When I feel unsettled or anxious, I read ferociously. Something about the escape or the accumulation of knowledge. When I am happy, I read ferociously too. Or perhaps I am happy because I am reading ferociously. Anyhow—I feel a mixture of the two at the moment and I am, indeed, reading and listening to books whenever I am not working or talking to my family (and sometimes, too, when I’m doing either of those things). When I’m feeding the baby or getting her ready for bed, I’m often listening to a book. Some might accuse me of not engaging fully with my child—sure, but I engage fully sometimes. At other times (quite often), I need a bit more stimulation than just making noises at each other and smiling.

(Having said that, I was listening to the audiobook of Portnoy’s Complaint (my first Philip Roth) in the car with her yesterday, and when a particularly vivid description of masturbation was amplified for many minutes into the warm sleepiness of the car (the baby was napping, but still), I did decide to turn it off and put The Rest is Politics on.)

These past few months I’ve read some absolute corkers. Dog-ear-and-underline-a-hundred-pages kind of good. I’m trying (and failing) to read as quickly as my tbr stack is growing. T bought a wooden book stand from a charity shop and I’ve commandeered it as my to-read shelf. It is bursting with promise and anticipation.

While I am endlessly frustrated that I don’t have more time to read physical books—audio is a godsend—I am also so pleased that my reading is back up to pre-baby level. I was reading an entry in my diary from when I was pregnant, and I was clearly very concerned that I had lost the ability to read with fervency and joy and I might never get it back. I can reassure past-Claire, you get it back.

I’m splitting this into two as I have quite a few books to talk about and I need the time and space to do so. The second part will be out in a week or so.

Here are some of the best NON-FICTION books I’ve read these past few months.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve read, and an exemplar of the importance of investigative long-form journalism. I heard him talking on a podcast recently about how the kind of journalism that he does—that takes months and that he is paid well for—just doesn’t exist for young journalists starting out now. This is a problem. And this new book, about an 18 year old Londoner who falls to his death from a fancy apartment building into the Thames and turns out to have been posing as a Russian oligarch’s son, is the kind of reporting that opens a criminal case up again. The Met police are seen to be, if not incompetent, then at least gravely under resourced and struggling to do actual police work. The book reads like a thriller—as all of Radden Keefe’s work does. He’ll start a seemingly unrelated narrative and then suddenly weave it into the main story with blinding precision. He knows exactly how to end a chapter to make you desperate to find out just a bit more. Before long, you’ve read the whole book and it’s 3am.

Strangers by Belle Burden

I’ve read a bit of discourse about this book but have mostly tried to avoid it. I am bored of the rhetoric that says that unless a privileged person states their privilege on every page their suffering is not legitimate. Case in point—Belle Burden at their Martha’s Vineyard second home when she receives a call from a man who tells her that her husband is having an affair. It is the beginning of the pandemic. Her (trash) husband leaves her with their children and turns into a person she does not recognise. The panic described is potent—it is a living nightmare. The story is nuts, for sure, but what I found most interesting was the exploration, through her lived experience, of the way ambition and freedom can be stamped out when a woman becomes a mother. That traditional way of mothering is seen as incompatible with autonomy. It is chilling. When their children are a bit older she gets offered a job and her husband tells her not to take it. She is needed in the home, she says. She agrees, with a meek willingness, though she wants the job. She wants to feel like she owns something, that she has skills other than domestic ones.

It’s almost a cliché: the idea that husbands want their wives to stay at home and embody a certain kind of femininity, only to grow bored of the very version of womanhood they once desired, and begin looking elsewhere for something different. Yet that is exactly what happens to Burden. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be a stay-at-home mother—though for most women, it is no longer financially possible—but there is an undeniable vulnerability built into that choice. Because so many families now depend on two incomes, staying at home has increasingly become a privilege reserved for higher earners (perhaps part of the reason for some of the more snarky Substack responses to the book). But whether or not it remains an option for most women, Burden gestures towards a broader truth: domestic labour is still profoundly undervalued. Society depends upon women having children and raising them, yet continues to treat that work as secondary or somehow insufficiently real.

Life After Ambition by Amil Naizi

Somehow, sometimes, a memoirist can make you feel as though they are describing your life and your feelings. Their experiences—the literal fact of them—may be different, but the emotion and the impact are the same. When she has her son she describes the realisation that this is the biggest and most important thing she has ever done. It is emotional but somehow scientific, and obvious—this epiphany about the reality of parenthood. That this little person is yours and you are theirs. I hate to be trite (do I?) but it’s the best and hardest realisation I’ve ever had.

In some ways reading Life After Ambition soon after Strangers made it feel like the two books were having a conversation in the confines of my mind. The first half of the book is a moving and gripping story about youth, growing into young adulthood, domestic violence and addiction. Naizi reflects on this time with great composure. She is removed and analytical, but it is very affecting.

Amil Naizi becomes a mother while also trying to build her career and to somehow prove something about her worth through work. I relate very much. She explores the particular pressure placed on women now: that motherhood should transform you completely, but not so completely that it interrupts your productivity, ambition, desirability or momentum. You are expected to behave as though nothing fundamental has changed, while also being the best, most devoted mother ever.

She goes through a slow process of realising that many of the ideas she has inherited about ambition and success might not work for her. Not because she lacks drive, but because motherhood has shifted the scale by which she measures value and meaning.

Famesick by Lena Dunham

I wrote a whole post about how much I loved this and how much I admire Lena Dunham. I need not say much more, except that it continues to move me, that book. That I miss sitting with it; what a great reminder it was of the life-giving energy of good writing.

I made a promise to myself to read more non-fiction this year, so please give me your recommendations.

I’d forgotten how many smells there are in the city.

When I must go into London for work, I tend to stick to the leafy perimeter. Soho is my nightmare. Just too many people for each square metre. I can cope quite well with Hampstead, Primrose Hill, Notting Hill, the new development at Kings Cross. Places where you can see trees, maybe water, and tall terraced houses reaching up into the sky—guiding the eye.

I went to Kentish Town last week, for an author’s bookshop event, and found myself walking down the high street, past Kossoff’s Bakery and Whole Foods and Tesco Express, breathing the thick air and smelling aftershave, cigarette smoke, strawberry vape, sweat. When I’m in a city—maybe because of the sensory overload—it feels as though every version of myself is passing me by. I can see my younger self, who is twenty-two and living in south London—completely uncertain yet exhibiting an arrogant surety only a person barely out of pubescence is capable of. I can see the parallel universe version who made different choices. Ended up somewhere different. I can see future me, with more experience and wisdom, walking to a bar to meet a friend she hasn’t seen in ten years.

I have just finished Lena Dunham’s second memoir, Famesick. And it was quite a profound experience. I found myself almost in tears as I listened to its final sentence. Just as she did so iconically in Girls, her HBO series, her book manages to encapsulate so perfectly, a unique yet universal experience—what it means to be a woman, a friend, a partner, an artist, a daughter, and crucially, what it means to fail, fall down, hurt, and then get back up again. I watched Girls for the first time when I was twenty and I identified so painfully with Hannah Horvath, Dunham’s character. She is all ego and passion. When I was thirty I watched the series again. I loved it just as much but I felt different. Less ‘seen’ by the character of Hannah. More empathy and a little bit of revulsion. To be young and full of expectation…

Everything feels drenched with meaning and profundity. There is the change in seasons. It’s warm enough to sit outside with your face to the sun and contemplate your existence. I have loved sitting with Lena Dunham’s stories and reflections while I am in such an emotionally intense period of my own life, and perhaps the audio version provides an especially transcendent atmosphere. To be with Lena Dunham’s writing is to be transported into a movie. She has a very particular way of zooming into the detail and finding beauty or intrigue. She makes a statement and you are stopped short, absolutely convinced of her genius. Wondering why you hadn’t seen it that way before. Perhaps she was the original romantasiser of every day life. But instead of that concept meaning TikTok videos of women in various shades of beige cleaning their work surface and putting food in Tupperware, it is about climbing into an unmade but colourfully quilted bed, pulling a notebook or laptop on top of you, and making something that—at least in that moment—feels like the most important work you’ll ever do.

There is something unique about Dunham’s celebrity. She is almost as despised as she is loved, and I found it very sad to read about her past twenty years; what she has had to endure in terms of work and public perception, but even more so her battle to be understood and cared for when suffering from a particularly female form of extreme ill health (endometriosis and a hysterectomy). Despite that though, she remains resolutely herself. And somehow still seems resolutely joyful about life. Hopeful about what is to come. Since Girls ended and after a few years of surgeries, a horrible public breakup, subsequent terrible men and a disassociation with herself and her body, she started to make choices that led her towards who she seems to be now. Not fixed—who is?—but more content. It made me think about how crucial it is to be able to make choices that are truly your own. Not dictated by people who want something from you (I can relate to that, this past year), or your own lack of self worth.

It reminds me of that Self Esteem lyric: If I’m so empowered, why am I such a coward? If I’m so strong, why am I broken? I feel that every single day.

Last week after work, I went to write and drink wine at an Italian restaurant. As I got my laptop out and ordered a pizza and a glass of pecorino from a very lovely waiter who enquired about my writing, the sun was setting and drenching the place in a yellow glow. The day had been beautifully bright and, finally having a little bit of time by myself to be indulgently introspective, I felt something I think could be described as joy.

My mood is seemingly changeable by the minute at the moment. I am feeling every bit of the worry, sadness, dread and, yes, joy, that is available to me. Reading the news and despairing, scrolling through Instagram Reels for an hour and hating myself, blowing raspberries on my baby’s tummy and wondering if anything could be better. Then, of course, contemplating our mortality. My period might be coming back—horror of horrors—which probably has something to do with the mood swings.

As with everything Lena Dunham seems to create, she’s received mixed reviews. Some people will just never like how honest she is. They will call it TMI. I call it a service. I call her The Voice of Her Generation.

It seems I write best in my car. Stationary, for obvious reasons. And alone. The metal shell providing a buffer between me and my responsibilities. The sounds inside have a deadened, muffled quality.

I used to write well in cafes, where the background noise of other people’s conversations, cutlery on plates and yelling children were mere inconsequential rumbles while my brain focused on ideas and words. This morning, though, I found I couldn’t concentrate. Another symptom of a change I’ve noticed. My body, in some undefined way, was uncomfortable. There was too much noise — a baby crying, making me think of my own. I wanted more coffee, more food, to do a wee. I opened my inbox to read and reply to emails. I felt overwhelmed, in every sense. A sensory overload.

I’ve been noticing a strange and new inability to tolerate my senses, and a lack of outlet for the frustration that inevitably builds when I feel overwhelmed. At the weekend, we went to my parents’ house for Easter, an occasion I traditionally absolutely love and look forward to. Christmas’ low-key, less prohibitively expensive cousin. For context, and to better explain how irregular I am feeling right now, how un-myself: in my mind, the Easter weekend is always sunny. The Easters of my childhood start with a breakfast of boiled eggs and a table laden with chocolate eggs. We go to church, and there is always an Easter egg hunt. More chocolate. Roast lamb for lunch, with mint sauce. We have pudding (not chocolatey because my mum says we already have plenty of chocolate at Easter: something lemony), and then, after clearing the debris and washing up saucepans, we sit around drinking tea and chatting and perhaps playing a board game. Memory often erases the jagged edges of otherwise pleasant experiences. The argument about the washing up or the slight queasiness after too much chocolate. In my memory it is idyllic.

We started the day, this year, with boiled eggs and croissants. The baby had her porridge and some buttered toast. It was sunny. It was. Blue skies and birds happily chirping. The collared doves that nest in the satellite dish by my office (and now M’s bedroom) window every spring were back. Lambs were sunbathing in the fields around the village. I felt a sense of anticipation. I packed up our stuff: M’s bits and an M&S bag full of Easter eggs and a book or two because you don’t want to get caught without a book and a few minutes to kill. I think my need to take a book wherever I go, regardless of how unlikely it is that I will get to read it, is another call for isolation and quiet. Just the sight of a book and its promise of peace can make me feel a little bit calmer.

The day was lovely. A delicious roast cooked by my mum. All my family around the table. But I get overwhelmed by noise, by mess. I think I used to be more relaxed, able to sit back and allow chaos to exist around me. But now my need to control is almost overwhelming. I desperately want to sit in a quiet room for a while, but I also want to chill the hell out and enjoy this time with my family. Who cares if there is mess? If there is noise? Why is my heart rate getting faster?

I want to be around people, I want to keep experiencing life in all its wonderful, messy glory, but I think I also want to opt out. Give my brain a chance to slow down, to breathe, to actually think for a second. This week, the feeling of overwhelm has continued. My to-do list — for life admin and work — feels never-ending. While usually the stack of unread books on my bedside table would fill me with pleasant expectation, it now seems like another list of jobs to do. Nice jobs. Jobs I absolutely want to do, but the fact of wanting so much and not knowing where to start is paralysing.

My friend has gone on a meditation retreat where she will sit for, I think, 10 hours a day in complete silence and nothingness. Rory Stewart is currently taking a couple of weeks off The Rest is Politics podcast to do a very similar thing. (A sudden thought: imagine if they are on the same retreat. I can’t wait to ask her if she saw Rory Stewart.) Anyway, that sounds utterly terrifying and utterly brilliant. I wonder what would happen to me if I could be alone for so long. If I didn’t have anything to do but think.

We decided, after many months of anxiety and resistance (on my part), to sleep train M. She has been in my bed with me until this point, unable to sleep if I am not feeding her into unconsciousness. It has been an interesting, complicated and beautiful time. There has been something undeniably special about the closeness that comes with providing such uncomplicated comfort to your child. But it has also been exhausting. I haven’t had more than two hours of uninterrupted sleep for about nine months. There is a fracturing of the husband–wife dyad when the mother–baby dyad takes precedence, when mother and baby cast the father out of the room and create their own nighttime bubble. We always planned to have her in her own room, in her own cot, and I have been surprised at my sadness and resistance to the reality of doing that.

Sleep training has gone very well, and M is sleeping through the night in her cot already. I was so worried about doing it. About how she would feel and, as a result, how I would feel. But it has been so much easier and more positive than I feared. She is so happy to see me in the morning, she is sleeping better in the daytime as well, and she, crucially, still seems to love me. But, impossible as it seems to avoid, I am both ecstatic and its opposite: grieving the end of yet another stage of her. I barely remember newborn M, and I fear not remembering these months of holding her at 3am. I am delighted to be able to go to bed and watch an episode of a TV show or read my book with the light on. To get a couple of hours in the daytime where she is asleep not in the car but at home, and to get to actually do something else. What a thrill that is. But I also feel very sad a lot of the time too.

I suppose we are seasonally going through change, and there is so much unrest in the air. Everything is fractious. Maybe this is just what change feels like when you’re inside it. Not like a transformation, but like irritation. Like everything is slightly too much, and you don’t quite know why. For now, I’ll sit in the car a bit longer. I’ll write a few sentences when I can. I’ll enjoy the promise of spring and a nice glass of wine at the end of the day.

T immediately noticed the blue plaques. Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud. Psychoanalysts. Father and daughter. The former had lived at the address for just one year, after they fled Austria in 1939; the latter stayed on for the rest of her life, until her death in 1982.

Anna Freud was keen for her home to become a museum, and there is something uniquely intimate about a museum honouring someone’s work in the place where they slept, ate, worked, and drank their coffee. It isn’t just the preservation of objects, but of atmosphere. And that atmosphere was palpable. We were positively giddy to be out by ourselves and somewhere that felt so potent and full of attention and ideas.

In the late afternoon, on the middle landing that overlooks the street, sunlight blazes through the huge bay windows and sets the walls alight with golden ribbons. Anna and her companion, Dorothy Burlingham, would sit there, apparently, drinking coffee and reading.

Psychoanalysis has always fascinated me. I have done a lot of therapy in the past but have never been analysed — it feels a step further, somehow, than the kind of counselling that is common in the UK. Psychoanalytic theory, created by Freud, posits that human behaviour is influenced by the unconscious, that most mental activity occurs outside conscious awareness – repressed memories, desires, and impulses.

There was a wonderful letter displayed, from Anna Freud to someone (presumably) considering becoming a psychoanalyst. It said:

“You asked me what I consider essential personal qualities in a future psychoanalyst. The answer is comparatively simple. If you want to be a real psychoanalyst you have to have a great love of the truth, scientific truth as well as personal truth, and you have to place this appreciation of truth higher than any discomfort at meeting unpleasant facts, whether they belong to the world outside or to your own inner person.

Further, I think that a psychoanalyst should have interests beyond the limits of the medical field in facts that belong to sociology, religion, literature and history, otherwise his outlook on his patient will remain too narrow. This point contains the necessary preparations beyond the requirements made on candidates of psychoanalysis in the institutes. You ought to be a great reader and become acquainted with the literature of many countries and cultures. In the great literary figures you will find people who know at least as much of human nature as the psychiatrists and psychologists try to do.”

That section about interests contains, I think, what I find so useful about the act of self-reflection and exploration in general. One must be of the world to truly understand human nature. I see that playing out in my own life and brain – the more I read, listen, learn, the more content I feel. Knowledge is power, after all.

We made our way through each room, marvelling at the rugs, the light, the warmth, the countless (over 600!) Egyptian items and figurines (Freud was very interested in Egyptian art and viewed archaeology as a metaphor for psychoanalysis – the unearthing of buried, unconscious memories.) Freud’s psychoanalysis coach was on display – it had been brought to London from their apartment in Vienna at the beginning of the second world war. At the head of the couch is a seat for the analyst. The patient lies back, closes their eyes… 

Afterwards we walked to a cosy pub and ordered drinks: white wine and a beer. We sat in the corner and read books for an hour. Such a luxury, it now feels, to just sit, quietly reading with a drink. I’d made early reservations for dinner (so my mum wouldn’t have to cope with an over-tired baby for too long), so we made our way down the high street to a very minimalistic, trendy Japanese restaurant called Ine. The food was very good, but the atmosphere was a little strange. For the first hour we were the only customers and the aggressively attentive staff were… aggressively attentive. Hovering over us, repeatedly asking if we would like another £11 glass of wine, looking personally affronted when we went against advice and didn’t get the set tasting menu (I don’t really like sushi lol). I would recommend it for the food (the black cod was heavenly) but perhaps go late, when the atmosphere is a little less intense. 

Before dessert my mum called and said M was very upset. She did not want to go to sleep and was probably wondering where on earth I was. We rushed through our ice-cream with matcha and red bean paste (is it terrible that I still ordered pudding?) and returned to my parents’ house to find our sleepy baby on her granny’s lap, watching Gardener’s World. 

It was a really good day.

Yesterday, tensions were high. T and I alternated between being lovingly supportive of one another and completely incensed by how annoying the other was being: why had he left that defrosting Tupperware, dripping with condensation, on the wooden work surface that was already covered in dark damp patches LESS THAN A YEAR after the kitchen renovation was completed. I went to bed at 8.39pm, read my book for half an hour and had every intention of going to sleep immediately thereafter. But then I proceeded to have a coughing fit that knew no bounds and saw no end, so that my baby also couldn’t sleep and lay next to me laughing while I struggled for breath. 

Strangely, the baby seems to have decided on a far longer nap than her usual 27 minutes and I am sitting in the car in a carpark in Berkhamsted with her while she heads into her 74th minute of slumber. You might wonder why, when I’m complaining about exhaustion and overwhelm, I am taking this opportunity to write rather than just simply close my eyes and submit to whatever. Well, I actually want to write more than I want to sleep. Strange, but I feel a hum of inspiration and what can only be described as energy (alongside its opposite). I’m doing some fiction writing too. Making notes on my phone when an idea occurs to me or I see someone doing something weird or rude or funny, that one of my characters could do. Some interesting mark of humanity. A person in the car in front throwing a crisp packet out the window onto the central reservation – what does that say about that person? That they are an arsehole.  

I am overwhelmed but happy, is the thing. And when I feel happy, I want to create and consume. I went to the London Book Fair on Wednesday and just days before that I launched my new book PR business. It was good timing, in a lot of ways, I had some great meetings with old and new contacts and left feeling hugely galvanised. But it’s all ramped up at the same time. I can’t stop thinking about how important reading is for our minds and culture, and sometimes it is easy, within the industry, to become strangely complacent or cynical. There are people working in publishing-adjacent organisations who have generally been taking on a more activistic role than most of us who work directly with books and authors. I’m seeing and hearing more people from within the industry standing up, listening, shouting about what can be done to combat all time low literacy levels, the existential crisis for vital small presses, the AI slop that agents and publishers are having to trawl through to find books written by human beings. 

But all this to say: it’s quite overwhelming. What needs to be discussed, learnt and done. I have launched my business and I’m working with some brilliant people this year, but I also want to be cuddling my baby and having dance parties in the kitchen and making her nutritious meals. I also want to write a book. And these little essays, ruminations, blog posts – whatever we’re calling them. 

Every night when I put M to bed, I lie next to her and listen to the evening edition of The Guardian’s Today in Focus. In around 10 minutes they tell you about the top story of the day. Often, it’s Trump related. Right now, it’s specifically Iran. How can we hold it all together? When not only is there simply too much on a domestic level, but the world feels overwhelming and terrifying but also completely surreal. That lying there with my seven-month-old in our little village, hearing reports of missiles hitting a primary school or influencer-packed Dubai is not something my brain can comprehend. And yet it must. 

This has now taken me a few days to write. M woke up and I had to take her outside, get a coffee, walk down the canal. I am now on my sofa sitting beside my cat who is thrilled to get some mama-time while the baby is out with her father. They might be gone for another 20 minutes or so. What should I do with that time? I want to read a few pages of my book, I want to write more, I want to stare into the abyss. I want to learn a language, take a ceramics course. Excelling doesn’t feel like an option right now, just doing things well-enough. I read this back and feel dissatisfied. But I will hit publish anyway. If anything is a display of exactly what I’m writing about it is this, trying to write and publish something to try to comprehend or mark a moment in time. This moment that is both great and far too much.

Audiobooks have allowed me, throughout pregnancy but even more so in these early months of new motherhood, to retain my identity as ‘a reader’. While I don’t agree that listening to a book isn’t reading (I think it’s different but still, in essence, ‘reading’) I do find the lack of a physical object difficult to accept. Something, deep within me, tells me that I need to experience the physicality of the book – touch its cover and turn some of its pages – to feel a connection with it. 

I think my unease and defensiveness relates, at least in part, to another preoccupation of mine: I am terrified that I am losing my ability to pay attention. That I no longer have the patience for deep reading, deep learning, staying with a subject or a page, a problem, until I've worked it out with purely the power of my mind. 

I’ve always struggled to hold information for very long. At school during exam time, I could be spotted reading the textbook right before going into the examination hall, shoving it back into my bag as I grabbed my water bottle. The only way I knew how to regurgitate information was to have heard or read it moments before. That is, surely, an exaggeration, but not a huge one. Of course, I do know some things (message to my pub quiz team: we absolutely won that time because of the literature round and the fact that no one else at the pub had apparently heard of Maya Angelou).

I have some memory capacity, for instance: I can still remember all the lyrics to my favourite albums from the 2000s. But I am genuinely worried that my brain is finding it harder and harder to plug the gaps and keep the information from seeping out. Last night, watching an episode of The West Wing, I realised that I had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about. I’d been listening, I remember understanding what they were saying as they were saying it (some intricate sub plot about bill amendments) but it had not gone in. I wouldn’t be able to explain it back to you. My mind: blank. Horrifying, really. 

There’s loads in the news about our collectively diminishing attention span. That scrolling and social media is deadening. That we are becoming a post-literature society. I no longer read headlines (because lol ofc I can’t read a whole article) and think distantly, with a sense of superiority, about the state of the world. Instead, I think holy shit that’s me they’re talking about. 

And this was all exacerbated by what apparently happens to the female brain while she grows a human being inside her. It makes sense, that while so much of our energy and literal blood and cells are swept away by the baby, our capacity for understanding the latest well-reviewed non-fiction tome gets worse. Since having my baby though, I have been wrestling with a renewed sense of curiosity and enthusiasm for the world, ideas and, centrally, books, alongside a fogginess that makes me feel adrift and anxious.

I have decided that this year I will read a lot of nonfiction. A direct response to the lack of nonfiction I read last year, for sure, but also to reports that nonfiction sales are down exponentially because of people turning to podcasts and, of course, short form video content for news or for a (not-so-deep) dive into a particular subject. Professors at universities all over the world – even professors of literature – are saying that they can no longer expect their students to read a book in a week (if at all). That they are having to rely on handouts and TV and film adaptations. James Marriott, who is writing a book about our so-called post-literate society (which I believe is out later this year), writes that for the kind of complex ideas we need to be having for society and democracy to not only flourish but survive, we need the written word. We need books. That Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason could not exist were he to have attempted to express it orally. We need time and revision to be able to work ideas through to their most complex conclusion. 

I wonder if audiobooks are, in a small and not completely satisfactory way, here to save us. We sometimes need the ability to take in information in a way more conducive to our lifestyles. We are busy, we have long commutes, we are working and doing dishes and laundry. I imagine my mum at home all day with a baby who wanted to be carried around constantly, who could not go to sleep unless rocked or fed. She was alone with her thoughts (except when she was watching Neighbours), being driven mad by the isolation and the loss of herself and her autonomy. By contrast, when my baby needs to be driven around the villages of Buckinghamshire to get any kind of nap in, I listen to books (and, yes, podcasts). Not to say I’m never driven mad, but maybe less so, because I have options. I can use my brain more easily. When you ask your parents what it was like to read X book when it first came out or what the general reaction to Ross saying Rachel at the end of season 4 of Friends was, they look at you with incredulity. ‘I wasn’t reading/watching tv/listening to music, I was having children!’. My mum, a voracious reader, was without books for years.

The author Olivia Sudjic, who has two small children, made the very good point on her Instagram stories recently that if publishers were to provide audio versions of proofs (early copies of books created for the purposes of getting endorsements from other writers and generating press coverage), she would be able to blurb many that are sent to her in physical form. As such, with no mechanism for this currently used by any publisher I am aware of, she hasn’t been able to blurb any of them so far this year. And this is all before we even begin to discuss how revelatory and important the audio form is for those with disabilities. If there has been such a seismic shift from nonfiction books to podcasts, perhaps audiobooks are the answer. The form opens the world of literature to people who might not otherwise be able to access it, while also responding to the attention problem – we could be treating an audiobook release in the same way as we might a new podcast. Marketing it as such. I am not suggesting that there is no place for podcasts, in fact they’ve revolutionised my understanding of the world and politics. There is, though, a problem with TikTok, Reels, Shorts, and the fact that a lot of people are getting their news, ideas and beliefs solely from there. Books, television, podcasts, radio, film — all of these mediums that prioritise quality, thoughtful content that expands brains rather than deadens them, can coexist. 

Even so, books do offer something that other mediums cannot. They are a form that engages the writer and the reader in deep thought, and it is only through deep thought that we can make societal change, democracy can succeed, innovation can happen. 

Yes, I am clinging to the physical versions of books. I love the feel of one in my hand. It comforts me. I love bookshops – thumbing the shelves until a spine or a cover piques my interest. But I am also embracing what the audio form offers me. The thing that, after my family, I hold most dear. Reading.

A couple of ironies to finish: 

1.        During the writing of this I got distracted by the pull of my inbox, clicked away from this word doc, read an email from Daunt Books recommending recently published titles, remembered I’m excited to read Michael Pollan’s new book, went on my phone to add it to my book list, completely forgot that was what I was going to do, scrolled Instagram for 10 mins, posted a couple of pictures of my cat to my stories, reposted a picture of Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem) looking hot, wondered why I’d stopped writing, went back to my laptop, saw the Daunt Books email, remembered. I still haven’t added that Michael Pollan book to my list. Brb. [and she was never seen again…]

2.        The podcast episode, where James Marriott talks brilliantly about the idea of the post-literate society that I have recommended before on this Substack, I have had to listen to three times.

At the beginning of the year my laptop stopped working. I turned it on, or tried to, ready to begin 2026 with positivity and productivity, and… nothing. A black screen but for a strip of fuzziness at the very top. I took it to the Apple store, waited a week, picked it up and brought it home again. And still… nothing. It wouldn’t boot up, come back to life. I pointlessly, desperately jabbed at the power button. My heartrate increased. Pure, stupid anger rose. My husband told me to calm down, that it was okay, and I snapped at him. It was decidedly not okay. Except of course, fundamentally, it was.

After a long and frustrating conversation with what may or may not have been AI, I had a more helpful conversation with a human being on the phone. I sent the laptop off again, this time to the Netherlands. And then after another 10 days the laptop was returned to me, brand new. Literally, brand new. For no extra cost (aside from the £300 + VAT I’d paid for the initial repair) I’d been given an entirely new laptop. 

The moral of the story is opaque at best. Perhaps there isn’t one. But I do like to find some meaning in these most random and strange occurrences that end up not feeling that random, or that strange, at all. I am dismayed but not surprised by how paralysed I felt by a forced break from my laptop. How angry I was about it. And I am chastened by the good fortune that came from it. I am preoccupied at the moment by reports and news about our tech addiction – the danger of AI, our attention, children growing up knowing nothing but a tech-addled world, and whether there is, at this point, actually any way out. I am though, ironically, exceedingly grateful that my laptop broke and the Apple Store failed to fix it the first time around. I saved like 700 quid. 

I have, as a result of all of this, been locked out of my Substack account except for via the app on my phone. No amount of talking to Substack’s chatbots has helped. They seem as stumped as I am. I was intending to post the latest edition of Open Tabs last Sunday but because I had yet another technical difficulty and my blood pressure was once again rising unpleasantly, I let myself off the hook, went for a walk and then scrolled Instagram instead of worrying about it too much. I could, like I am now, have posted it via the app on my phone, but I kind of think when technology is frustrating you so much you think you might cry, it might be time to stop trying and go outside. 

Ps. When I start to feel too anxious about technology and AI I remind myself how Boris Johnson pronounces ChatGPT and it makes me feel a lot happier.

Right!

Some links and recommendations for your Sunday afternoon:

Chris Power is a novelist and book critic, and he wrote this wonderful piece for the Observer last weekend about a Pulitzer Prize winning history of cancer which has just been reissued with a new chapter: The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Power was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2023 so comes to the subject and his interviewee with powerful and genuine curiosity. It’s interesting, to read about Mukherjee’s perspective on the future of cancer treatment, how much is changing every year but, ultimately, that he doesn’t believe the human race will ever eradicate cancer. 

I haven’t quite finished it so I won’t go into huge detail but my goodness I am loving Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano. It is a sprawling, emotive family drama. A homage to Little Women and full of the unique complex feeling that is shared between families and those who enter the family as a beloved new member. It is about identity and purpose and where we fit in the world. A truly beautiful novel.

I might have found this article especially interesting as a book publicist, but I think most people who read a lot of books also, almost by default, read a lot of ‘book lists’. You know, the recommendations lists that pop up at the beginning or the year/season/month that we save and screenshot. This article by journalist Lydia Kiesling about the history and mechanics or those lists is so interesting. You might remember the infamous fake book list:

In May of last year, images of an insert from the Chicago Sun-Times with the title “Summer Reading List for 2025” began circulating on Bluesky. It was a capsule list of the sort that was ubiquitous online and in print: a cheery array of book covers accompanied by one- or two-sentence blurbs. There were fifteen books, all of them by well-known authors, mostly of literary fiction. Someone skimming this document might not realize that the majority of these titles did not exist; whoever had produced it, sans byline, had used AI, which had hallucinated ten of the fifteen books and their plots. 

Look at me recommending a podcast that is never not in the top 10, but bear with me, because The Rest is Politics has been not much short of lifesaving these past few weeks. The world is a hellscape. Powerful men are abusing women and children and other men (and some women) don’t give a shit. A dictator is running the US and is threatening to wage war on whoever and wherever his tiny egotistical mind lands him upon that week. Our government is weak and imploding and opening the doors wide to Reform and the flag-flying anti-immigration far-right. It is confusing and deeply upsetting and I have leant heavily on the insight of Rory Stewert and Alistair Campbell. I don’t necessarily agree with everything they say (they don’t always agree with each other) but understanding the context behind the news, rather than just the headlines, feels imperative right now. 

On a not entirely unrelated note: I really recommend rewatching (or watching for the first time) The West Wing. When T suggested a rewatch I was hesitant. There are so many well-reviewed TV shows on my list that I’ve been meaning to get around to. But as soon as we pressed play and the rousing strings of the theme music played, I felt soothed and happier. It is many ways depressing to see a depiction of a flawed by ultimately good man in the Oval Office. Come for the politics-done-well, and stay for the 90s outfits, the Donna/Josh chemistry, Toby Ziegler’s dryness, the slurped coffee, and Rob Lowe. Every night after M has gone to bed we have dinner in front of TWW and the fire and I feel hugely comforted. 

This poem by Jenny Clark:

I'm eating Maggie's marmalade

on a thick slab of buttered toast

in the kitchen where the cat is 

perched in a place I call my home

the sun is shining through the window 

in a holographic ring and I'd say 

the world's a perfect place—

but I know better, that's the thing

Wild in Berkhamsted. This recommendation is a little exclusive, as it won’t be of much use to anyone who doesn’t live in or near Buckinghamshire, but I went to Wild for lunch yesterday and it was so good I can’t not mention it. We were given a voucher for Christmas by T’s sister and, wanting to celebrate February marking the end of an unpleasant time in my life, we dropped the baby off with my mum and went for a delicious lunch just the two of us. We ordered wine and way too much food and experienced what was undoubtably the best leek dish of my life. I was tragically too full for pudding but I must go again and take my parents because I feel I sorely missed out on the made-to-order sharing apple tarte tatin. 

Have a lovely week.

What I find hardest is the speed. I understand, now, why my mum rushes all the time. She had three children in four years, of course she rushes. Rushing is now buried so deep, that to not do so would feel like standing still.

Slowness, deliberateness, signals to my nervous system that everything is okay. Now, I find myself at speed. In quickened step with the other mums. Pushing buggies, iPhones clasped in hands.

Must shop for bread, more milk, baby needs feeding, cat is being sick again (do I need to call the vet?), baby needs a nap, how do I put her to sleep? Feed her? Again? She's got a stuffy nose, doesn't want milk, she's crying, she needs a nap, I'm so thirsty. When did I last drink water? I had a coffee this morning. Shop for more bread, carbs are life, the dishwasher, the baby needs holding, what can I do one handed? Need to apply to nurseries, we're not going to get a place. Should have applied when I was pregnant. When I didn't know her name. The baby is content, watching dancing fruit on YouTube, should I puree some vegetables? My god, my inbox. 

When we rush, our nervous system reads it as threat. The sympathetic nervous system — the branch responsible for fight-or-flight — takes over. Heart rate increases. Breathing becomes shallow. Attention narrows. This system evolved to keep us alive, it doesn’t distinguish between danger and urgency.

When this happens repeatedly, it becomes a baseline. Cortisol and adrenaline linger. The parasympathetic nervous system — responsible for rest, digestion, and recovery — struggles to come back online. The body learns that someone else’s needs take priority, that time is scarce, that stillness is a risk. Even when nothing is technically wrong, the system stays partially activated, scanning, braced. This is why rushing stops feeling like a choice. Slowing down isn’t neutral — it can feel unsafe.

There is a paradox here though, because then bedtime rolls around. Suddenly, the haste of the day melts away. The very thing that required speed now requires the opposite. 

The new aim is slowness, quiet, because rest is imminent. M needs me to feed her to sleep, she hasn't yet learned to do it herself (we haven't taught her, I suppose). We both lie on the bed, she is wearing a sleeveless sleeping bag, quilted and duvet-like. Sometimes she's crying, restless, and other times she is excited, not yet ready for the day to be over. But we lie there together. The room warm because we put the radiator on half an hour ago in preparation. I have my earphones in, listening to an audiobook or some news podcast about climate change or Starmer or Trump. I close my eyes, feel her squirming body getting quiet, relaxing. Before long her breathing becomes rhythmic. I lie there for a little while longer even after I know she's asleep. She's such a light sleeper, stirs and opens her eyes slightly whenever I inch away. I could go to sleep myself. I feel my nervous system quiet as I breathe, feel the extreme, exquisite calm and safety of home. 

I’m spending more time at home, keeping plans to a minimum and entering a new phase for our little family – different roles during the week, sharing childcare and time to work, create and focus on something other than keeping a tiny human alive. I am genuinely excited about what is in store this year, and unlike last January when I was nauseous and exhausted and my brain didn’t feel like my own, I am so excited about watching movies, reading books, eating delicious food, writing, going into the world and soaking up whatever I can. Tim and I decided to buy one Odeon limitless card for the year and share it – prioritising solo cinema dates that feel like the very best version of resting. I‘m drinking less but still drinking. I like wine. So sue me. There are so many wonderful things to be enjoyed at this time of year — the TV is good, all the awardsy films are coming out. The Traitors is on and pie and mash is a thing. Enjoy yourself!

Here are my recommendations for the fortnight.

The Beast in Me (Netflix)

Utterly compelling. The end of episode six… my goodness. I was terrified. In a wonderful way. The two leads – Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys – are astonishingly good. The style of the show, the way the camera hovers just a little bit too high, zeroing in on every micro expression, makes it all feel weirdly unsettlingly. Claire Danes plays a writer turned vengeful recluse after her young son died in a car accident, while Matthew Rhys is a billionaire real estate developer rumoured to have murdered his ex-wife, moves in next door. They both take an interest in one another. Wild, scary, horror ensues.

Matrescence by Lucy Jones

Is it too early to say book of the year? Lucy Jones captures the psychic and physical earthquake of early motherhood with a clarity that feels both validating and startling. She highlights elements of the experience I felt but hadn’t had the language for, and then gently contextualises them – biologically, culturally, evolutionarily.

When Should Founders Have a Baby? (The Times £)

This article in The Times, sent to me by my mum, was really heartening. I have felt dismayed and confused by the impossibility of what is expected of mothers who also want to work, or even have their own businesses. Is it possible? Surely. Yes. I believe it is. Seeing successful women talk about their experience – what they did right and what they’d chance if they got the change again – is so powerful when you’re finding your way through this strange, altering time. I have been questioning myself and what I want my life to look like endlessly, but I think I’m coming to some kind of stasis – a realisation that I can choose. There is such strength and power in eschewing the capitalist ideal, the cult of productivity. Vowing that you will not follow the Sheryl Sandberg approach and instead will find another way to be both fulfilled by and successful at work, while your child is your clear and unashamed priority.

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

This is just a fantastic novel. A proper novel – if that makes any sense? Loads of plot, many and varied characters (some likeable, some not), an existential threat, hopping time frames, a satisfying twist and a final 50 pages you weren’t (or at least I wasn’t) expecting when you finished the first 50. I love a bit of contemporary fiction with little to no plot and a whole lot of introspection, but sometimes you need to read a book that will grab you by the figurative lapels, make you care about the people in the pages and leave you wholly, contentedly satisfied by the end.

@earthtojudeee on Instagram

My current fave on Instagram. She’s a first time mum, in her 20s and seemingly absolutely excelling at it. She’s very cool – I think I have a bit of a crush on her – and her baby has bigger cheeks than M (no mean feat). He’s utterly adorable. I’m finding watching certain other mum’s on Instagram to be very comforting. When you can relate to their attitude but they also offer a little bit of inspiration. A galvinising feeling that perhaps I could do that too. It’s lovely – when I’m struggling with sleep or feelings of guilt around leaving M with T or my mum, I can look at other people, people like Jude, who are so clearly wonderful at this, and love their baby so dearly, and yet also seem totally comfortable with choosing to do things in a way that not all the insta mums on my For You page might get behind (see: sleep training).

Marty Supreme

This was my first solo cinema trip since having M, using the aforementioned Odeon Limitless card. Ah, the solitude: sitting in a dark room with a chocolate muffin, feet up on the recliner seat, nobody asking me for anything. Timothee Chalamet in his best role yet? Methinksso.

Philosnowphy by horticulturalish

I loved this essay about the real vs the synthetic. Beginning with a walk through snow, it opens out into a reflection on the growing divide between physical life - gardens, weather, books, our actual faces and bodies - and the increasingly synthetic, online world we spend so much time in. It offers a calm, thoughtful case for opting out of constant digital performance and paying closer attention to the small, sustaining details of everyday life. 

That’s it for now. I hope you are having a good January. Be kind to yourself. Don’t abstain entirely from the things that make you happy. 

I’ve been cold all day. The kind that gets deep and makes you feel, if only for a moment, that you’ll never be warm again. I’ve been worrying that my baby is too cold. That she won’t be able to sleep. That she’ll be sad in her coldness. That my cat doesn’t have a soft fluffy bed to snuggle into because he’s always rejected any bed we’ve tried to give him.

Now, finally, I feel warm. I am in bed. I have on my dressing gown and a hot water bottle at my legs. My baby is beside me. Asleep. There’s another hot water bottle on the far side of her. She’s not the mini radiator she sometimes is, but at least her fingers aren’t icicles like they were last night. 

I actually love the cold. Despite how it gets into your bones. My family and I spent quite a lot of time in Switzerland when I was growing up and in my 20s. Mainly in the winter. At least a couple of weeks a year. (The privilege of this goes without saying but should be noted). The cold there is different, and the houses are too. So well insulated. Sometimes too warm when the heating has been on all day. You wear clothes that are actually appropriate for cold weather. People sit outside and eat their lunch under blue skies and subzero conditions — occasionally your bottle of Fanta freezes. Your vin chaud certainly doesn’t stay chaud for long. There is something about that very specific dry cold that takes me somewhere I can only describe as holy. An ember of the thrill of it glows within me as soon as we arrive, the car packed to the rafters with board games and ski boots and food for the week. I open the door of the car and am hit by it, that cold. I go inside and feel the Swiss insulation. The beautiful whiplash of the opposing temperatures. That ember grows and spreads as we make hot chocolate and discuss the week ahead. As we wake the next morning and look out the window, at the majesty of it all.

At the top of a ski lift, you might well be as close to heaven as one can be on earth. The snow is thick as anything. It looks like the cosiest bed. There is no other way to witness it — you have to drag on your boots and long johns and crunchy trousers and Michelin man it up the mountain on a cable car or a chair lift (a particularly special way to experience the cold — your fingers freezing trying to take a photo of the view and your nose so numb you can’t feel it dripping).

I’m not going to the mountains this year but I got a little taste of the thrill of it, when it snowed this week. Just a smattering. An embarrassing amount really. But it was white and it fell overnight and then didn’t disappear because the temperature stayed so wonderfully cold. The skies were primary blue. I walked through woods with my baby and my parents and the ground crunched under my feet. I left the house to find a cosy cafe to do some writing in and as I scraped the ice from my car windscreen, a woman walking by and I discussed the thick flakes falling on our heads. A point of connection, the cold. Very British.

So I’m having a great January so far. Thanks almost entirely to the cold. Our house is freezing, build in the 1800s and terribly insulated, but it makes the fire even more satisfying. The way it crackles. And climbing into bed to feed my baby, holding her tightly while I listen to an audiobook and let my eyes grow heavy, I feel so content. It is one of the greatest privileges to be warm inside when it is cold outside. It makes me so very grateful for all I have, and I can’t wait to see the mountains again.

This is my BOOKS OF 2025 SPECIAL EDITION OF OPEN TABS. A reflection on what I read, why, the best of that list, and some more cultural recommendations at the bottom.

When I look back at my year in reading, I notice two things. First, there are considerably fewer books on the list than there usually are. Second, I can hardly pick out any that I really, really loved.

I was pregnant for the first half of the year which, in no uncertain terms, sucked the life out of me. Then I had a small baby to look after, who sapped both my time and my capacity to take in and retain information. That pretty much explains the first point, but the second I’m less sure about.

There will have been just as many brilliant books published in 2025 as in any other year. In fact, I’m reading other end-of-year book round-ups and feeling reading FOMO. I look back at my list of 2025 reads and wonder: did I pick badly, or did I read badly?

I’m writing something else about reading badly because one of my resolutions for 2026 is to do just that. I’m taking advice from wiser minds than mine on what that might look like, so more on that soon. Essentially, I want to look back at my reading in a year’s time and think: I’m satisfied, and I got something out of that. Not a wild ambition.

How to actually pick a book to read next, though, is a dark art. As a child I would go to the library with my mum and choose purely based on vibes. I remember picking a book once because of how shiny the cover was. I got about 50 pages in before I gave up — it was about a 1920s circus and, the Jacqueline Wilson devotee I was, I just wasn’t that into it. I did, however, greatly enjoy the shiny cover beneath my fingers.

There are so many factors to consider. For instance: are you in the mood for fiction or non-? What is going on in your personal life that might enhance or derail your experience of a certain subject or theme? What did you read last? Did you like it? Do you want to ride that raucous Marian Keyes wave with another Walsh sisters epic, or pivot to a slim Fitzcarraldo novella that promises to enrich your mind and look cool reading it in the coffee shop?

Unfortunately, because I felt like a shell of myself for most of my pregnancy and struggled even to conjure what I used to enjoy, I also struggled to choose books I would actually like. I wanted fiction — escapism — but my usual sad-single-girl-in-the-city subgenre wasn’t cutting it. It felt like a slap in the face as I lumbered my heavy body from sofa to kitchen to hospital to office to bed. I turned to historical fiction at one point (I am not a history girlie) and while I thought In Memoriam was brilliant — as good as everyone says — it still left me oddly unmoved.

I also tried a celebrity memoir, lured by reviews promising everything I enjoy in the genre: glamour, gossip, self-reflection, a journey. I was mildly interested in Say Everything by Ione Skye but couldn’t shake the question: what is the point of me reading this? And once that question lodges itself in your mind, enjoyment becomes difficult.

There were some standout books, mainly read after the baby was born and I felt more connected to my tastes and interests again, and I list my top five below.

Overwhelmingly, though, I’m left with the feeling that many of the others didn’t get a fair go. They are good books, but I did not meet them at the right time, or as the right version of myself.

THE TOP FIVE

Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo

This was, without question, the book that most reminded me why I love reading novels. Lombardo writes families so vividly. It’s expansive, emotionally intelligent, funny in places, and deeply humane.

A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

This was the first book I chose to read as part of my informal educating myself on motherhood project. It’s sharp, unsentimental, and bracingly honest about the psychic and physical upheaval of becoming a mother. I hugely admired the clarity of her thinking and the refusal to smooth the experience into something more palatable.

Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix

A slim, devastating book that I couldn’t stop thinking about. It’s cool and controlled on the surface, but beneath that restraint is real moral fury. The way it interrogates responsibility, distance, and institutional failure without ever becoming didactic is incredibly impressive.

Heart the Lover by Lily King

I loved Writers & Lovers, so I came to this with high expectations — and it met them! King writes about love like not many authors can. Without cliche but open to the sentimental. I cried at the end.

Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash

This is probably my book of the year. And also my last read of the year. Ash writes with openness and sincerity about faith, doubt, and the human desire for meaning. I’m writing a whole separate essay about the book and my response to it.

THE FULL LIST

1. The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

2. Holding the Baby by Nell Frizzell

3. Redhead By the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler

4. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

5. A Life’s Work by Rachel Cusk

6. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis

7. Say Everything by Ione Skye

8. Green Dot by Madeleine Gray

9. How to End a Story by Helen Garner (DNF and will be going back to / dipping in and out of!)

10. Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

11. So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne

12. Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

13. In Memoriam by Alice Winn

14. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

15. All Fours by Miranda July

16. Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur

17. Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix

18. Same as it Ever Was by Clare Lombardo

19. The Lifeline by Libby Page

20. The Wedding People by Alison Espach

21. I Love You Byeee by Adam Buxton

22. How to Raise a Viking by Helen Russell

23. I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai

24. Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers

25. Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst

26. On the Calculation of Volume (vol 1) by Solvej Balle

27. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

28. Heart The Lover by Lily King

29. My Biggest Mistake by Marian Keyes

30. Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever by Lamorna Ash

THE OTHER STUFF

The Birth Keepers podcast is exceptional journalism. It’s a devastating listen, charting the impact of a cult-like group led by a figurehead of the ‘free birthing’ movement, which encourages women to give birth without any medical support. They sell courses for thousands of pounds which claim to teach women how to ‘trust their bodies and their babies’. Many babies have died, and the most chilling part is that the group, The Free Birth Society, is still operating. Harrowing, vital listening.

Home for Christmas on Netflix is providing all the Scandi comfort I need right now. The third season of this Norwegian rom-com landed in early December and has been my companion during countless afternoon sofa feeds. While I haven’t been feeling especially festive so far this year, this show is helping to inject some twinkle into my life.

Finally, speaking of end-of-year book lists, one of my favourite literary podcasts returned for a special festive episode. I’m talking about the brilliant Octavia Bright and Carrie Plitt of Literary Friction. This nearly two-hour episode covers the books they’ve loved, what they’re excited to read in 2026, some reading resolutions, and — because they’ve both had babies this year — a fascinating, nuanced, galvanising discussion about motherhood. I loved every second, and am crossing my fingers they’ll start podcasting regularly again soon.

The big Christmas tree is up on the Green in our village. At 3.40pm it is starting to twinkle in the low light.

I’m sitting here tapping away in the Notes app because it seems that this is the only way to write anything while I’m looking after the baby. I have become a cliché. Before I had a baby I heard countless women talk and write about the ‘juggle’ of motherhood and creativity. And it’s not that I didn’t believe them, I absolutely did. But for some reason I never really believed it would happen to me. That I would have ideas and feelings (so many feelings!) sending tingles in the direction of my fingertips and hardly a minute to place them on the laptop keys and let it all out. The idea of which sounds like a big contented sigh to me. Oh how I want a week to just read and write.

The irony is that before I had M I was in an idea drought. Time was on my side but inspiration was not.

As I have alluded to before, the past few months have been hard for reasons unrelated to having a baby, and I’ve been in a state of fight or flight. Each day choosing something different. I’m like a jangling bag of nerves. Exhausted but full of energy. Nervous energy. I’ve looked up the etymology of the word nervous which, it turns out, once had a very different meaning. In the seventeenth century, to be nervous meant to be strong, full of vigour and spirit. The nerves were thought to carry the body’s ‘vital spirits’: tiny channels of energy that kept us alive and responsive to the world. I like that — the idea that beneath all this jangling exhaustion, the original meaning still flickers: energy trying to move, to find its way out.

I remember reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic (which I did not like) and her assertion that ideas journey from person to person. That if you don’t grip onto one while it’s with you, it’ll leave and find someone else. I’ve thought about that quite a lot since reading it. And while I don’t agree with the concept (it’s a bit too woo-woo for me) I do think that you’ve got to use an idea when it’s at its most vivid. So many times I’ve been driving or walking or in the shower and a little spark will ignite — it might be no good at all, of course, but if I don’t use it, try to put something down on the page, I’ll never know. All too soon the spotlight will fade and the idea will dull.

My nervous system has been on fire. That complex network that controls everything alight with fear and excitement and vivacity. All the worrying, hurtful and anger-inducing things that have been happening to me, alongside the intense joy and exhaustion that new life brings, have left me frayed at the edges. On high alert. So aware of every brilliant and awful thing. I’m so tuned into heartbreak and beauty. More than I’ve ever been. It’s a lot, and I love it. But I just need some time to know what to do with it.

So I keep finding those flickers, and little snatches of time, and putting them somewhere if I possibly can. Even if that means sitting in the front seat of a car that desperately needs a good clean (carrot cake crumbs adorn the base of the handbrake beside me). I need to go inside and hang the washing on the heated clothes horse. I need to make a mushroom bolognese that can go in the freezer for the week. I need to wrap presents and buy presents and I desperately need to write and read and soak it all in. This vivid life I love so much.

Here is your first installment of open tabs, my new series of cultural recommendations. We shall dive into essays, books, films, content creators, podcasts (etc) and, I hope, talk about them in the comments.

I listened to James Marriott’s interview on The Story twice. It’s one of those conversations so full of insight that you want to make sure you’ve absorbed every word. He asserts that we’re drifting into a post-literate society (also explored in his brilliant Substack essay). He isn’t simply mourning the decline of reading; he’s tracing a deeper cultural shift, from a world built on words to one shaped by our smartphones. Deep reading — the kind that stretches your attention and teaches you to sit with complexity — is being replaced by something faster, shallower, more reactive. He’s describing a transformation already well underway, and he makes you feel the weight of what’s at stake: not just the loss of books, but of the mental habits books can teach us — memory, reflection — and what that means for reason and knowledge.

Related: The Times and Sunday Times are embarking on a campaign to get the country reading. Have a look at their website — there are lots of ways to be involved. I love the pledge they’re encouraging people to make: to read for pleasure for 10 minutes everyday. “Decades of research shows that reading for fun can transform lives. It boosts children’s and adults’ mental health and has been found to be more important for a child’s cognitive development between the ages of 10 and 16 than their parents’ level of education.” I, for one, pledge to read to myself and read to my baby. It’s an easy one to make, despite how much time I waste clicking onto apps seemingly at random on my phone. Books make life feel more manageable.

This story by Harriet Armstrong — author of To Rest Our Minds and Bodies — is short and brilliant. It’s hard to categorize. I feel like she could have plucked it from my brain (and I wish I had/could have written it). It’s about wanting to connect, to ask for comfort.

Amy & Fox: a Youtube channel with an abundance of simple cosiness. Amy lives in a caravan on the Isle of Skye with her little dog and her husband. She is from the north east and has that very particular north easterly charm of managing to be sincere without too much sickly sincerity. A few years ago they simplified their life and went after financial freedom (certainly as much as one can hope for in our capitalist dystopia), more time outside, and the introvert’s dream: the Scottish Highlands. I find myself seeking out Youtube content from people who have very purposefully chosen to change their life in search of freedom. I guess that’s what I want to do, and I need some inspiration and focus to do it.

Race Across the World is one of T and my favourite shows to curl up in front of on a rainy weeknight. We look forward to Thursdays as if they hold the key to our contentment. And maybe they do. The current series, the celebrity edition, is every bit as heartwarming and awe-inspiring as the normies. As someone with an acute fear of flying, I may well never see the countries they visit beyond my television screen. Which I suppose makes the show’s intimacy all the more special. You’re not just shown glossy highlights or an old town through a historian’s lens (don’t get me wrong, I also like those shows) — you’re with them on 24-hour bus rides, sharing home-cooked meals with families in rural Panama, seeing the world from the backpackers-eye-view. And — at the risk of using the biggest cliché of all — their journey isn’t only physical. By the end, you can see something shift in them: they know themselves better, they feel stronger, more capable, more open. It’s a beautiful thing to witness. (Dylan, from Big Boys, and his mum Jackie, are the absolute heart of this series. Watch it if only to see their gorgeous relationship).

I’ve been thinking a lot about this essay from The Care Gap — “The Office Men Made — And the Women It Ruined.” The writer describes being asked, again and again, to prove her reliability at work — not because she’s unreliable, but because motherhood is seen as a potential liability. The assumption lingers that women, especially mothers, are one sick child or elderly parent away from letting the team down. The essay reminds us that the modern office — its hours, hierarchies, expectations of constant availability — was designed by men who didn’t have to think about school pickups or emotional labour. That’s not a moral failing, it’s just the architecture we inherited. Care — invisible, unpaid, essential in our society — has been excluded from the way we design work. The fact that women/mothers often take that burden of care on, means that women are the ones bearing the brunt of this failing. “Women report that competence is questioned, that they’re mistaken for someone more junior, and that microaggressions are still pervasive. In 2024, the share of women reporting competence-based microaggressions jumped sharply again, evidence the “vibe shift” didn’t fix culture.”

I had no idea I was interested in the Berlin techno club scene, but the podcast Search Engine has shown me otherwise. I’m new to this series — where the host takes a listener’s question and investigates it with obsessive, journalistic rigour — I started listening a few days ago and I’m ready to get knee deep in their back catalogue. The aforementioned episode, about Berghain, the notoriously-hard-to-enter club in Berlin, was one of the best podcast episodes I’ve listened to. It starts with the question (posed by Chris and Dan): ‘Why Didn’t Chris and Dan Get Into Berghain?’ and it becomes a deeper meditation on belonging, boundary, and what it takes to be in. The episode investigates the cultural history — techno, Berlin, post-Wall liberation — that gives Berghain its mystique. Something about the way it’s reported (we love the This American Life cadence), and the techno music pulsing beneath the narrative, makes you feel like you’re standing outside the club yourself — waiting, hoping, wondering if you’ll get the yes.

There are other episodes I’ve loved — one on the swimming pool in Buckingham Palace for instance — and I know the show will pop up again on this list.

I hope you liked my first go at open tabs! It’s fun because I love consuming all this stuff and I love talking about it. Tell me what you are watching, reading, listening to. I’d love to know.

I’ve caught M’s cold. After a week of little sleep punctuated by hourly wakeups with a very sad and congested baby, I am feeling weary. I had this time scheduled in though — to get a coffee by myself with my laptop and my notebook, and write some words that have been percolating for days. One of the things that has changed since having a child, and I’m only just slightly getting to grips with this, is that my time is simply what it is. I cannot change it, I cannot pause to feel better, more in the mood, I cannot use time like it is mine to abuse. I must just take it. Make the best of it.

I’ve just finished reading Heart the Lover by Lily King, one of my favourite writers, and in it the narrator introduces the concept of ‘presentism’: the view that only the present exists. “It feels okay to just have this moment and nothing else… it feels vast, open, beautiful. Only this right here.” I like that idea. It helps me feel grounded while time seems to be slipping through my fingers.

Well-intentioned people keep telling me: you’ll never give this time back, your baby will only be this small once, enjoy it! And I’m trying, I’m really trying. Most of the time I’m succeeding. But life has also been really hard these past few months (nothing to do with M, actually) and there’s this part of me that is terrified of looking back and seeing only that: the negative. Rather than the vast, open, beautiful now.

While my baby has been ill this week, I’ve spent a lot of time lying next to her in bed, singing to her, feeding her, stroking her tummy until she falls asleep and her breathing calms. She stirs often and lets out a cry. Sometimes I need to feed her again and sometimes she just needs to know I’m there and she’ll settle and fall back to sleep. I was lying there one night, looking at her little face and her rosy cheeks, smelling her sweet musty head, worrying about something work-related. And I wanted to give myself a shake. A good talking to. These are very much the times when I needn’t let that other stuff in. That if I notice the vastness of these moments I won’t look back with sadness, I’ll remember that I was there and that though time was moving, fast, I let the important stuff — the singing to my child — be the big stuff.

I’ve always had this morbid fear of time passing. I think since my parents got ill and I realised we are all, in fact, mortal beings, I’ve been trying to cling onto the hours with a desperation I’ll probably always need therapy for. I was listening to a podcast this morning about the covid report (on how utterly incompetently our government dealt with the pandemic) and the journalist saying 2020 was five years ago felt like a personal attack. Ridiculous to think that it was five years ago. Ridiculous that my little niece is going to be six years old next month and she was born like, yesterday. Remember being a child and older relatives saying, ‘I remember when you were this big!’. I am that older relative. I am baffled by the passing of time, and I often feel scared and angry about it.

I didn’t quite realise that having a baby would be exposure therapy for a fear of time passing. But it is. M is four months old today and though it feels like I’ve known her forever, I cannot get my head around the fact that she is no longer a newborn whose tininess strangers remark upon. She is changing constantly and is a visual reminder of our march towards death every single day. Or at least, that’s how it feels when I’m my existential dread era. And alongside all the utter joy I’m feeling about being a mother to this perfect little human, I very much am in that era.

It’s been interesting, therefore, to read the novel On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle while having these thoughts and feelings. Apparently, Balle said of her inspiration for the novel (which will be a seven-part series in which the narrator gets stuck in the same day — a Danish Groundhog Day): “The thing that fascinated me most was the question: how can one day be so voluminous?” What a beautiful question to start from. And the book (I’ve only read vol 1 so far) asks it again and again in unexpected and nuanced ways. On the one hand (given everything I’ve written so far) an opportunity to live within one day again and again — no one getting older, time to read every book on your shelf — would sound like a dream. We don’t have to push too far, though, to see how quickly it would become a nightmare.

The loneliness in the novel is striking — the way she describes the growing distance between herself and her husband with each new 20th November she experiences. At first, she tells him every morning what has happened, so they can think on it together, but it turns out that telling him isn’t enough. The fact that they’re no longer on the same timeline becomes a crater between them, gaping wider each day.

Being in time, with everyone around us, the people we love – for good and for ill – is perhaps what binds us. There is simply nothing we can do aside from be here, in this moment. Together.

Well, quite a lot is changing in my life. 2025: the year of change. 2026 will, I hope, be something else entirely. Something calmer and more centering. But for now I am waking up every morning, drinking my coffee while my warm, sleepy baby sits on my legs and smiles at me, and furiously writing notes and making plans. I won’t (/can’t) go into too much detail but I am refocusing on what I set out to acheive exactly eight years ago this month: freedom to choose, and a life where my time is truly my own. Somewhere along the way I lost that a bit. But I won’t allow it to slide away from me anymore. A few years ago both of my parents nearly died within about eight months of each other, so ever since, I’ve never forgotten that time is our most precious commodity. But these past few months with M have totally solidified that truth.

I’m watching the (really fantastic) All Her Fault on Sky at the moment. M normally turns into a little ball of tired fury at dinnertime but last night she slept in her bouncy chair while T and I ate bowls of pasta and drank red wine and pressed play on the next episode. The show follows the disappearance of a five-year-old child, and it’s completely gripping. But almost more compelling is the story running beneath the mystery — one about gender roles, motherhood, and the relentless guilt a woman can feel when pulled between two things she holds dear: her child and her work. The ‘all her fault’ in the title speaks to the idea that no matter how hard she tries, a mother will never be able to do it right. In one scene, Sarah Snook collapses on the kitchen floor when she realises she’d snuck off to speak to a potential client at the very moment her son’s kidnapper might have made first contact. Snook is phenomenal (hi Shiv), and her despair hits you in the gut. And isn’t it just one of the cruelties of time — passing without our consent — that we might one day look back and think: why did I believe that was the important bit?

My time off with my baby is over, and I’m okay with that. But in this new time as I refocus my need for flexibility and work life balance I’m thinking and learning so much about how to actually live that grand idea out. I have lots of plans. For work, writing and my creative life. I want to hire a coach in 2026. I am going to write a lot more (on here, with my writing group, fiction, essays, in my journal). I want to make sure that I am not just one thing — because of course I’m not. None of us are. We contain multitudes. And as the years pass and we get that bit older, wiser and more sure of ourselves, we must embrace all those facets and find ways to honour them with our time and attention. For me that means pulling my laptop out while M naps beside me to reply to some emails, write a proposal or an essay. It means a Wednesday not feeling bad for not replying to emails and instead fully engaging with what M wants — namely, me staring at her and us smiling at each other for hours. It means going outside and smelling the air and feeling the light rain on my face before coming home and lighting a fire and opening a bottle of wine.

I’ve been leaning heavily on my community these past few months and though that doesn’t actually come that naturally to me it’s been revolutionary. The people around us can actually hold us up when we don’t feel we can hold ourselves — who knew!? T, obviously, and my parents. But also my writing group who will always respond to my Whatsapps in exactly the tone I need them to. My new mum friends who I see every week now and provide endless solidarity, care and hilarity. The friends who have known me for so many years, seen so many iterations of me and know why something might have upset me without me having to explain, and also know just how to reframe it so I can refocus and look forward with optimism. The women I don’t know too — who have podcasts and a whole back catalogue of writing about being a mother who knows herself and what she needs and how to build a life that works for her.

I’m excited. Feeling apprehensively positive. I can imagine myself a year from now thinking: okay yes, I can see why that happened, and I’m so much better off for it.

Because I love lists, here are a few I’ve been making:

Helpful stuff while going through change:

• Books — always.

• People to talk to who have been through something similar — examples of people thriving after something hard are hugely powerful.

• Batch cooked dinners in the freezer.

• Opening a bottle of wine on a Tuesday night and not feeling guilty (in fact feeling pretty great).

• Putting your phone in another room and engaging fully with what you’re doing — cuddling your baby, making a coffee just the way you like it, tidying the living room so you can properly relax, watching yet another episode of Married at First Sight.

• Perspective.

• Laughing — my friend came to stay last weekend and we laughed so much my tummy hurt and it was really great.

• Focusing on what comes next.

Podcasts I’m currently obsessed with / are keeping my eyes open and my mind engaged:

• Motherkind — so much good stuff about the reality of being a mother in a not-annoying/cliched way.

• Strong Message Here — Armando Iannucci on political language. The episodes with Stewart Lee are especially good.

• Guardian Today in Focus — they cover such a variety of news and, I think, do so in a truly balanced way. Also the production value is second to none.

• The Rest is Entertainment — though Richard and Marina annoy me a lot of the time (see, for instance: Richard Osman’s advice to authors). I do love them and this is the only podcast (since The High Low) I have listened to every single episode of.

• Question Everything — Brian Reed reexamining the role of journalism.

• Ill Advised with Bill Nighy

• Not Too Busy To Write — Penny Wincer does warm, in depth interviews with interesting writers. They talk about their books and their writing life (and the challenges therein).

• BBC Shadowlands - Anatomy of a Cancellation — a recent listen, about what happened to Kate Clanchy when critics starting calling her book racist and ableist. It’s a nuanced and balanced look at an incredibly polarised argument. It displays everything that was/is wrong with social media, especially Twitter. I don’t think Clanchy comes across very well in the podcast — she doesn’t seem to have learned much from the ordeal. But it is genuinely awful to hear the impact such a public and unpleasant debate has had on the lives of her and her critics.

Plans for my Substack:

• A motherhood and work series — to be launched in a few weeks, covering: flexible working and what people/businesses are still not getting; an interview with my mother; the cult of productivity/what real productivity looks like; how much we need grandparents; much more.

• Lots of links and recs! We love a good rec. I watch a lot of TV and films, I read lots of books, listen to lots of podcasts, and I have plenty of opinions to go with them.

• Essays every other week. I’ve been filling my notes app with ideas for years.

Please do subscribe if you haven’t already! And comment. I’d love to chat.

Caroline Walker: A rare self-portrait … Me and Laurie, Six Weeks Old. I’m desperate to go and see this exhibition in person, but if I can’t make it to Wakefield or Chichester I will definitely be adding the book to my Christmas list!

My baby is nearly three months old and my time on maternity leave is coming to an end. It’s really hard. I’m sad to leave this little cocoon we’ve built.

I like to work — I always have — and while I admire anyone who can devote themselves completely to parenting, I don’t think I could, financial necessity or not. Still, these weeks with her have rearranged something. They’ve forced a new kind of reckoning — not just with time, but with what I value.

I sit now with the friends who’ve told me about renegotiating contracts, sending their babies to nursery full time and fighting for the right to leave work early enough to do the school run. It feels trite to say that my outlook has shifted. But of course it has. She’s top of my list, every single day.

This isn’t simple, though. It’s certainly not a case of throwing it all in and becoming a trad-wife. I don’t want to be with her all the time — now, for instance, I’m on my own, writing this. Answering that creative tug to put words on a page. I suppose what I want is everything. Which is to say, I want the impossible.

The Second Wave feminists told us women could do what men do, but then came the backlash, when it turned out we were doing what men do and what women have always done. The modern idea — a better one — is that men and women should both make work and home fit together. That, for instance, if a man leaves work to pick his kids up from school, a woman can do the same without fear of judgement. What I’m realising though is that in some places, the old way of thinking still persists. Somehow, the expectation remains: work like you don’t have children, parent like you don’t have a job.

The idea of ‘having it all’ is an unrealistic, class-bound myth that places pressure on individuals (mostly women) instead of challenging systemic barriers — workplace inequality, childcare shortages, the cult of productivity. It collapses under the weight of reality — and yet, the impulse behind it, to integrate love, work, and purpose, is valid.

If success at work is more visible than success at home, perhaps the problem isn’t our ambition, but what we’re taught to value. The last three months have been both blissful and brutal. I’ve never felt such love, or such doubt. I feel afraid of being away from her for too many hours of the week — what a waste that seems. But I’m also afraid of not being able to choose the things I used to choose.

In A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes: “When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them.” The maddening paradox.

Though breastfeeding has been, frankly, mostly horrible, I have this inexplicable urge to keep going. Providing my baby with the comfort she craves when the bottle only offers food. I’d always said I’d switch to formula if it became too hard — but how things have changed. Now I know her. I can feel her tiny body relax in my arms when seconds earlier she was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe.

Maybe it’s less about balance, which implies stillness, and more about movement — a constant tilting between need and desire. The world still expects mothers to divide themselves neatly, to prove that care doesn’t diminish ambition and that ambition doesn’t compromise love.

But what I’m leaning into — right now, and in the weeks and months to come — is the blur. The messy middle where both things live at once. Motherhood hasn’t erased my ambition; it’s made it sharper, more purposeful. It’s 2025. We’ve lived through a pandemic for goodness sake, and learned that people can, in fact, be trusted to work from home (who knew?). Maybe the answer isn’t in balance, or perfection, or the myth of ‘having it all.’ Maybe it’s just this: letting ambition and care coexist. Without shame. Without apology.

I’d love to hear your recommendations for books and writing about this subject. Stuff that’s nuanced and knotty. As with everything in my life, I am searching for the women who have come before me. For their wisdom.

I’m out and I’m alone! People say that it’s like your heart is living outside your body and it is, in a way, but it’s also like when you leave the best party ever to go home and have a long sleep in your own bed. There’s a woman with a pram ordering at the counter and I feel a lurch of guilt. It quickly dissipates though — if the baby were here, I’d be staring at her, joggling her, feeding her, talking to her in my new mum-voice that was previously reserved only for Jeremy (the cat). It’s nice to be at my laptop writing, nibbling on a pistachio cannoli and sipping a cappuccino.

I’m five and a half weeks postpartum. It’s sped by. Of course it has. Painful boobs, painful back, her soft skin and so, so much love, just floating on the wind. I’ve been collecting a series of thoughts and reflections on the Notes app since she was born — an experience that was awful and beautiful in (literally) equal measure (I’ll try to write about it at some point, if only for the sake of catharsis). The reflections have veered from the trivial and mundane to me trying to make sense of what seems to be the most insane (yet everyday) thing a person can experience. Like, science fiction levels of unbelievable. How did my body make her spine and her ear canal? And what is love?

When she was born she wasn’t breathing. She’d got stuck and the surgeon couldn’t get her out by himself — he told me afterwards his hand had completely cramped up. I’m so glad that’s not my job. I was pretty out of it. The anxiety, drugs and adrenaline made me so sleepy. T saw it all though — her floppy body. He’s told me about it and I do remember seeing her little leg in the air after she’s started to wriggle around (after an initial scare she was totally fine), but I can’t believe that was my girl there. Looking back.

We’re watching Pointless every day at 5.15. Alexander Armstrong asking Sharon from Middlesex about her hobbies.

Photos are not a patch on the real thing. It’s impossible to show through a photo that her toes are actual heaven.

I don’t think the feeling of love is immediate. Like, there was love there immediately. But I mean the level of love I now feel. Will that keep growing until I die? Maybe it is what will kill me.

I’ve realised I’m squeamish about the term breastfeeding. I do all I can to avoid saying it. Even when talking to a lactation consultant. I didn’t realise how much it could hurt or how much I’d want to keep doing it despite the fact that I have to bite down on something to stop myself from screaming when she latches on.

I might hit the next well-meaning BF ‘expert’ who shows me on a crochet boob that the baby should be positioned ‘nose to nipple’ and that you want the nipple to hit the hard pallet at the back of the mouth, not the soft pallet at the front, and that she’s probably not getting enough breast tissue into her mouth and that’s why it hurts. Like, no shit. But if she won’t open her tiny mouth wide enough and I’ve been trying for an hour at 3am to get the latch right, in the end I might just shove it in and scream into my pillow.

A woman at the weigh-in clinic last week told me ‘it shouldn’t be hurting at this point’. Cool.

Apart from when I’m feeding her, I feel happier than I ever have.

My heart is breaking with every minute that passes because I feel like I’m losing who she was.

I can’t wait to find out who she will be.

I’m rewatching Schitt’s Creek from the beginning. Elite decision.

People are like make sure you don’t fall asleep while breastfeeding! I’ve never fallen asleep while having pins stuck into my nipples though so I think I’ll be fine.

BF can feel horribly lonely because the person experiencing it with you can’t speak.

Despite feeling like everything has changed I do feel exactly the same as before. I like all the same things and want to do all the same things. I just also have something else I really like — being with my daughter. She’s great and I shouldn’t have worried about getting time to read because: audiobooks.

We wanted to test out going away for a night and have a taste of before-baby time, with the baby. We had a lovely time and mostly felt very capable — sitting out in the pub garden with rosè, chips and burrata — but that evening we lay the baby on the hotel room bed and squirted saline solution up her nose before sucking mucus out of it with a contraption called a ‘snot sucker’, because she was congested and we were parents now.

It’s hard to feel creatively inspired and too tired to do anything with it.

I found pregnancy really hard. But now I know her, everything makes sense.

1am diary

Have I ever been this persistently uncomfortable? I doubt it. My body itches. But from the inside. When I turn onto one side the baby kicks in the direction of gravity—somehow nauseating, the way her legs or arms try to escape my side body. Kick kick kicking at the mattress below.

My stomach has been cramping all day and I wonder if my waters will break. I’m scared out of my mind but I’m so damn uncomfortable I’m also like let’s fucking do this. Let’s just get this done so that my body can be my own again. Every time I shift position my stomach tightens and pulls. The skin so taught and the muscles below so overwhelmed with baby and fluid. They surely cannot stretch much further.

On the edge of sleep and whack, my ribs get pummelled. I jerk into consciousness.

My legs won’t stop moving. So restless. So itchy. I get up and do some squats. I can’t get down more than a few centimetres. How must I look? Belly hanging from below my t-shirt. I go for my sixth wee of the hour.

The baby has hiccoughs now. A steady rhythmic pulse that happens a couple of times a day and at night feels especially irritating.

The laptop that had been playing Friends has run out of battery but the charging cable is in the other room. I want to kick my husband awake. Demand he go and get it. He would—but I don’t want him to be awake. I want to be alone in my misery.

We’ve spent more money than I care to admit on cooling devices in the last few weeks. Not unlike, I’m sure, the rest of the UK. A portable aircon unit that is as unsightly as it is loud, and a beautifully sleek, quiet fan that, when the temperature soars beyond 30 degrees, does little more than push the hot air into your face.

God, I’m so pregnant. 39 weeks tomorrow. A leaden beach ball is attached to my front. I finished work a week ago—only for three months, and realistically not even that because I work for myself. It felt stressful and strange. I’m scared of the inevitable pull between home and work. Of the areas of responsibility that will undoubtably be in conflict. Because of some slight complications (that now seem to be mostly unconcerning! Thank you specialist consultant who was very reassuring about my baby’s massive belly!) I have a date for my child to be sliced from my body. I want to spend this time of waiting watching Love Island and drinking iced coffees, and I will, but I will also be spending my time worrying existentially about the future, being a mother, being happy, being myself.

More on that at some point, as I allow those reflections to percolate and find form. For now though, I’m thinking about how to best romanticise this time—(#positivevibesonly)— and also how to accurately reflect it. To engage fully with and see the value in both. I write regularly in a journal and reading entries from a month ago, two months ago, four, is an exercise in witnessing the multitudes of a person’s emotional tableau. Perhaps especially a pregnant woman’s.

In a shocking display of middle class nesting—we’ve had our kitchen renovated. That’s easy to romanticise because it looks great now. I love the terracotta walls and chunky wooden work surfaces that will be impossible not to ruin with water marks and scratches. I can display my cookbooks finally, on the open shelves on one side of the galley kitchen. Bitter Honey and Ottolenghi alongside my prettiest crockery and the green glass bottles made to look like they’ve been collected from the bottom of the ocean but actually cost £20 at a gift shop in north Norfolk. It also meant: living with my parents for a month (god love ‘em but not ideal), financial stress, mess, chaos, anxiety.

An instagram friend posted a beautifully stylised carousel of photos from the past few weeks on the app. She is also more than 8 months pregnant and I think dealing with much the same as me in terms of physical discomfort, anxiety and overwhelm. Yet when I scrolled through her photos I felt a sense of calm—there she was in a pond with her protruding belly half dipped in the water, there was a book and a glass of iced coffee—a moment of stillness and rest—there was serenity in the captures. The way she presented this time of discomfort and heaviness lacked both of those experiences, and yet I felt its sincerity and authenticity regardless. Because of course it is both. My days right now are both. Last Saturday I used some spa vouchers I’d received for my birthday and went for a prenatal massage and a pedicure. It was heavenly—my sore back melting beneath the therapists fingers. My toes look lovely now too. Ready to be covered by hospital-issued compression socks.

I was put off having children for quite a long time by the negative rhetoric that surrounds it. The way parents tell you to ‘enjoy your lie-ins and impromptu trips to the cinema while they last!’ regardless of whether you’d ever expressed an interest in having children. Have a look at the parenting memoirs on sale in Waterstones—they’re not about how great being a parent is! (Granted, if they were, they would be very boring and self-congratulatory). Have you read Soldier Sailor? A devastatingly claustrophobic novel that could be prescribed as contraception.

Recently though I have been noticing a different narrative. Perhaps primarily coming from people choosing to have children a bit later who genuinely seem to see having a child as a case of adding to (their life) rather than taking from. Not only can it be extremely fun and joyful—a new friend to add to your friend group—but also something that can enhance other parts of life too. Work, creativity, a sense of self. A fear of mine has been losing myself in the process of having a child. I worry about the identity of ‘mother’ and how to navigate taking that on in a society that seems to both value that above and below everything else, in all the worst ways (the confusingness of that concept only perpetuating its insidiousness). I know I am naturally a nurturing person. I’m a homemaker, I love cleaning and cooking and creating a safe warm space for the people I love. I’m also an overbearing amazing mother to my cat Jeremy. But I am also a writer and a reader, interested in politics and reality TV and wine. I love going to gigs and staring at the sea and walking in the mountains. I have a lot of opinions, some of which I try to keep to myself.

When I go on Instagram or Youtube, I want to feel calm. So I’m seeking people who exude not an unrealistic state of perfection (that’s actually kind of the opposite of what I want to see) but people with a free, expansive perspective. Probably because I think I lack that. I was talking to my writing group friends this morning and I always find hearing about their lives and plans so galvanising. We are all in such different places (figuratively and literally: England, Spain, Italy). Yet we come together with so much shared feeling and ideas. They are travelling all over the world, concentrating on freelance businesses and writing short stories and novels. I know I’m not doing those things right now but I don’t feel distant from them either. I hope they don’t feel distant from me. I love that we are each making specific choices for specific times of out lives and I love how absolutely we know that that can all change at any moment. That we can shift and make another decision or change our perspective or priority and that it’s all open. We come together and talk about the issues and worries and heartbreaks we’re facing and though it’s all very different it’s also all the same.

This is a time of immense change but it is also not. I am about to change, but I will also be me, doing this new thing. I am not only excited to meet my child and find out who she is, I’m also excited to find out the ways in which I shift, expand and of course—stay exactly the same.

I have been feeling very anxious, these past few weeks. We had a holiday booked that involved getting on a plane and it was inconveniently scheduled within a particularly busy period at work. I wasn’t looking forward to it at all and, given it was going to cost quite a lot of money and, frankly, I don’t need extra stress in my life right now, we cancelled the trip. T was kind—because he’s a kind person—but he (and I) needed to do something… to get out of our house and routine and be somewhere that felt full of life. That made us feel full of life.

So we got the train from Oxford, where I had been working all day, to London St Pancras. Once in the station and with only minutes to spare, T ran to Shake Shack for burgers and I went to Marks & Spencer for snacks and drinks, and then we met at security. We got the Eurostar to Paris, stayed overnight in an airless Ibis near Gare du Nord, and then woke the following morning to find coffee and pastries before our next train which would leave Gare Du Lyon just before midday.

The boulangerie I wanted to go to, and that we got off the Metro a stop early to find, had closed early because they’d sold out. Swallowing my disappointment we instead ordered a croissant and a pain au chocolat at the more traditional place a few doors down and coffee from a hipster cafe across the road. Let me tell you, the disappointments continued. The pastry was a little dry and not nearly buttery enough. The coffee was luke warm and weak. I spoke (to T, on a bench) for a good three minutes about how we have been cursed with exemplary baked goods in the UK. You don’t need to go to Paris for a good croissant.

Never ones to cry over dry pastry though, we found a cafe with seats facing out into the busy Paris street ahead and ordered strong coffees which we sipped in the morning sun. (I then got another croissant at Pret in the station which was much better).

Arriving into Lyon Perrache, the train crosses the bridge on the south side of the city. For miles, you can see the arches and towers of Gothic and Renaissance French architecture. It reminds me of Paris—grand apartment blocks and cathedrals towering over the blue river and trees everywhere, little pockets of green and pink.

It was gone 2.30pm and we find a completely deserted Italian restaurant to have lunch. The chef has to be radioed to come back upstairs to cook our pizza. I drink blood orange juice and eat my half of the pizza—hot, crispy and incredibly cheesy. I have that wonderful first-day-of-holiday feeling. Full of expectation and just excited to be somewhere new, somewhere you’ve never seen before.

For the next four days we walked the historic streets — grand boulevards where you can find designer handbags, H&M and Zara, and tiny alleys that smell a little like weed and boast cool cafes and places to buy vintage Levis. One particularly sunny morning we found a boulangerie with lots of tables outside and we order coffee and pastries and sit for an hour exclusively talking about how lovely it is to be on holiday, to be sitting here in this moment.

The city has two rivers, the Saône and the Rhône. The ‘island’ in the middle is flat and full of shops, galleries and restaurants. On the west side is the old town — the centre of the French resistance in the Second World War — and you can ride the funicular railway to the top of the hill where the Basilica watches over the rest of Lyon and the views are phenomenal. Near to our Airbnb in the north, is Croix-Rousse, which also towers over the city and it’s almost impossible to squeeze yourself onto a train to, as the alternative walk is so steep and unappealing. We had dinner there one evening and ate some of the best food we ever have — plates of perfectly balanced fresh flavours: bright green peas with ricotta, hot crispy polenta fries and pillowy, buttery gnocchi. The food in Lyon is amazing. There are, like London, too much options. On another evening we went to an American Italian restaurant that had just opened a couple of weeks previously and I ate — and I know this is a huge claim — a pizza that had the best base I have ever experienced. Those charred air bubbles…

As is always the case when you find yourself abroad and on holiday with entire days to fill with whatever your heart desires, you start to dream about how you could implement more of the holiday vibes into your normal life. How you can more seamlessly merge the two states, instead of desperately waiting for a few weeks a year to actually relax and properly enjoy yourself. Inevitably within hours of arriving, we start looking online for houses in the French countryside (“it needs some work, and a pool, but it’s remarkably reasonable!”). One near a village with a great pastry shop and somewhere to have a glass of wine in the evening.

We’re all on a constant search for the good life. It’s incredibly important, to not just get through life, but to actively want and enjoy it. I feel like I manage that a lot of the time but recently I’ve been struggling more with feelings of overwhelm and dissatisfaction. Not with my current life exactly — I’m incredibly lucky to mostly really like my life — but a dissatisfaction with the Western, capitalist sensibility I find so deeply problematic. That constant hustle to stand out, make more money, show your worth. As if the kind of worth we’re talking about is anything other that a fiction. Based on how anyone with a bit more power than you makes you feel.

I have no answers but I am on my own personal path to finding contentment, stability and happiness. To working out how that looks for me and my family, in our life.

Taking these little trips to places that make you feel alive — like your eyes are open — are so nourishing. I will never stop believing in how necessary it is to take the time to remind yourself what is most important to you.

Finally — my croissant experience improved hugely as the trip progressed. I’m pleased to report that France is still making some outrageously good pastries.

In Oxford. The sun shining, the magnolias blossoming and my newly round, growing belly is aching as I walk the cobbled tourist-ridden streets. I’m here for the literary festival, but before arriving at the green room (think coffee pots, squishy sofas and writers eating sandwiches and slices of cake), I visit one of the best bakeries in the country. When I moved away from Edinburgh I thought I’d left exemplary baked goods behind, but now I have an office in Oxford and soft, gooey cinnamon buns are back on my menu.

Overwhelmed by Spring. Winter just goes on for so long, doesn’t it, so when Spring springs it is almost too delicious. Could cry with happiness.

Am constantly bone tired. Except when I have immense bursts of energy that prompt cleaning-based procrastination. I put on six washes this week. Loading the wet clean-smelling clothes onto my heated clothes horse is my favourite part of the laundry programme. I don’t feel like I’m sleeping very well at the moment but when I check my FitBit app in the morning it tells me I’ve been unconscious (on and off) for rarely less than 8 hours. I’m very uncomfortable though—this morning I woke at 7.30am with one restless leg, an aching shoulder and arm and general nausea that doesn’t know if it’s hunger. My phallic pregnancy pillow with special cooling-technology is always kicked out of the bed and on the floor by the morning. Once I’ve eaten a bowl of Fruit ‘n’ Fibre and done my NYT puzzles I feel better though.

Went to see a talk by the author of the novel I’m currently reading. She was brilliant, funny and—though irrelevant—very beautiful. She was in conversation with equally funny and interesting Jonathan Coe. Was very interested in what they both had to say about writing all characters with nuance and humanity, no matter whether you like or agree with them. If you don’t it is not interesting. I remember my friend giving me that note when I let her read a story I’d written about conservative Christians. After getting that note I put the story in a drawer and have done nothing with it. I suspect that says something about me and a lack of willingness to see the other side. Must think more on that.

Isn’t it awful listening to groups of female friends talking? I probably find it extra awful because I know me and my friends must sound exactly the same and elicit similar reactions of irritation. It’s annoying when it’s inane conversation (babies, mutual friends, Married at First Sight), but it’s even more annoying when the subject is heavy or *quote unquote* important. If you don’t have the conversational gravitas of a The Rest Is… podcast host then shh.

Suspect I might have an inflated view of my own conversational skill. Often after a particularly wine fuelled dinner I consider starting a podcast.

It’s Mother’s Day and I’m reminded that I’d promised myself I’d work on an essay I’m writing about my mother, her mother, me, and I guess now—my daughter. Finding it increasingly hard to gather the brain power needed to interrogate and not just lie comatose on the sofa in front of Below Deck. I will buy my mum flowers on my way home, from the nice shop in the covered market.

It’s hard to write when you’re happy, depressed, anxious, busy, tired, energised, hungry. It’s hard whatever, to make the time. When I first discovered I was pregnant I was shocked and happy. Then very quickly I was deeply depressed and anxious. Then I felt okay. And now I feel very excited and very scared.

Sat down today today to write a bit because when I read and write I feel the most like me I can, except maybe when I’m drinking a glass of Picpoul and laughing so much I get a tummy ache. Spring is here—I’m going to France next week for a few days and the weather forecast looks *chefs kiss*. Life is good.

There’ll be more soon. These gorgeous blue skies and the tulips opening up in my garden are making me feel excited to create.