More nights away from home please
time is different when you're someplace else
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼 Hi! If you’re new to these parts, the short version is this: I’ve worked for myself almost forever, mostly writing novels, largely done from home. It sent me a bit doolally, being alone that much and also working within an industry that hasn’t always treated me kindly. That’s why I started writing How to Build a Life, now delivered to thousands of readers in over 80 countries (!). I’d been desperate to unpick why I seemingly had a dream career but life in general felt so underwhelming. I figured out that my brain likes writing but my soul needs something else, so at the start of this year - in addition to still writing my books - I took a job in a high school mixing teaching and pastoral work. In one million ways this makes no sense at all, apart from the fact that working out of the house with teenagers is making me really very happy. I’m almost 40, a solo parent by choice, and knowing all this means you’re all caught up. WELCOME.
(pssst! I just revealed all the details about my summer 2025 book. Please do consider pre-ordering: it’s the single best way to help authors you love!)
As the weather warmed up by degrees all week, I could see London in the sun in my mind’s eye and me, in a perfectly concocted outfit of exacting proportions and layers, meandering places, coffee in hand, perhaps having just eaten a pain au raisin, one of the good ones where the raisins go plump and burst in your mouth, sunglasses on, forgetting to look at the time. I have to check the time a lot. Morning alarm at 5 a.m., an eye on the digits above the oven as I write before work, forever knowing how much of a lesson is left, when I’ll need to pick up my son, how long the fish fingers need to be in the air fryer, how many minutes until we’ve missed a good bedtime. Time, time, time. When I sent Sarah a voice-note about meeting up I said, ‘We look good. We walk. We talk. It’s Carrie and Miranda running errands in the big city, except we stop by Arket.’ I needed time to not matter. This recovering control freak would like the practice.
‘Doing anything nice this weekend?’ they’d ask at work, and I’d say, ‘Going to London, actually. My brother is down there.’
I can never figure out how to explain that part of me is down there too. I don’t want to live in London anymore, not now, not until I’m in my 50’s (!) and in a different chapter, maybe. When I lived in London, in another life, I don’t think I realised just how lonely I was, pin-balling around and trying to figure out how to belong. I like this life, suburban, geographically small but perfect for us. I feel like I belong more in this life than any other I’ve tried on. But big city living, a place the size of London available to us for forty-eight hours at a time, a brother with a zone 2 flat and the insistence that we come stay, well. That is wealth.
We drove, because cross-country trains apparently stop working on Sundays every spring so we’d have no way to get home otherwise. We had activity books and snacks and we know all the lyrics to every song on the Era’s Tour playlist now, so there was enough to keep us busy. When we got out the car for a McDonald’s the sky was light and when we got back in the car to keep driving the sky had gotten dark, so there was plenty to talk about too, if only we noticed. When we finally arrived my kid said he’d never been sat down for so long all at one time, and my brother took one look at me in my after-school clothes, pissed himself laughing and said: ‘You’re dressed like a teacher’. Two year 8’s had complimented my outfit that day. I didn’t think that was a bad thing.