other things. The way your tolerance for nonsense quietly evaporates. The way you stop mid-sentence one day and think: I no longer believe this about myself. The way the performing falls away, not all at once but in pieces, like plaster from a wall that was always covering something more interesting underneath.

This week, The Commonplace turns its attention to that. To the woman who is still here, still arriving, still becoming. To ageing not as a series of losses to be managed but as a process of excavation. What remains when the performance stops is not less. It is, if you will allow yourself to look at it, considerably more.

One hundred things. Quotes worth keeping, films worth watching, books worth reading, recipes worth making, small practical tasks rooted in the belief that how you tend to yourself is a form of philosophy, and journal prompts for the questions only you can answer. Some of them will sit quietly. Some of them will not.

The first twenty-five are free, for everyone. The remaining seventy-five are for my paid subscribers, the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If you would like to come inside, you know where to find the door.

No. 2: On Ageing Without Shrinking

1. This weekend, go through your bathroom cabinet and throw away everything that promises to fix you. The creams that claim to erase. The serums that market themselves as corrections. Replace one of them with something that simply nourishes. A good oil. A thick cream that smells of something real. Stop punishing evidence of the woman you are becoming.

2. JOURNAL: Write the last time you made someone uncomfortable simply by taking up your full space. Write about whether you apologised.

3. WRITE IT DOWN: “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” (Mark Twain). Charming and insufficient. Mind it. Let it matter anyway.

4. The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi finds beauty in the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete. We qualify on all three counts. Act accordingly.

5. READ: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French. Published 1977. Still happening.

6. Getting older doesn’t have to spell humdrum. This week, take one item of clothing from your wardrobe that you have been saving for a special occasion and wear it on an ordinary day. Tuesday will do. The occasion is that you are alive and it fits and you chose it. That is enough.

7. LISTEN: I know I’m obsessed with her, but listen anyway: Patti Smith’s Because the Night. Because she was forty before most people had heard of her, and she has not stopped since.

8. WRITE IT DOWN: “Ageing is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” (Betty Friedan). Write down three opportunities that only exist because of your age. Not despite it. Because of it.

9. In Japan, the art of kintsugi repairs broken pottery with gold, making the fracture lines the most beautiful part of the object. You know what this is a metaphor for. Let it be one.

10. Go to bed thirty minutes earlier than usual this week, just once, and don’t take your phone with you. Lie in the dark. Let your mind do what minds do when they are not being managed and try not to run from it. This isn’t wasted time. It’s the most useful thing you will do all day.

11. WATCH: Shirley Valentine (1989, Lewis Gilbert). A woman in her forties talks to her kitchen wall, then goes to Greece. It is funny and devastating and true and everyone should see it at least twice.

12. RECIPE: a simple bone broth, made on a Sunday from a leftover chicken carcass with onion, celery, carrot, a bay leaf, a splash of apple cider vinegar and cold water. Simmered for four hours, strained, kept in the fridge. Drink a cup of it warm on a weekday morning instead of a second coffee. Your joints will notice. Your skin will notice. You will notice.

13. WRITE IT DOWN: “The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world.” (Susan B. Anthony). She said this at seventy. Keep it.

14. Simone de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex at forty-one. Toni Morrison published her first novel at thirty-nine. Anna Mary Robertson Moses, known as Grandma Moses, began painting at seventy-eight. The timeline is not the point.

15. LISTEN: Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Love. For the knowledge that desire does not have an expiry date, whatever anyone implies.

16. This week, choose one room in your house and remove three things from it. Not to tidy. To breathe. Ageing well in your home means editing ruthlessly until only the things that genuinely sustain you, AND EXPLAIN YOU remain. The room will feel different.

17. JOURNAL: The version of myself I was most afraid I would become. Write her. Then write whether she has anything to teach me.

18. READ: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. A whole life, a woman’s whole life, taken seriously. The ordinariness of it made extraordinary by the simple act of looking…

19. The French phrase une femme d’un certain âge was always meant as a diminishment. Take it back and decide yourself what the “certain age” means.

20. RECIPE: miso soup made from scratch, not a packet, with good dashi, white miso, silken tofu and a handful of wakame. Eaten for breakfast, as it is eaten in Japan, where women have some of the longest healthy life expectancies in the world. It is ready in ten minutes. It is warm and savoury and deeply settling. Make it part of the week.

21. Watch: All About My Mother (1999, Pedro Almodóvar). Women of every age and configuration, living at full volume. None of them shrinking. STOP SHRINKING!

22. WRITE IT DOWN: “It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.” (Albus Dumbledore, via J.K. Rowling). The choice not to diminish yourself is available every morning.

23. This weekend, take a walk with no destination and no distance in mind. Not for steps. Not for fitness. For the specific pleasure of moving through the world at your own pace with no one to keep up with and nowhere to arrive. Walk until you feel like turning back. Then walk a little further.

24. There is a difference between ageing and decaying. One is inevitable and interesting. The other requires your active participation. Do participate in your own life won’t you?

25. READ: Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp. About appetite, about filling emptiness, about the long work of becoming honest with yourself. For anyone who has ever used something to manage the feeling of being too much or not enough.

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One of the hardest things about being here, in this house, in this particular stretch of life, is what happens in my relationship with my own reflection. Weeks pass without me really looking. And somehow the distance between the woman I am in my head and the Alis(on) I eventually meet in the looking glass becomes a startling thing, especially for a mind that has long relied on feeling alright because it looks alright.

This weekend, ambushed by the fact of turning 54 (outbloodyrageous, truly), I happened upon a grey hair in my eyebrow, a forest of them on my head, and squinting into the one mirror in this entire house, discovered bags under my eyes capacious enough to pack a whole life into. I sat there and stared at 54 and thought: no. Just that. No.

And so it was that hours before venturing out for a birthday afternoon, I found myself slathered in castor oil, running an ice-cold quartz roller over my face to encourage the fluid gathered there to kindly take its leave, before roping Ben…

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There is an old tradition, older than the internet and wiser than the algorithm, of keeping a commonplace book. A place to gather. Quotations, recipes, remedies, the name of a paint colour that stopped you in your tracks. One hundred small things that mattered enough to write down.

So this is that. Every Friday, one hundred things on a single theme: to read slowly, to dip in and out of, to carry into your weekend like a basket of good things. Not a to-do list. Just the pleasure of noticing, gathered up and laid out for you.

This first list is yours, entirely and without condition. All one hundred things, with nothing held back, because you should know what you’re being invited into before you decide whether to stay.

From next Friday, the first twenty-five things will always be free. The remaining seventy-five are for paid subscribers, those who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If that’s you, you are so very welcome and appreciated.

LIBRARY MEMBERS NOTE

If you are a member of my Library, you will find a printable version of this post in my printables archive.

Not a Member? Learn More Here.

No. 1: Spring, At Last

1. The French have a phrase for it: le renouveau. The renewal.

2. Open every window in the house for exactly three minutes, regardless of temperature. The Swedes call this luftning and consider it non-negotiable. The cold air is the point.

3. WRITE IT DOWN:“One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.” (Gaston Bachelard)

4. Buy yourself peonies this week. No explanation needed.

5. Read: Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger. For the woman who feels everything too much

6. The Japanese call it mono no aware, the bittersweet awareness that everything is passing. Spring is its highest expression. Stand in it.

7. WRITE IT DOWN: “She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad.” (Marilyn Monroe). Pin it somewhere you’ll see it.

8. In Lisbon they call the ache of spring saudade, a longing for something you can’t quite name. You know this feeling. You were born knowing it weren’t you? Surely.

9. WATCH: Certified Copy (2010, Abbas Kiarostami). A film about a woman in Tuscany in spring who may or may not be pretending. You will think about it for weeks.

10. Keep your kitchen counters completely clear except for three objects: olive oil, sea salt, and one beautiful thing.

11. QUOTE: “April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land.” (T.S. Eliot). He wasn’t wrong. But we go anyway.

12. RECIPE: make a simple French tarte aux fraises this weekend. Blind bake a pastry shell, fill with crème pâtissière, lay strawberries over the top like you’re arranging flowers. Eat it standing up.

13. Face east when you drink your morning tea. In Vastu and Feng Shui, east is the direction of new beginnings

14. Take a walk somewhere you’ve never been. Spring makes strangers of familiar streets.

15. LISTEN: Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Put it on while you do the washing up. Notice what happens to the washing up.

16. WRITE IT DOWN:“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.” (Louisa May Alcott). Think of it as forecast, not metaphor.

17. In Morocco, spring smells of orange blossom and something just slightly rotten underneath. That’s the truth of it. Beautiful things often have something composting at the root.

18. Clear one drawer completely. Do not organise it. Simply empty it and leave it bare for a week. Notice how it feels to have one empty space.

19. READ: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford. For the recklessness of it. For Linda. For the reminder that women have always wanted more.

20. The Italians eat ribollita in late winter and early spring: a thick Tuscan bread soup, twice-boiled, made better by leftovers. Make it. Eat it. Know that you are ancient.

21. WRITE IT DOWN: “She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.” (Louisa May Alcott). Wear it as a badge.

22. LISTEN: Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit. Not as background music. As an education in what a human voice can carry.

23. The Greeks had Persephone. She didn’t come back reluctantly. She came back because she’d learned something in the dark worth bringing with her. Consider what you’re bringing back.

24. Buy one extravagant ingredient this week: saffron, good vanilla, truffle salt. Use it on something ordinary. Scrambled eggs. Toast. Because this is what abundance practice actually looks like.

25. Practice the Scandinavian tradition of utepils: the first beer of spring, drunk outside. Even if it is only six degrees

26. WRITE IT DOWN: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.” (Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar). Say it out loud.

27. In Kyoto, the cherry blossom season lasts exactly two weeks. The Japanese gather beneath the trees to eat, drink and weep a little, understanding that beauty and impermanence are the same thing. Plan your own hanami this spring. A blanket. Wine. The sky.

28. RECIPE: a simple salade niçoise for one, eaten outdoors, even if outdoors is a doorstep. Tinned tuna. Hard-boiled eggs. Olives.

29. Change your pillowcases. Spray them with something that smells of the sea or green things. Sleep differently.

30. READ: Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. A woman alone on a beach, thinking? Still the most radical act.

31. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not resigned.” (Edna St. Vincent Millay). Two words for spring. For midlife. For all of it.

32. Take triphala before bed: the Ayurvedic formula of three fruits that gently detoxifies and prepares the body for seasonal transition

33. LISTEN: Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. On a spring evening. With the window open. Alone.

34. Take your coffee outside this week, even once, even briefly, even in a coat. The ritual matters more than the comfort.

35. In Seville during Semana Santa, the air smells of incense and orange blossom and something ancient moving through the streets. Spring in southern Spain is not gentle. It is operatic. Let your spring be a little operatic too.

36. JOURNAL PROMPT: She had a galaxy in her eyes, a universe in her mind. Write the woman you are becoming this spring. Don’t be modest.

37. Start a spring commonplace book of your own. Write down one beautiful thing a day. Not an achievement. A beauty.

38. Observe brahma muhurta (the auspicious time before dawn) and wake at least once to sit in the dark and watch it become light

39. WATCH: Amélie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). Not for the romance. For the way it treats small pleasures as a serious philosophical position.

40. Buy a bunch of herbs from a market stall: thyme, rosemary, tarragon. Put them in a jar of water on the windowsill. Your kitchen will smell like Provence for a week.

41. Make a mandala out of flower petals or coloured rice. Spend hours on it. Then destroy it. The Tibetan practice of impermanence as art.

42. LISTEN: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark. The whole album. Start to finish. She is telling you something about wanting and having and losing that you need to hear again.

43. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.” (Sylvia Plath). Spring doesn’t erase the dark thing. It just gives you better light to see it by. This is progress.

44. Buy yourself a truly beautiful pair of gardening gloves. You deserve lovely things even when covered in mud

45. Use a jade or rose quartz roller to massage your face every moning. (Keep it in the fridge!) The Chinese gua sha practice that moves lymph and brings blood to surface.

46. The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker died in 1907, aged 31, eighteen days after giving birth. She had said: “I know I will not live very long. But is that sad?” Look up her paintings. Look at the way she painted women. Look at the way she painted herself.

47. In Buenos Aires, autumn arrives as your spring begins. The city is all wide boulevards and melancholy and dulce de leche and tango. There is something instructive in knowing the world is always seasonally opposite to you somewhere.

48. READ: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. Because female friendship is the great unwritten epic and she wrote it.JOURNAL PROMPT: She was a free spirit. Not the Instagram kind. The kind that made people uncomfortable at dinner parties. Are you her? Could you be? What is stopping you?

49. Light a candle in the daytime. For no reason. For spring.

50. Observe the German Feierabend each Friday night: the deliberate end of the workday. Turn off the computer. Pour a drink. Declare the work finished

51. In Florence in spring, the wisteria covers entire buildings. The colour is the colour of dusk. Plan a trip, even if you can’t go. Planning is a form of living.

52. LISTEN: Édith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose. Then the Nina Simone version. Then decide which woman you are today.

53. Research a wildflower mix for somewhere impossible (a crack in the path, the edge of the lawn) and order it.

54. WRITE IT DOWN: “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” (Søren Kierkegaard). Spring is the annual reminder that becoming is still available to you.

55. Go through your wardrobe this weekend and remove everything that makes you feel like a smaller version of yourself. Do not replace it immediately. Live for a week with less. See what you actually reach for.

56. READ: Zami: A Biomythography by Audre Lorde. Because she wrote about the body and the world and the self with more courage than almost anyone.

57. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” (Carl Jung). Put it somewhere you’ll read it when you’re being stubborn about the past.

58. Make a spring altar on a windowsill: a bud vase, a found feather, a stone from somewhere that mattered. Ritual doesn’t require religion. It requires intention.

59. Go outside and actually look at what is already stirring: the buds, the shoots, the quiet ambition of everything

60. Make Danish smørrebrød (open-faced sandwiches on dark rye) arranged like small works of art

61. JOURNAL PROMPT: She was a woman who loved mornings but lived for midnight. Write your own version of this sentence. Then write the paragraph that follows it.

62. RECIPE: a simple Spanish tortilla: potatoes, eggs, olive oil, salt. Cooked slowly. Cut into thick wedges. Eaten at room temperature with good bread. This is a dish that knows what it is.

63. WATCH: Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019, Céline Sciamma). About looking. About being seen. About what spring does to two people who have nowhere to go.

64. WRITE IT DOWN: “I have wasted my life.” (James Wright, from the poem Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm). Read the whole poem. It is twelve lines long. It will rearrange you.

65. Buy one paperback from a secondhand bookshop this weekend. Do not research it first. Choose it by its cover, its weight, the feel of the pages. This is how the right book finds you.

66. LISTEN: Fado. Any fado. Mariza. Put it on and clean the kitchen and feel the ancient sorrow of all women who have ever cleaned kitchens while wanting something more.

67. Spring cleaning is not about cleanliness. It is about excavation. What are you digging for?

68. In Prague, spring arrives overnight and the city turns baroque and blossoming and slightly mad. The Czechs have a word for it: litost, a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery. Spring can do that. Feel it. Then go outside.

69. RECIPE: tabbouleh made properly, with far more parsley than you think is correct and lemon and good olive oil and the patience to let it sit for an hour before you eat it. It tastes of somewhere warmer. Go there, briefly, at the kitchen table.

70. READ: The Collected Poems of Sharon Olds. Because she writes about the body, her body, her parents’ bodies, desire and age and flesh, with a directness that will make you breathless.

“each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life.”
― Sharon Olds, Stag's Leap

71. JOURNAL PROMPT: She was not interested in being rescued. She was interested in being understood. Write about a time you needed understanding and received rescue instead. What would you have said, if someone had simply asked?

72. Write down three things you want your garden to feel like this summer. Not look like. Feel like.

73. Learn to identify five European birds by their song. Blackbird, robin, wren, thrush, nightingale. Listen for them. They are already preparing

74. WRITE IT DOWN: “I am larger, better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.” (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself). Read it this spring. All of it. Take weeks.

“These are the days that must happen to you”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

75. LISTEN: Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel. Mirror in the mirror. Ten minutes of music that sounds like what spring feels like when you stop rushing through it.

76. Practice Nadi Shodhana (alternate nostril breathing) for five minutes daily. The yogic technique that balances moon and sun within you

77. Make a batch of natural soap, melt and pour with dried petals or ground coffee or oat flour, and wrap it in wax paper and tie it with string and give it away or keep it and feel the satisfaction of something made with your hands to be used daily.

78. RECIPE: Prepare muhammara, the Syrian red pepper and walnut dip, and eat it with warm pita

79. Take one photograph this weekend that has no purpose, not for Instagram, not to remember anything. Just the way the light fell on something ordinary. Keep it for yourself.

80. LISTEN: Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Because it sounds like the feeling of spring arriving in a city, being young and old at exactly the same time.

81. In Tbilisi, Georgia, spring means churchkhela, strings of walnuts dipped in grape must, hanging in the market like strange jewels. Try one thing this spring you have never tried before. One new taste, one new smell, one new voice in your ear.

82. WRITE IT DOWN: “Do I dare disturb the universe?” (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). Yes. Always yes. Especially now.

83. RECIPE: a green sauce, salsa verde, made with whatever herbs are in the garden or on the windowsill. Parsley, capers, anchovy, lemon, olive oil, blitzed together. Put it on everything for a week. It tastes like things are beginning.

84. READ: Outline by Rachel Cusk. Because she took the novel apart and rebuilt it as something stranger and more true.

“There was a great difference, I said, between the things I wanted and the things I could apparently have, and until I had finally and forever made my peace with that fact, I had decided to want nothing at all.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline

85. WATCH: Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman). An old professor on a long drive, remembering. About the life behind you and the spring you still have left. Not sad. Something better than sad.

86. JOURNAL PROMPT: I am not afraid of my own complexity. Write into that. Write the parts of yourself you have been asked to keep quiet. Spring is a good time to take up more space.

87. Plant a row of sweet pea seeds on a sunny windowsill. They need the head start and you need the hope.

88. Listen: Sufjan Stevens’ Death With Dignity. Because grief and spring and beauty are not opposites.

89. The painter Leonora Carrington lived to ninety-four, made surrealist art until the end, and once said the only things worth doing were cooking and painting. Cook something this weekend as though it were art.

90. JOURNAL PROMPT: “I am larger than I was. The spring did that.” Write your spring inventory. What has opened in you? What are you ready to put down?*

91. Wash all your curtains. The dust of winter comes off in great grey clouds and the fabric underneath is softer than you remember

92. LISTEN: Chopin’s Nocturnes. Late at night. With one lamp on. The music was written for exactly this.

93. In Marrakech, the medina in spring smells of rose water and leather and the sharp green of fresh mint piled in the souks. Somewhere between overwhelming and paradise. Let something overwhelm you this week. Don’t manage it. Just feel it.

94. WRITE IT DOWN: “One must always be drunk - On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.” (Be Drunk by Baudelaire). Pin this somewhere sensible people will see it. Aim to shock. Spring doesn’t have to be so nice…

95. RECIPE: a bowl of strawberries macerated in a little sugar and aged balsamic and left for an hour. Eaten with thick cream or good yoghurt. The balsamic is not optional. It is the whole point.

96. Stand outside tonight, even for five minutes, and look at the sky. The spring sky is a different sky. You are different in it.

97. WRITE IT DOWN: “And I said to my body softly, ‘I want to be your friend.’ It took a long breath and replied, ‘I have been waiting my whole life for this.’” (Nayyirah Waheed). Begin there. Begin again. It is spring.

The Commonplace returns next Friday. One hundred more things, on a different theme. Bring something to write with.

I slept like a lamb and woke at 6.20am, as always, because my body has decided that 6.20am is simply what happens now, non-negotiable, regardless of what time I went to bed or what I ate or drank or how sincerely I pleaded with it the night before. Poking me awake and shattering a dream in which I was wandering through a house that was mine, making a slow inventory of everything in it, touching things, and naming them. The same old dream. Always the same house, always the same time, always the same faint sense that I am checking something is still there before the day gets its hands on it.

Mornings have been odd lately. Full of weather, full of portent, full of the kind of atmospheric drama that makes me feel like the slightly overwrought protagonist of a golden-age domestic novel. A windowsill of rooks last week, all apparently seconds away from genuine violence. Then snow I initially mistook for ash falling from the sky, as if the world wasn’t just metaphorically ablaze, but had set …

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