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Patrick staggered into an estate agent in an unfamiliar part of town; “Do you want to see a desperate man? I am that desperate man. “ he said, pointing to his chest.

“Show me anything”.

Patrick’s wife, Lynne, was just weeks away from birth. The two and a half of them - plus a toddler - were living in a cramped basement flat in West Ken. And that is where they were destined to stay. Unless, that is, they found somewhere bigger. And fast.

Patrick hopped into the estate agent’s car and drove. They went to every single property on the books. Nothing. There was nothing. In the passenger seat, a demoralised Patrick allowed his head to sink, as they returned to the office. He was about to say his thank-yous, goodbyes and leave.

“Oh wait, hang on. This is just about to come on. Um… A house on Kew Green? The owner’s just sending over the paperwork.”

Patrick had never been to Kew. Patrick had no idea where that even was. And only a vague recollection of the name from the famous botanical gardens. But Lynne and Patrick were no gardeners. They had a stone yard outside the flat.

“Great! Yes. Where’s that? Take me. ”

And that is how, thirty years ago, Patrick and Lynne came to view 67 Kew Green.

Across the warren of Regency rooms that had once housed royal staff, guards and high ranking members of the court, a dazed couple looked north, back towards the river over a long, thin stretch of wilderness. An old boy would be coming with the house. He’d tend to the garden, the agent said. But first they’d have to pass the interview…

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All parenting is hard. Single parenting IS different. It may seem obvious, but as the Ted Lasso actress Hannah Waddingham says; “it’s not the same as two parents… but I think people forget it.”

A great friend in a strong marriage took my hand awhile back and said she had no idea. Her husband had been away for awhile on a work trip in a different timezone. As such, he was missing much of their lives back home. The domesticities didn’t hit in the same way over Whatsapp. And who would she share a glass of wind-down wine with once the kids had gone to bed? She loves food and is a phenomenal cook. Who’d she eat with? Despite two brilliant kids in the house, without her other half, she felt…alone. She asked me what I do in my evenings. I shrugged. I guess.. I didn’t have them?I’d stopped eating dinner five years ago. Bedtimes, bath times and homework take twice as long when you have to do them all in series and not in parallel. There is no one doing the washing up or chopping carrots whilst you’re doing the bath. No one is running you a bath or taking out the dog. Having to leave one kid unsupervised to focus on the other invariably means the former gets into some kind of trouble, and then some kind of UN style peace deal involving high intensity negotiations and dirty bargaining would ensue. Drama, tears, supplicatory snacks and a whole load more things to tidy up later. And this would be happening twice a night, every night, as each child got their time in the sun and revelled in the dark side of the moon. By the time I’m normally done, the kitchen cleaned up, the washing on, reading done, homework in and the schoolbags repacked for the morning, laptop shut it was always closing in on 10pm. Maybe later. I might read a bit. Reply to my messages. But I’m usually so exhausted most nights I fall asleep in my daughter’s single bed by 9. She looked at me in horror. “Call me.” she said. “Call me whenever you’re feeling lonely.”

I’ve never called. Not because her gesture was not genuine or well-intentioned. But because being a single parent is fundamentally, structurally, psychologically, financially, socially, emotionally not the same as when you’re on your own with the kids and your partner is away. I genuinely don’t have the time or space to be lonely. Or call. There is me-time. But it’s between 5 and 7am. I’ve always been a morning person and a little solitary by inclination; I relish in the dawn chorus and the quiet rebellion of these stolen hours.

Here’s what it’s really like. Here’s what I didn’t know about being a single parent.

In moments of domestic dislocation for couples with kids, you can always Facetime, send a text or catch up over the weekend. It may be disjointed or delayed, but there’s somewhere for the information you are holding, to go. Jack’s losing his stammer. Max still isn’t dry and what if he’s bullied when he starts school in September? Elodie reduced me to tears today because she sang her heart out in the school assembly. Just six months ago, do you remember she was raking her thighs with the point of a compass? I caught Kate reading, finally, thank god. They couldn’t find a viable vein for Ryan’s IV and they tried both wrists and feet and he was screaming, writhing in sweat and wet himself on my lap. I held him down for the nurses and I sobbed into his back so he wouldn’t see. Could Bobbie be autistic? Rahul walked today. Charlotte looked terrified when I yelled at her in the car. I feel like I’m failing her but I just can’t cope. Lucy’s hiding her food. Ella told me she wants to transition. Noah’s getting teased because you work as a binman. I need more help.

You can store it up, write it down & discuss all this, if you choose, with your partner; which secondary school is best? is she being cyber bullied? what’s our policy at home on screens? On social media? How is the ongoing row about your parents affecting the kids? Can we bribe our son to revise for his exams? I feel awful for missing Isabella’s first ballet recital because work overran. Again. But if I don’t pick up the extra shifts, how will we keep paying for Granddad’s carer? We’re going to have to come up with a different solution for Wednesdays after school because Granny keeps repeating herself and Ella said she burnt through the saucepans on the stove. Is our child happy? Have we done enough?

The uncomfortable truth is no one cares about your children the way you do. Not their grandparents. Not their godparents. Not your mates. No one is interested to the point where it changes their day.

When you lose your co-parent, through relationship break-down or bereavement, nothing can prepare you for the sudden and total isolation in this venture. The isolation and the crushing sense of responsibility for a life you’ve just woken up to realising is entirely dependent on you. How you act. What you say. What you don’t say. How you respond. How you manage the separation between dealing with your own pain, sorrow and confusion and the space you hold for them to manage their own, without judgement or fear of repercussion. Technically, these things aren’t new. But the fig leaf of a partner, however hypothetical in reality, alters the sense of security completely.

It’s so hard. So hard to put your feelings to the side and say “I’m going to prioritise the well-being of my kid”. You know you can’t show them how upset you are. You know how important it is that they see a good example. Because you have to lead by example. You are the example. And they are the ticker tape recording every bum note, every outburst, every time you retreat into your phone to escape this new, bewildering reality.

Every single parent I know cries when they clear out their child’s cupboards. This is normal. You feel the passing of time so much more acutely when you are on your own, parenting. Buying the clothes online after bedtime on your own. Dressing them alone. Washing them alone. Hanging them back up alone. Taking them out of the wardrobe like it was only a week ago you bought them and donating them alone. The now-too-small anorak to go to charity they wore all week on the holiday that didn’t go to plan. How you couldn’t carry all the suitcases by yourself, push the trolley, have the boarding passes ready, and still have a free hand spare and outstretched to hold a hand. So they didn’t get lost. So they did get lost. The brutal confrontation of your own declining fertility and closing of the window for a different kind of parenting experience. No single parent holds back babygros and hand knitted cardigans, “just in case”. You don’t romanticise the idea that there might be another baby in your life. Another invested adult. The question is only how long you hover over each item, feeling sorry for yourself. Its better to do this quickly and minimise the moping. It’s bin or sell or give away. Breaking up the oversized Barbie dolls house you bought one Christmas to try to make up for not being able to offer them a bigger home. And remembering the hours they played with it without you as you wheeled and dealed on conference calls trying to earn money for the two of you. The car seat they’ve silently outgrown whilst you drove around in the front, disconnected and desperate for direction. Things have a habit of staring back at you. In my experience it’s better to have as few as possible. What they really need is you. Not proxies for your attentiveness.

Other things are harder to deal with. How do you explain to blinking, uncomprehending eyes why they’re being taken away, in front of the public audience of your ex hovering in the doorway and ready to pounce on your every word? How do you manage your own distress when they cling to you screaming and don’t want to be left in this other home? How you cry in the car afterwards. And how they come back in clothes you don’t recognise and foreign vocabulary from those times away; making memories with your ex in a parallel universe that you have no sight of. The influence of other adults, the new partners, that you cannot choose or shield your child from. The unexplained cuts and bruises, burns and stories when they return that don’t quite make sense but have you terrified. The friends they make on the street where you don’t live. Christmas Day without them. Feeling like a guest at their own party. How redundant you can feel as they hit milestones that you didn’t witness. How empty your new home feels without them. At these times I remind myself that this is normal. As kids grow up you stop being the centre of their universe. Their peers matter more. If you’re lucky, the opinion of their teachers. Their speech reflects their interests, their area and their company. Teenagers are often unrecognisable from the ten year olds and five year olds they once were. Empty nesting happens to every parent. For you, it’s just happening earlier and by degrees. And perhaps that’s a blessing.

You never have a kid, not to wake up to them. You never have a kid not to see the look of triumph of their little face when they first manage to ride a bike without stabilisers. You never have a kid imagining they’ll never get to know their father.

It’s a hell of a lot. A hell of a lot.

The bravest people I know are the women who actively choose single parenthood. Those who didn’t find the right partner and walk alone down the road of sperm donation, surrogacy, or adoption, with their eyes wide open. How lucky could you be to be the child of such a woman? The woman who chose you, regardless. The mothers who built their independent lives around scaffolding yours. Truly, you are blessed, I think, to have such a woman in your corner.

And so the majority, the two parent families, have no idea just how different it is to be us. No clue what it is really like to be in the one in four families with children in the UK who are held together by one adult. I know I hadn’t.

Although the vast majority, between 84-90%, of single parent households in Britain are headed by women, feeling atypical and being less than is not unique to single mothers.

I’ve held a friend in my arms, weeping; trapped by circumstance and a legal order into roles he never wanted to play; part-time father, full time funnyman and 24/7 provider for two households. He’s always there with a silly face, a great story, an excursion planned and a constant stream of activity. Swinging ad infinitum from play date to play date like a monkey on vines in a bid to distract his little one from realising in the stillness she is an only child to divorced parents. On the outside he couldn’t look more successful nor doting. Privately he felt a total failure. The sheer energy it took to retain the mask for his child on the weekend and another for colleagues, clients and investors Monday to Friday robbed him of the power of speech and all expression come every Sunday afternoon. It was heartbreaking. And a good reminder of the shadow side of every single mother’s story. That there is frequently single fatherhood too.

Even though my ex very quickly remarried and had more children, it is not lost on me that he shares a room with my children when they go on holiday, whilst she takes another in the hotel for her own. Blended families often exhibit their own form of loneliness for the parent straddling both sets of children.

Men are not feelingless. Fathers are not feelingless. Suicide is the single biggest killer of men under 50 in this country. The rapper and single Dad Professor Green opened up about his own experience of feeling without a compass or a guide recently. “It’s because we [men] don’t know how to tend.” Tend to their children. But perhaps more importantly, tend to themselves in the absence of being tended to by another.

As with many of the harder roads we travel, the rewards, when they come, are all the sweeter for the struggle and steeped in gratitude for the here and now.

Motherhood was once a mantle I was uncomfortable wearing. I didn’t know if I had it in me. And, in my hesitation and underconfidence, I was sidelined. I was judged and found wanting. I know many men feel the same way. They are made to feel, as I did, a gross incompetence and inconvenience within the family unit. The great irony, of course, of relationship breakdown when there are children involved, is that in many cases the parent made to feel inferior will at some point have 100% of the responsibility for the child, during the x% of time they have them over the course of any given week, month or year. And in that unexpected petri dish of sole care, wonderful, galvanising, life changing things can happen.

I would never have the depth of relationship I have with either of my children if I hadn’t been a single parent. It is the only dynamic we know. It is honest, close, warm, responsive and fun. It is also flexible enough for all of us to f*ck up and still remain within the circle. It is intentional and direct, because it has to be. There will never be a time where we become estranged. It is a physical impossibility for any of us to be remote or absent for long. There isn’t the room. Structurally, we cannot be anything BUT close. We know immediately when something is up. We address it. We beat as one.

There is a bond that is so particular to families that are raised by single parents. If this is you, take heart. They will be your strength and shield, as you are their’s, and they are eachother’s. It is timeless and will outlive you.

Within a relationship, parenting can take a backseat, as parents play out the melodrama and sometimes tedium of marriage. It’s amazing how much you take time for granted, within a marriage. As though there is time for sulking. Time for shirking. Time to act like a child. When you’re conducting this great life experiment with someone else, you can pick and choose elements of your role as parent and provider if you know or assume someone else is there willing or able to pick up what you’re not so keen on. You can lean into your strengths and avoid working on your weaknesses.

As a single parent, if, like Professor Green, you feel you don’t know how to tend, and are in way over your head, you have no choice but to learn. And learn fast. You have to figure all the sh*t out. Most especially the stuff you’ve been running from.

Nothing makes you sober up faster than parenting solo. Nothing forces you to come to terms quicker with your own time. Your own values. Mortality. Health. The risks to your own happiness and security. And how those risks might endanger the safety and security of your family. You will become more resourceful. You will get quicker and more adept at turning a challenge into an opportunity. Or an apron into a cape.

In almost all cases, people emerge with a strength and ingenuity they never knew they had, regardless of the circumstances in which they started. What an unbelievable gift that newfound knowledge is. How incredibly freeing.

You will be better for becoming a single parent. You may not be richer but you will be more financially literate. You will be better organised. You may not have an obvious place to dump a blow-by-blow account of your own day but you will become more empathic. You will hold space better for your friends. For your family. You may be more accepting of the limitations of your own upbringing. You will be more astute about who you allow around you and your children. You will be more intentional and proactive about selecting role models. You will create a real and diversified network of support for you and your family. And by being more aware of being a role model yourself, you create community leaders of the future.

It is your children who see when someone needs a hug or a word of encouragement. It is your children who’ll have the emotional fluency to connect to the new kid who feels different. Your kid who discovers two seemingly inconsistent things can both be true. Your kid who moves from either/or to an and/and way of thinking. Your kid who can create something from nothing, inspire magic in others and weave a network around them. It is your kid who, as an adult, has an exceptionally close bond with their siblings or their cousins. It is your kid who has seen that every problem is fixable and that every situation has a season. Because they saw you work it out. Without a playbook. Without a backstop. And holding on to the future lightly enough to let it breathe.

If the family moves to a more open and broader place, that’s all, as a parent you can do. Single or otherwise.

Let me leave you with this.

Legacy

From A Grown Son on the Passing Of His Dad:

How do you want to live?

How do you want to live?

My Dad lived exactly how he wanted to live.

His days consisted of conversations. Friends. Family. Music. Laughter. Cooking. Walking. Swimming. A life prioritising joy. A life subsisting on silliness, whilst finding the depth in the mundane. A life prioritising what nurtured his soul. My Dad lived exactly how he wanted to live. My Dad never defined himself. My Dad, more importantly, never defined himself to himself. This lack of definition meant he followed his nose through his life stages. We’ve been looking back with rose tinted glasses, giving him the benefit of the doubt, like he had any idea what he was doing. That man openly admitted he was stumbling through mismatched opportunities. He had no idea what he was doing at any point. Yet what he made clear to us is that you don’t need to know what you’re doing at every step of the way. You just need to keep searching.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself. Dad lived a life figuring out how to play like himself. Music is the conversation between the internal and the ephemeral. And Dad was having this conversation his entire life. Sometimes he shared it with you. Sometimes it was just for him. But he was always interested in letting people in to influence his thinking. That’s why he hosted parties. Played music. He prioritised the ephemeral, and taught us that everything is fleeting.

If you asked Dad how his day was, he’d tell you about someone he’d spoken to that day. Over time, Dad found he really didn’t need much to be happy. He lived in the present tense. He prioritised his way of living. He wanted to make sure he was there for us fully and presently. But he also wanted to squeeze a swim in or a walk or a quick blast on the saxophone.

In the last years he had to slowly say goodbye to a lot of these foundations of himself. Albert Murray wrote; “Jazz is an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty. Of improvisation in the face of challenge.”

It is grace under pressure, creativity in an emergency, continuity in the face of disjuncture. It is on the break that you are required to improvise, to do your thing, to establish your identity, to write your signature on the epidermis of actuality.

It means you acknowledge that life is a low down, dirty shame. You confront that fact with perseverance. With humour. And above all, with elegance. It’s not about being a victim. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Dad had cancer for two years. We did not hear him complain once. He accepted the diagnosis. He accepted the risks. He accepted the decline. Time became this precious necessity that kept running through our hands. This is my biggest test, he’d say. “I’ve got to find the humour in it.”

Dad deflated serious topics with humour, but never put them down. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t take things seriously. The opposite. He had a spirit about things that would take away your worry. Every day, somehow, he relieved mine.

Lately he went quiet. He was figuring out how to have a good death. We often don’t get a choice about how and when we die, but we are all hurtling towards the same place.

How we live is how we die. And his death completely reflected his life. Open and honest. Kind and warm. Family focused. Some people’s grief is like lightning. Fast and sudden and loud. Ours was like thunder. It had been rolling in for the last two years. We knew what was coming. But that didn’t make it any easier. It does mean though, that we talked. A lot.

Often, the only way we can talk about grief is with heaviness. But I have found my grief looks a lot like him. Warm, joyous, comforting, humourful. I’m finding him whenever the sun pops out. It can take the shape of Ray Charles’ voice. Or simply the rebellion of laughing at the wrong time.

To feel joy in these moments is not wrong. It’s the point.

What else did this man do with his entire life if not to ensure that we learned how to have a good giggle into the abyss.

At the end, we had to go out to get milk. And we were standing in the supermarket, crying. And looking at the expiry dates on the cartons I thought, the milk gets more days than Dad.

We bundled him up. And we surrounded him with love. We didn’t leave his side. He could only really be compared to someone giving birth. We were all so attached to him. Nursing him. There was such cohesion and closure to the ending. Such intimacy. He felt strong enough to let go with us. What a privilege. What an honour. What a gift.

Life flows on in you, and without you.

So I’ll ask you again. How do you want to live?

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How terribly unfeminine, unsavoury and un-British to admit the truth; I am deeply, deeply ambitious. To my bones, ambitious.

I was an ambitious teenager. And before that, an ambitious kid.

I possess a frighteningly zealous drive to learn, to improve, to grow, to combine ideas and people to enact change, to succeed. Always have done. And I will not stop until I reach where I’m headed. Except that’s never the end of it. I don’t sit back and relax; I’ve already worked out the next set of goals to strive towards. The next project. The next venture. The next Known Unknown to explore. The frontiers are always expanding. And the truth is, that is my happy place, right on the edge of what’s possible, knowable, and jumping into the void of what lies beyond.

And I hope to God that never changes. I hope and pray I never learn to relax by a pool.

I am propelled also by a steely self-belief. Equally unpalatable. I have no idea where it comes from. I didn’t have effusive, or helicopter parents. If anything, the opposite. Whatever good came my way was a mixture of going after it hard, a lack of an audience and a bit of luck. But from where I stand and have always stood, anything is possible.

I’m sick to death of successful people on LinkedIn wanging on about their Imposter Syndrome. If as many people suffered the chronic psychological experience of crippling self-doubt as they claimed, nothing would ever get done. Unless every single one of them was a masochist hell-bent on their own pain. Which is statistically unlikely. Which leads me to the conclusion that at least 51% of those claims, therefore, should be dismissed as no more than irritating self-promotion rooted in faux vulnerability. It is a pathology of our own making. We wouldn’t even have the phrase if we didn’t have social media feeds on which to boast about it.

I’ve always been of the mindset that someone needs to be in the England first 11. Someone needs to run a country. Broker a peace deal. Cure neurodegenerative diseases. Eradicate cancer. Someone needs to find a solution to climate change. Be a brilliant writer. A fantastic artist. These people are not magical. They’re just people. So why couldn’t that be you? Why couldn’t that be me? And that is what I will continue to teach my kids. Go after it. Why not?

I genuinely believe ambition is the best thing I’ve got going for me. Not what’s on my CV. Not my contacts. If I make any positive mark at all on this world, it’ll be because I was determined to not stop until I’d done it. And then some.

But, out of my own mouth as a woman, what does that naked ambition make me? A social pariah? A narcissist? Unrelatable? Unmarketable? Unmanageable? At the very least, certainly not a “woman’s woman”.

But why should ambition be a dirty word when it comes from the mouth of a woman?

See? The scorn. The judgement. The double standard?

Our collective view of ambition is both a dim and an overwhelmingly male one. It focuses not on the exciting kinetic energy of the process, a sort of psychological nuclear fusion, but on the acquisitive nature of the reward. Under the male gaze, the definition of ambition is the pursuit of success, power, and wealth. As such, when we are asked to imagine an ambitious person; a surgeon, perhaps, there’s a man behind the mask. Likewise, the billionaire. The politician. The CEO.

Those that strive and achieve are, men?

Overtly ambitious men are lauded for their genius and held up as heroes and role models. Yet powerful men are rarely powerful alone. Management teams, PAs and wives underpin that personal ambition to make individual success possible. There is a small army of people below the visible tip of power, influence and success.

Someone else remembered the appointments and the anniversaries. Someone packed the school lunches. Someone knew what was in the fridge and which child needed new school shoes. Someone else changed the sheets on the bed, took a reading on the electricity meter and switched suppliers, and still remembered to contact the council about the overflowing bins. Someone bought and wrapped the birthday presents and paid the subs for football training on a Saturday. Someone wrote the thank you cards and sent flowers round to those who needed a boost. Someone updated the schedule and went over the press release. Someone wrote the speech and rehearsed the talking points in the back of the cab on the way to the radio interview. Someone ran the data again and spotted an opportunity and pitched it to their boss. How many times was that “someone” a woman, as you were reading?

That labour rarely makes it into the autobiographies. Which, by the way, are also historically overwhelmingly male.

And yet the most publicly powerful women I know are doing a lot of this already and more. Those that outsource where they must are still carrying the mental load of being Project Manager extraordinaire and Chief Accountant to the team’s enterprise.

That takes personal ambition on a colossal scale.

Yet ambitious women rarely talk about ambition as a positive personality trait. Or even at all. They’ll instead deflect and talk about infrastructure. They’ll put any success down to after-school clubs and after-care, the godsend of a soul who cleans the house, the grandparents who step in, the partner who takes the unexpected call from the school and absorbs the disruption to workflow most weeks, and every half term and school holiday of having a life beyond the laptop.

Somehow, in this world of emancipation, we’ve concluded that female success is only palatable if at every turn it is divorced from the personal ambition that must sit at its core.

A convenient lie of “the village” appears to be the only way to reassure the wider world that powerful, successful women are indeed also loving partners, emotionally available humans, and attentive parents who also happen to have pantries full of granola, seeds and nuts decanted into mason jars. These women just about qualify as women’s women. But in the narrow category of willowy, wealthy blondes who worship at the altar of Goop.

Yet I’ve met plenty, through work but also life outside of boardrooms, who are secretly run ragged with disproportionately little support for what they are holding together let alone trying to achieve. For most, the village doesn’t exist. They might have a couple of babysitters they can turn to, and one or two school mum friends who might pick up their kids in an emergency. But that hardly constitutes a village. Personally I have a deeper level of support from my 15 year old sports bra.

The playing field is anything but level.

When I was at the BBC I point-blank refused to ask the few female bosses of FTSE 100 companies “how do you do it all?” or “how do you manage?”.

Why should men get 5 minutes of prime air time to talk strategy with me in front of millions across the globe when women have to run down the clock running through logistics?

No woman’s Ted Talk would stay within the 18 minute rule to communicate their one big idea given the apparent obligatory avalanche of footnotes, acknowledgements and qualifications that preface it.

I’d love to know if the British investment manager and mother of six Nicola Horlick kept a tally of the how many times she was asked the same boring, lazy question of the course of her professional life. Perhaps that’s why she felt compelled one day to add to the list of things she was doing “ * write a book called Can You Really Have It All?”

Nicola Horlick had a nanny and a secretary. Who cares? So does almost every bloke working in finance. Not once are they asked about it. And yet, for a woman to be doing these things with the support and aid of others somehow diminishes the achievement and is something to scorn.

A beautiful, clean home? She must have an interior designer and a cleaner. A blossoming career? There’s a full time nanny hidden somewhere off-camera. Killer bod? Time and money for a personal trainer or a home gym.

I am dying for the day a woman writes a bestselling business book where she starts by thanking herself for being a badass b*tch and her number one fan.

Women are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

Women should do what they damn well like.

Just imagine. Ambition without justification or denigration.

Ah yes, that must be what it is like to be a man.

This isn’t an argument against men. Or marriage, for that matter.

It is a request to observe how differently we think about support depending on who is receiving it. Women, even the most ambitious and independent, perhaps especially the most ambitious and independent, need help.

The question is why we’re embarrassed to admit it.

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“I met the most FABULOUS man the other week.”

My companion rolled his eyes. “Really? And which fabulous man was it this time?” he said as he smiled.

He’s right, of course. I amass new acquaintances like others collect loyalty stamps for their local coffee shop. I don’t mean to. I blame the Irish in me. I’m a millisecond of sustained eye contact away from a relationship with almost everyone who passes by. My mother is the same. Though it caused me no end of embarrassment as a child. Relieved by the blessed anonymity provided by an occasional trip to the city and escape from our small-town life in which every charity shop assistant knew a potted and illustrated history of my childhood thus far, it was inevitable that by the end of a fifteen minute wait for the number 13, my mother would know the names of everyone at the bus stop at Marble Arch. There was every chance they’d be singing together by the time we’d boarded the bus and without question we’d be joyously waved off by the time we’d travelled the twelve minutes to Victoria station. Anonymity and opportunity were synonymous, as far as my mother was concerned. A Dublin city girl through and through. Never far from a twinkle in the eye and a sashay of the hips. Its infectious. And, it seems, hereditary. When she goes I’ll always remember her with her head tilted back, roaring with laughter, sunshine bouncing off her sunglasses and the metal crown on her back tooth.

I’ve met some of my most favourite people over plants. I met Graham, my long time correspondent, over a garden wall in the Cotswolds closing in on twenty years ago. Every week we have spoken, in one form or another, of family and plants, of migratory birds and politics and grief. I’ve seen his two girls grow up, get married and have kids. He is a man of dignity, courage, compassion, extraordinary knowledge, many lives, wrapped up in an unsettling line of toilet humour. He remains gloriously a law unto himself. Graham was the first, but not the last spontaneous but enduring connection over a boundary line.

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Let me tell you about Rodney. Because Rodney doesn’t just deserve an article. He deserves a book. As chance would have it, he’s just finished his own.

Last week, Rodney was looking for conversation. You can always tell. There’s something more outward in their gaze. People intent on learning more from their immediate environment look harder. They are masters of discovering entry points to intimacy. They’ll remark on a dog to its passing owner. They’ll cup a rose in their open palms, inviting comment from someone passing in the opposite direction. They’ll compliment the barista on their new haircut since the last take-away. They notice and position themselves in such a way as to reap the rewards of opportunity.

In the shadow of a sycamore, Rodney’s eyes were shielded under impossibly dark lenses. His facial expression was masked entirely under the brim of a large hat. His feet may have pointed along the tow path, but his shoulders faced towards me and he held his hands clasped loosely behind his back. A man of some leisure. Its the particular, non-threatening stance of express interest held only by a person of innate confidence. I know it because my father walks in the same way. And my grandfather before him.

“Hello” I ventured, with my widest smile. The one that shows the molars. I was up to my chest in pittosporum, half swallowed by a rudimentary hedge and clutching a pair of secateurs. We stood not more than three feet apart.

He lit up. I was right. He WAS looking for an in. “Ah, hullo! Have you just moved in?” Something about the tone of the question suggested he already full well knew the answer.

“Yes, that’s right. To this one, just here.” knowing that he already knew, I gestured vaguely behind me to the little white cottage with the battered blue shutters.

“Marvellous! David and Michael’s old house”.

“Yes, that’s right. I understand they were wonderful people. Much missed.”

“Yes, very much so. And here a long time. Almost fifty years. I’m a relative newcomer at twenty five.”

I laughed loudly, and perhaps too easily, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“I’m Rodney.” Out shot a hand over a low hornbeam, understandably sulking in stony soil. Whoever thought to start a hornbeam hedge here should be fined under crimes against basic botany.

“Victoria”.

And so, we played conversational tennis at a gentle volley, until I struck a lucky ace.

“Oh! You live THERE! You don’t happen to know Christopher do you?”

The curator of the Garden Museum, simply one of the most stunningly beautiful minds for its perpetual motion, had mentioned in passing that he had a friend who lived on the tow path, too. Bear in mind that the Thames Path is 185 miles long. What were the chances that the only other person I knew to live on it might be sixty yards away?

Our friend in common is Christopher Woodward. Part man, part fish, on account of his stunning ability in open water, and part butterfly, for the ease with which he moves from place to place, person to person, cross-pollinating all with new ideas, and leaving each wishing he’d stayed a little longer. Here is another fortuitous friendship; borne from a mutual niche interest in the art, craft and history of gardens, and an equally mutual willingness to say yes to the unknowable. I’ve long suspected Christopher is quite naughty. Catnip when you have a rich seam of craic coursing through Irish blood.

( Here is Christopher earlier this year with Annie Freud, the poet and eldest daughter of Lucian, and great granddaughter of Sigmund, at Benton End, the home of the artist Cedric Morris. Lucian, Annie recalled to Christopher, would stop in at Benton End to sit in the garden alone, with Cedric, with whom he studied at 17. Small world. )

It turns out I was right. Although I tend to see Christopher in a professional capacity, hosting events for him at the Museum and talks at the roving Literary Festival, Rodney spoke fondly of riotous recent evening up on the roof terrace overlooking the river. Rodney, it turns out, had given the Garden Museum all the papers of his late partner, the esteemed polymath, writer, florist garden designer, Malcolm Hillier. And that is how the relationship with Christopher had come about. I could well imagine them getting on. Both living proof that The Great Gatsby and The Picture of Dorian Gray could have been rooted in fact and the sixties and seventies really did happen.

Rodney himself has written twenty six books in his years as a curator, cultural historian and biographer. He also drew and painted prolifically, He was no slouch with the secateurs either. He knew his box from his bay. And approved of my decision to remove the latter from the frontage of my little cottage. Twee. My thoughts, not his comment. But I’m sure we both thought it. Seconds later, he was telling me about a chap whose partner loves to pole dance and has recently installed one in the bedroom. Rodney is not how you imagine seventy eight might sound like. And I loved him instantly and all the more for it.

“Why don’t you come for drinks? Tonight? Is half past five too early for you?”

How could a girl refuse?

So this time last week, at five thirty sharp, I turned up in a velvet tux with a bottle of very good claret stolen from the cellar my ex-husband forgot about in the divorce under a rose arbour of impossible beauty, not ninety seconds from my own new front door.

Rodney, lightly accented, bespectacled and handsome still, in a shawl collar and neatly combed hair, grinned broadly and ushered me in off the towpath through a secret door. He took off my coat.

“How fabulous!” he exclaimed. The velvet tux was an instant hit.

And what a world I entered. People talk of bygone ages. But here was proof that bygone does not mean extinct. The very fabric of the house was bound by books. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books. By books, by art, by a true love of plants, and by dazzling, glorious homoeroticism. It was nothing short of fabulous. Mesmerising. I’m not entirely sure I didn’t spot a dismembered member. But it could have been a shaman stick of white sage and saffron to purify people of negative energy. Hard to know. Both equally possible. Hidden in plain sight, a blur of a few seconds in someone’s morning jog, remains a private shrine to hedonism. To a way of life that, for whatever reason, we deem as unserious. And by many, I suspect sadly, as unsavoury. How indescribably sad, I think. That we have gone so far backwards in our tolerance and celebration of others.

Why have we become so puritanical on pleasure? Take a leaf out of Epicurius’ book. What is so very wrong with pursuing the pleasure that comes from a simple life, freedom from fear, and deep intellectual and emotional connection?

Rodney has no fewer than 86 mirrors in his hallway. It started, he said, casually, with a gift from the venerable interior designer Nina Campbell, and grew from there. One room is entirely dedicated to finds from Venice. “ Malcolm and I were obsessed with Venice. We had a giant pali de casada, one of those striped canal poles, in the middle of our garden in Chelsea. Much of this fabric is from Fortuny.” He gestured around expansively to the priceless wallhangings. “Some other pieces, of course, we paid no more than 50p for. We loved combing antique markets.”

I told him of a recent find opposite Ripon cathedral in Yorkshire. The woman had no idea what she was selling me. But I knew the weight of alabaster alone was worth at least five times what I was paying for a rudimentary sculpture of woman, babe and child. I just hoped it hadn’t been nicked out of the cathedral not fifty feet away. It does have a somewhat ecclesiastical vibe.

“Oh, you love alabaster? Me too! Come and look at my collection.” And with that he took me to view no fewer than twenty exquisite pieces sitting atop an alabaster table intricately carved with swirling koi carp.

And from carved carp to real ones, Rodney took me through to his third secret courtyard garden, to the carp pond and fountain, via a story of a former lover, a thirty six year old boxer, under a rare schefflera and rarer still fatsia, remarking on the propagation of a woodwardia to the writing shed of the house’s former occupants, the Ahlbergs. From this house, and this shed, came The Jolly Postman, Peepo, Funny Bones, and more. From this shed, spilled Rodney’s life onto paper.

We talked and we talked. We climbed the stairs to the roof terrace and sat among the hostas and pelargoniums, of old times, former lives, trading stories of New York and London, previous lovers and quiet griefs.

We looked at his old photo albums to the time where he owned half a mountain on a Dutch island in the Caribbean. You won’t find it on many maps. You certainly won’t know it by name. I won’t share it here. “I planted whole banks of aloes. We lived in the cloud forest. We could pluck bananas by the pool.” He has been trying to recreate that lush island exoticism in his garden and the frank, open egalitarian culture, endemic to the people of the flatlands, behind his roses, ever since.

I would say he has succeeded. On all fronts.

Frequently the conversation would turn back to Malcolm; the love of his life for thirty years. And, inevitably, to his passing. The indignity and horror of ill-health during Covid. The isolation. And an inexorable fate.

I told him of my ex-husband climbing the walls not to be confined at home in the countryside with me and a newborn during that confusing, strange time.

It was only later, I told him, that I understood the reason for his repeated breaking of lock-down rules to go up to London and stay overnight. And it had nothing to do improving the quality of learning for trainee barristers as head of the pupillage committee.

Goodness. Rodney, in his seventies, was sheltering from police patrol units, under the deep shade of Chiswick Bridge, just to draw out his walks for a little longer, to get away from seeing beloved Malcolm fade away. Just as I was in a greenhouse alone and half his age, wondering why the love of my life was so keen to be anywhere but by my side.

And here we are, together. Six years later. Completely unknown to each other just twelve hours ago. The water flowed on by.

In the dark, above the geese, I remember reaching for the words of a Danish philosopher. But I don’t remember them. My mind is swimming. Flailing, really. I try very hard not to drink. It doesn’t agree with me. But there are moments where the need to appear agreeable to other people is stronger and pulls me under. As such, I was nursing my third glass of wine of 2026 and my second in a week. Things were slipping. Including an already very loose grasp on existentialism.

Søren Kierkegaard is most famous for the line: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

This was what I was thinking.

Rodney dispelled the quiet.

“I met 29 men last year… I write everything down in my diaries.”

“That’s fantastic Rodney! And how many did you convert into lovers?” And then ensued the most infectious giggle that rippled across the surface of the water all the way to posh houses in Chiswick and drinkers at the Bell and Crown.

My cup runneth over. In this moment I am deeply happy. Carefree and happy. What a blessing that is.

A perfect evening with a perfect stranger. Only when the sweary, blonde, bearded, avuncular Swedish handyman who had joined us at some point remarked that it was eleven o’clock and he’d better be heading home, did we decide to call it a night.

I could have sat out there all night with Rodney, the pelargoniums, the river and a bowlful of Doritos.

As we left, Rodney showed me the working drawings for an oil portrait he’s commissioned of himself. To accompany the autobiography, he said. As though either were the most obvious and natural things in the world.

What a life.

And how right he is to celebrate it.

Only now do I realise meeting Rodney last week may be behind my own spontaneous and wholly uncharacteristic desire this weekend to photograph myself. As I am.

Or as I was, as it happened, bare-faced, hands on hips, standing atop a sofa in a pillarbox red octagonal triple height drawing room, under a chandelier, with a sleeping she-wolf, Athena, by my feet.

Because, sometimes, that is also life. Sometimes it is being late for the school run, being judicious with rationing the last toilet roll and pulling hair pins out of the vacuum cleaner. And other times it is camping in a mid eighteenth century palladian folly in a forest with no WIFI, scant phone signal but an internationally celebrated solo violinist preparing for a concert with the Royal Philharmonic.

I shall look at the photographs at seventy eight and think of how FUN! And how much more there was to go at forty two.

Kierkegaard had another good line. A better one, in my view. "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself."

To Rodney. And all those who dare greatly.

I’ll be seeing you on the towpath.

All of this Chelsea coverage this week has got me thinking. The budgets might be vast, the clientele wealthy, but the plots are not huge. So what can you take from what the creme de la creme are up to?

If you’ve got a little garden, you’ve gotta THINK BIG.

I cannot emphasise this enough.

Not chic. F*king awful, in fact.

And you see it ALL THE TIME. Which perpetuates this idea that good-looking gardens are the preserve of the wealthy and well-endowed (speaking purely in acreage terms). Because everyone else is destined to mildly to severely forlorn, curling postage stamps of spaces.

YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT

Resigned to our (p)lot in life, some kind of hideous horticultural wilful blindness kicks in. As though, if we face the sofa in the opposite direction, the yawning black hole of biodiversity and joy going on behind us will magically disappear, if only we’re not looking at it.

The reality is, I’m afraid, your ambition and self respect are leaching out of the back of your skull and into the death star that estate agents can’t bring themselves to write “garden’ but instead settle for “private outdoor space”. Same goes for the 3rd bedroom/study btw.

Word to the wise, if ever a room requires the euphemism of a forward slash, it is in fact a “no slash required” pit of despair. Avoid.

I get it and I digress. Apologies. Life ain’t cheap. Any space of your own is precious.

But, come on, you deserve more. There is nothing more depressing than moving daily through a diminutive space in which nothing appears to thrive.

How do you expect to feel good about yourself and the world at large if you’re looking out at Lilliput after a nuclear disaster?

I moved from 5 acres of wafty hillside gardens with beautiful far-reaching views, in which I had to do very little to generate a sense of wellbeing and effusive praise for my gardening prowess, to 30ft by 30ft of walled city courtyard overlooked by 10 other houses.

Er, yes. More of a hands on hips, screw your eyes up affair. No more wild wees and inappropriately attired early morning garden inspections here, then. Rowan at number 9 is watching. And that 30 by 30, by the way, includes a 8ft x 8ft shed. So, about 850 square feet of “garden-garden” possibility. As a result I’ve had to radically alter how I approach designing and making a garden.

Where did I start? Well, as if it were a virgin Chelsea show garden plot.

It’s all about creating the illusion of space whilst making yourself perfectly accommodated. A kingdom fit for a Queen. That’s how I think of it, and why the hell not? After all, if you’re giving it your time, money, thought & attention on the regular, it SHOULD be your kingdom and you should feel nothing short of very happy indeed in there.

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WHERE TO BEGIN

Before all the fandango of the RHS show in May, the Royal Hospital Grounds at Chelsea is largely one enormous expanse of turf, with an established avenue of London plane trees. Each garden show entry is given a blank plot and you’ve got to crack on and make do with the plot you’ve got. The large show gardens are about 1700 sq ft. About twice the size of my garden at home. But the smaller show gardens are often not dissimilar in dimensions to what I’ve got. Short of robbing a bank, my dreams of compulsorily purchasing the gardens left and right and behind me are most unlikely to happen. So, we must work with what we’ve got.

WHAT CAN YOU NICK?

As a designer or exhibitor, you may or may not have the anchoring spine of those London plane trees in SW3 as a borrowed view. The best spots are often under those trees as you have a natural head start. Its akin to having something half decent to look at beyond your boundary. Everyone knows the best plot is the corner plot on main avenue. Rather than just being viewed behind a rope on one edge, the public can see the garden from both the long side view, and the short side, deep view right to the back. This gives you twice as many opportunities to engage. Can you do the same? Are there two ways to experience the garden? Can you make two paths, or open two sets of doors or windows out onto it? The more angles of entry, visual or otherwise, the more you can do to psychologically expand the space.

WHAT CAN YOU MANAGE?

At Chelsea, you’ve got to be a fiend at logistics getting everything in, from mature trees to giant boulders, water and electricity. Again, similar to living on a residential street; which in my case, means a garden with no rear access and no road access either. Everything I put in the garden, from pots to rocks to plants, has to be carried by me along a path, down a half flight of stairs and taken through the front door and the kitchen. Logistics. And lifting hooks. IYKYK.

LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

I’ve worked on the planting teams on a number of Chelsea show gardens over the years for the world’s most famous and celebrated garden designers. Say it quietly; the medal tables is not all down to good design. The reason it comes together in the way that it does is down to the expertise of the most experienced and skilled contractors in the business. It’s the doing that counts. Here I am in the muck in 2019.

We won gold and best in show with this one. Luckily you learn a thing or two from these absurdly talented people along the way.

I see no reason to withhold the useful stuff I learned for free. So here it is, so that you too, may create a knock-out garden worthy of Chelsea Gold.

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A friend of a friend is going through a divorce. Her decision. And she’s doing very well. Her phone has, naturally, been spying on her, and her instagram feed is, without prompt, now full of slightly scary bra-burning women and HEAVILY CAPITALISED daily affirmations. The Andrew Tate anti-feed.

Ah. THAT place. I remember it well. I even had a black T-shirt that said STRONG FEMALE LEAD in very angry white lettering on the front. I turned up in it once to a country golf course to meet my brother at the club house.

He had the good sense to say nothing but spent a long time silently going between staring at my t-shirt and my new “I’m not having a crisis, you’re having a crisis” bangs. Surrounded, as we were, by prams, toddlers and young married couples, I stared his cisnormative craft beer down with the aid of my morally indignant green juice. I’m glad I’m no longer in that place, but it was as necessary to the journey as a ropey service station up the M1. The T-shirt has since been retired. And the bangs are also, thank god, a thing of the past. They made me look like my Mum. Not Mum, smoking hot in her thirties, but my Mum now at 76, bless her, on the way to her regular pilates class outside a small market town that clings to life in 2026 by virtue of the Waitrose and generously proportioned train station car park. And, of course, beers don’t have views on gender or social norms.

The T-shirt, the green juice, the Dakota Johnson tribute act, were all, however, part of a systemic, visceral allergic reaction to the views of the Majority. And that’s what I wanted to talk about here. And what I wanted most to impress upon my friend, five years behind me. Received Wisdom and being the goose flying out of V formation.

If you’re going through something similar, or have done in the past, this is for you. Forearmed is forewarned.

Cast back to 2021. My lawyers said the most extraordinary thing. Privy, as they were, to all the gory details, intelligent, as they must be in their profession, and widely versed in the profitable business of heartbreak, they looked on at me kindly and said: “Don’t worry, you’re still young, and beautiful. Give it five years and you’ll be remarried to someone wonderful.”

I mean, seriously? Where to even start with this? Let’s ignore, for a moment, the inference that if I was old and/or ugly I’d be f*cked. Let’s pick up, instead, on the assertion, which I found to be surprisingly common among good friends too, that to be anything other than married was in some way, less than. My current state as a divorced single mum, they assured me, would be temporary and I will be spared the horror of dying alone in a bedsit surrounded by rescue cats and seed catalogues. There’d be a fairytale ending yet. Sooner than I know it, I’ll be folding back into the estate of another and will be welcomed back into the narrative arc and the titles would roll. I’d be in the “lucky” 54% of female divorcees who escape certain death-by-cat. Some people went even further. It was good I’d already had my kids, they said. You know, because some guys are not up for babies. They might let a couple of cute youngsters slide, however. Particularly if they weren’t footing the bill.

At this point you’d think I’d be evaluating my friendship circle as well as my life choices. But these are, I assure you, good people. Well meaning people. They really were offering what they considered to be comfort. I’d look at them askance. But after several re-runs of the same conversation with different people, I had my script down.

A Prince Charming got me into this almighty mess in the first place? Why (in God’s name), would the solution to all my problems be… ANOTHER man? And why would or should I regard my two kids as liabilities to diminish and not the brilliant assets that they are to the world at large?

From male friends, I could understand it. Perhaps. Dudes get disproportionately greater benefits from marriage than women do. Married men are healthier and happier than their single counterparts. They also live longer, have higher incomes, and are considered to be higher status. Marriage is far more beneficial for the average man than the average woman. No wonder their remarriage rate as divorcees is twice that of their ex-wives. Marriage through the male gaze is nothing short of the holy grail.

Well, five years on, I have an admission to make. I’m rather loving Trouble Town, this place I was supposed to be rescued from. I can confirm that I remain gloriously, delightfully, happily unmarried.

Is it any wonder? Whilst divorced men have the whole gamut of prospective new partners twenty or more years either side of them to facilitate their happier, healthier existences, no woman I know wants to adopt a man-child. Nor end up pre-emptively a full-time carer again to an older paramour, having dedicated years of active life already to raising a family. Which narrows the hypothetical field considerably. Women who’ve been around the block come back more discerning. They’ve no interest in winding up co-dependent; poorer per capita, more knackered or socially isolated than they are solo. The statistics on this do not lie. 77% of women who divorce after the age of 50 do not remarry or cohabit within 10 years. And far from being a coven of bitter old witches, spending their Friday nights sticking pins into effigies of their ex partners, I’m afraid they may well be having quite the blast.

Yesterday afternoon, a mere whipper-snapper at 41, I waltzed around my kitchen with a microfibre cloth to the sensational soprano Kathleen Battle performing Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen whilst I ate ripe figs. I couldn’t care less what the neighbours thought. Now, I’m not for a moment suggesting that married women cannot enjoy figs. Or operatic lieds in German about lonely shepherds on mountain tops. Or a high b flat WHILST eating sexually suggestive fruit. Or don’t appreciate a good microfibre when they see one. Just that I was far less inclined to indulge in such things as the married version of myself. It was all just so bloody serious. Of course, its possible to be happily married, and happy in yourself within a marriage. But I wonder, truly, for how many people do those two states co-exist? And to what extent does the fulfilment of one happiness somehow require the starvation of the other?

When I think back about how much of my life was organised around keeping another adult comfortable, frequently at my own expense, I’m amazed. Even during the breakup so much of my time was spent worrying about whether my ex was safe, happy, comfortable, and in what ways he might harm me next. So rarely did I expend that level of concern and energy on myself.

Perhaps my experience is on the more extreme end of the scale, but so conditioned is society more generally to this way of thinking that to suggest I put myself first went against everything I understood to be being a Good Woman. An American friend gently introduced me to the concept of “idiot compassion”, a misguided, ego-driven form of kindness that avoids conflict and enables harmful behaviours. And I remember thinking at the time what an idiot they were for telling me not to be kind. And how bloody typical for an American to champion self-serving pop-psychology stolen from a Tibetan Buddhist. Ahem. Yes. I was wrong about that.

Take another example. This morning I topped up the oil in the Porsche I bought myself last year. 0W-40 for rapid cold-start lubrication for the turbocharger. Yes, I went for the turbo. With sports exhausts. And tinted windows. And even if I did call the bonnet the “lid” when recounting today’s micro-sized triumph with pride to the aforementioned friend going through her own break-up, I’m still amazed by all the changes, small and large, that add up to Progress. My life may be imperfect, but it is truly independent, on my own terms and being conducted in full technicolour. Five years ago, I didn’t even have a driver’s license, let alone a car. Now I coo over spyder alloys and routinely use my Fantasy Four Car Garage conundrum as a sleep aid. My new favourite thing is listening to Chris Harris and chums on the The Car Podcast on the Burmeister sound system and wondering which one of them I’d be most natural friends with based on metrics such as car choices and contributions to the discussion. Far from hating men, I adore them. Just so long as I don’t also have to be married to one.

Don’t get me wrong. Leaving the safety of the Majority was as big a rupture as I could imagine at the time. Getting divorced was hideous; the process harrowing and disorientating. Losing my home was terrifying. Being ejected from a career and not knowing how I’d get by or what might replace it as a raison d’etre, kept me up at night. Every night. I spent those nights listening to parenting podcasts and making notes for the morning, in the hope that at least I was not ballsing that part up too much. Or if I was, I’d recognise the appropriate moments quicker for remorse and repair. Is it any wonder that I cut off my hair, burned the bra AND bought the T-shirt?

Somehow though, I got by. And things found a new natural order. Whilst I could never remember off-hand which week was recycling and which normal waste, one day I had the presence of mind to save the council website tab on my laptop and phone so I didn’t have to madly google from scratch every week at 0802 on a Tuesday, prompted by the sound of the rubbish trucks rumbling ominously towards me like the ferryman Charon in Greek mythology, carrying me over the river Styx to the underworld of my incompetence. I realised, with that miniature breakthrough, I actually didn’t need to suffer a contemptuous bin collection broker in my life. I still don’t. I’ve discovered I’m not half as incompetent as I was led to believe.

Plumbing and basic carpentry are not rocket science. I’m sorry. I don’t know to what end people gate-keep this stuff. YouTube, ChatGPT and Polyfilla will get you out of most holes. Neighbourhood whatsapp groups are a godsend. I’m about to hit up Rowan at number 9 for his electric drill to put up some curtain rails later. And adopting an “it is what it is” approach to the outcome does wonders for the enjoyability of the process. The same goes for ISAs, tax planning, utility bills, bookings, reservations and a whole host of other things. Whilst it may be a quiet relief to offload such responsibilities to someone else, it doesn’t mean you have to, nor that you are incapable of handling it solo.

I changed a car battery this way. This was, probably, an error of judgment, and quite frankly I’m relieved I wasn’t found fried and elegantly decomposing in the driveway by feral foxes.

Unmarried does not mean kin-less. I will be forever grateful to the legion of good people, familiar and dearly beloved, and relative strangers that have sprang up from all over to offer advice, encouragement and practical help. There’s nothing like a life rupture to find out who Your People are. And it may well not be who you think it’ll be. I’m drinking tea from a mug given to me by a dear friend whose wicked humour, capacity for attunement and steely resilience I have leaned on many a time whilst building my own. Katie was a former colleague just a few years back. Now she’s a Ride Or Die. On my hand is a marble ring, sculpted for me by a chap I met for a dog-walk in New York; a sweet soul, intermittent correspondent and steady supporter from afar. I am writing at the table of a new home that I am well aware wouldn’t have been possible without the aid of my parents. But also Adam Moore, the mortgage broker, who pulled a rabbit out of a hat when my funding collapsed, leaving me and the kids with nowhere to go. The walls were painted by guys who leave mangoes in the fridge because they know I love them. And I’m listening to beautiful music known to me only because I was introduced to it by a wonderful human I met once upon a time on Raya. None of these connections, trivial and fundamental alike, male and female, would have come about without the experience of flying solo. Life is much richer for all of it.

For many women, the unspoken trade-off within a marriage with children is boundaryless emotional labour heaped on top of corrosive, chronic professional and creative compromise in exchange for a degree of administrative outsourcing. Given the choice, there are plenty of women, myself included, who’d run the cost-benefit analysis now and think very hard about whether that’s an acceptable return on investment.

Women, as caretakers in relationships, are particularly vulnerable to dissolving their own boundaries to accommodate the encroachment of another’s, and reacting in the moment, rather than having the space to reflect and respond from a place of experience. Compassion does need boundaries. Learning takes time. Without a hard stop to and space from these hard-wired Pavlovian responses, its exceptionally difficult to steer oneself to more fertile ground. Not impossible. But far, far harder.

Perhaps it would have been easier to do as the lawyers suggested and rush headlong into a giant game of Hungry Hippos; snapping up the shiny orange ball of Husband no 2, but as it turns out, there are many, many more productive and enjoyable ways to pass the time. None of which involve picking wet abandoned towels off the floor.

Here’s what no one tells you about starting over. It does not get easier. You just get less and less put off by something being hard. And so even the unimaginable become manageable.

Change, capitalised, is a many faceted thing. It happens over a longer period than you expect, and is rarely constrained to just one area of your life. What is more, it’s not over when you decide you’re done with it. Change slows when it’s done with you. After a while, once you’ve loosened up, you’ll become so good at dodging curveballs and grabbing unexpected opportunities, you’re suddenly the CEO, CMO, CFO and Creative Director of this new, limited company. That’s pretty cool. Capable of pretty much anything and recognising opportunity for gains everywhere. You’re off the pay-roll, off the production line and your own boss. As every entrepreneur and self-employed person will tell you, yes, its harder than just showing up, punching in & collecting a pay cheque at the end of the month. But, they’ll say with a smile, they wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Kathleen Battle & The Figs

"The Shepherd on the Rock" (German: Der Hirt auf dem Felsen)

Der Frühling will kommen,
Der Frühling, meine Freud’,
Nun mach’ ich mich fertig
Zum Wandern bereit.^[7]

The Springtime will come,
The Springtime, my happiness,
Now must I make ready
To wander forth.

As Trustee of the The Eden Project in Cornwall, I cannot help but be a little competitive and perhaps, ok yes I admit, a little jealous of the well-oiled machine that is the leafy, royal 325 acre site in the capital; Kew Gardens. With none of Eden’s marketing heavy-lifting to entice people far away from the capital but not so enticing as to send them all the way to the coast, Kew hits the sweet spot with ease. In fact, Kew cleans up, with over 2 million visitors a year. That routinely makes it the most visited paid attraction in the country, outgunning freebies even, like the Natural History Museum and the Tate Modern. That’s a helluva lot of oat flat whites and emergency-oh-god-how-do-we-avoid-another-meltdown-today ice creams. (And those are just mine)

My word, with Henry Moore: Monumental Nature, do they have a money spinner on their hands. As Eden advocate, I was salivating at the prospect of all the good work that could be funded with this year’s ticket take.

If you haven’t planned to go, just go. HERE is how to book tickets. This partnership is the Torville and Dean of landscape. I can’t think of more totemic a programme, anything more inherently British nor seductively nostalgic as these f*k-off, futuristic, self-assured tributes to the natural world, particularly at this cultural moment of apparent lostness for Britain.

Its just, right. Perfect, in fact. This is biomorphism on an epic scale. Kew’s is the biggest outdoor staging of Moore’s work that has ever been attempted. To see one Henry Moore in a landscape is something you don’t forget. To discover thirty is just something else. And there’s a further 96 in the indoor exhibition, plus a dangerous gift shop.

Moore once said, “sculpture is the art of the open air… daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is Nature.” Kew’s massive site; shifting ecological zones, from woodland to tropical rainforest, Japanese rock garden to lakes formal and hidden and the long, sinuous paths that take you there lends itself to traversing the gardens back and forth, over and again across the day. What feels intimate in the dappled light at 10am has lost its magic by noon, and so you press on, or at least I do, in the elusive hunt for peace and perspective in the city.

There will be rave reviews and long queues. So just do yourself a favour and book online in advance rather than on the day. As a local, my top tip would be to avoid the main entrances nearest the tube station and off Kew Green. And, maybe I shouldn’t say this, but to pack your own snacks and drinks too, like these pros,

as the queues for the cafes and restaurants are likely to be the seventh circle of hell on weekends and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be there awhile. Hit up my friend Nick at Sift cafe on Kew Green ( map here ) and he’ll sort you out with a few delicious goodies to pop in the bag for later, and a good brew to keep you company as you make your way in. You’re welcome, Nick.

There are many, many different ways in which you can experience this. Family day out, cultural fix, academic expo, low key first date, or just a virtuous leg-stretch with some ginormous lumps of bronze thrown in to keep things interesting.

Knowing Moore … and behind the scenes at my home & new garden (behind the paywall)

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Lovely Inner Circle Crew, bear with me whilst we get people up to speed.

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The very first yes. A hit. A smash hit. A knock-it-out-of-the-park-could-I-possibly-be-being-catfished-hit. I actually laughed when I saw his profile. It read as written by someone who knows me better than myself and would know exactly which buttons to push. We got talking. Whip smart, sexy as hell, playful, self-assured but self-effacing and running circles around me. I was learning new things from this guy, too. This was new. This was exciting. This was fucking great. There was just one, tiny flaw. He lived over six thousand miles away.

But. But right now, right now, he was in Europe, visiting a friend in Amsterdam and would be travelling to Switzerland in a few days. He was currently within 500 miles.

I was still in my tower, however. Unable to escape unless, ironically, to rush up to Britain’s most populous city to deliver international news to international people, and then rush back before I turned into a pumpkin when I ran out of my pre-designated childcare. 500 miles and yet I might as well have been the Atlantic Ocean away.

So I swear to God I could have kissed the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. If I ever meet him I might do just that. The utter omnishambles of the summer of 2022 for the British Government meant that at the last minute, the Chancellor postponed the latest lipstick applications on the pig of the British economy. However, I realised, I still had overnight childcare booked for the shift I was due to be on, covering the announcements. Manna from Heaven! The portal opened. And with it, the Swiss Air app. I booked a flight that morning for four hours later. I booked a hotel while waiting to board the flight.

I was going to Zurich. I was meeting a perfect stranger on the steps of the Zurich opera house at 10pm, overlooking the lake, for my first first date in almost twenty years.

To Be Continued…

OK…

Where were we?

Oh yes.

What the bloody hell was I doing? Perhaps sensing my reticence through European airspace, my prospective date whatsapped me as I was in Gatwick bag-check to see if I was, indeed, having cold feet. I’ll admit my heart was pounding and twice I’d stalled and not shuffled forward to collect a grey plastic container for my bits and bobs, feigning an issue with lost boarding passes and charging cables. It was an outrageously bold first move, I thought to myself as I rootled around in my bag, pretending. Even for me. I’d never so much as looked at another man for years and now I was boarding a plane to meet one I’d only spoken to twice? But what the hell, I reasoned. I don’t need to like the guy. I had somewhere to stay. He didn’t need to know where that was. I had money in my bank account. A bunch of transport apps, at least one of which would probably work to get across town. I was flying back the next day in time for nursery pick-up. I had cover at home. I wasn’t missing work. Even if the Daily Mail did want to poke fun at me, which I doubt they would (delusions of grandeur, Victoria) they’d never find me in Zurich. The Government was behaving like an episode of Dad’s Army, which, in turn, was keeping my bosses in a tailspin with constantly shifting media operations and running orders. I wasn’t due in. And google images suggested the lake is very pretty in the summer, I reasoned. This was no more than a self-care mini-break for one. I could escape and no one anywhere would miss me. If I needed to press eject there was no expectation that I’d need to hang about any longer than a drink. That would be polite, and reasonable. And one day it’ll make a hell of a story, either way.

Yeah. I could do this. And with that, I texted my sister, dropped her my location so that if I was murdered she’d be able to locate the body, and then stepped forward and picked up a tray.

I looked up and smiled at a blonde girl who seemed no more than eighteen years of age. Shyly, she smiled back. Unable to help myself, I struck up a conversation. She was Swiss. Flying home from her first time away. She was from a small place outside Zurich and life in London had opened her eyes. She was nervous about returning. Without meaning to, I soothed my own nerves by attending to hers. She swapped seats. The plane was half full at best. We settled down together. So why was I going to Zurich?

“Well, actually. For a date.”

She couldn’t believe it. And neither, it seemed, could the businessman seated behind us. I confessed to the girl that I was a little nervous myself. I’d been married a long time, and we’d been together a good five years before we were married. So I was more than a little green. In fact, this was kind of my first, first date. But you have to go for these things, haven’t you? In hindsight, I posed this more to myself than the poor bewildered, wide eyed teenager next to me.

At this, the man behind chimed in. He apologised but said he couldn’t help but overhear. I can’t quite remember the effusive tumble of half sentences that came out soon thereafter, but the smile was genuine, his eyes were shining and I remember thinking, I wonder if he’s been in a similar position himself. I DO remember that he sent both of us a glass of champagne in an act of bon courage. I drank both. It transpired that the girl next to me was, in fact, only seventeen and teetotal. So young to be trying to make her way by herself in a foreign country, as tolerant as London is to people passing through.

Zurich, by the way, is very nice. The airport is a vision in steel, and well run, as you might imagine. And the hot chocolate is excellent. Oh god, I was actually doing this. I flipped open Uber and within minutes I had a ride to my hotel. I swept by the brown glazed tiles in the lobby and the glass bonbon jars as though this was all totally normal, eyes scanning frantically for the lift. My room was tiny and somewhat harrowing, hardly an obvious pick for a secret tryst. Ornamentation extended to a solitary black and white picture of a flower, imprisoned in a faux oak square frame. It struck such a discordant note that again, I had a moment of panic, looking at the four walls and wondering what the hell was I doing here. Did I even know how to flirt? In an effort to keep it casual, I’d packed not much beyond a toothbrush and underwear. Now I was looking at my khaki silk cargo pants wondering how exactly did these and a black t-shirt convey sex bomb? Oh god, they’d have to do.

And with that, and the failing light, one by one the street lamps pinged on across the city, and I stepped out into the night.

My date and his friend were at the Opera House enjoying a spot of Verdi. The plan was to meet on the steps after the performance. His friend would head back to their hotel and we would…stroll? How very nineteenth century.

When strolling became fashionable in around 1800, the lower basin of Lake Zurich was created. It became the largest continuous public park grounds at that time, and Zurich was changed from a small city along a river to a big city by the lake. In clear weather there are views across to the Alps. By day, these days the shores are lined with inline skaters, jewellery sellers and even open water swimmers. Unimaginable in Britain. By night, Zurich’s quayside buzzes with diners and late night ambling dog walkers.

At once, both absorbed and distractedly cold, I paced past Zeus and Ganymede in some quarrel or other, and up the knuckled avenue of plane trees alongside the water’s edge up to and away from the Opera House, thinking. Movement always regulates thoughts, I’ve found. Tangled webs are pulled taught and straighter lines form. Reasoning you can start to follow. I’d seen a few photographs and concluded that, at a distance and from the cover of the trees, I might recognise him and make a decision then and there whether to bolt. Not so much to see if, indeed, I’d been catfished. But to have some privacy in a first impression and the luxury of time. First impressions exist in their own world. Indelible in the mind and impossible to recreate they’re sometimes the signposts we miss to what is rising within. Creating a time lag, otherwise known as light spying, might open a useful space to consider such surfacings. Would I, for example, feel adulterous and guilty? Was this all too soon? Forty minutes. Thirty minutes. Twenty minutes. Ten minutes to go. Bloody hell, Zurich is cold at night. Why didn’t I pack a jacket? Or a jumper. Every star was out to bear witness to the scaredy cat in the cargo pants.

My heart leaped as I heard the applause rise up from the hall signalling the end of the performance and I turned on my heel and walked as fast as I could away from the building. From sixty feet, I watched the audience spill out onto the steps and into the square. From somewhere in the crowd he messaged to say he was outside (which I knew) and would I like a drink (not really, no, but also yes, and so I replied, an aperol spritz, because this seemed like something a young-ish single person highly experienced at dating and in no way socially awkward might order). I waited and watched. And then I saw him. Or rather, I spotted his friend. I recognised him from a video the day before of the two of them on the water in Amsterdam.Taller and less hirsute, the street light bounced off his skull, a signal post, in a most unexpected manner, to a future with my husband firmly in the past. I followed the line of sight and there he was. Looking around, looking a little lost, holding a neon orange drink. I wasn’t altogether sure I was going to like that. It looked like Irn-Bru. In for a penny, in for a pound, Victoria. And with gritted teeth and forearms covered in goosebumps I walked their way.

I’d love to say I grew in confidence with every step. In fact the opposite was true. By the time I was upon them, I had lost all words and had become so invisible that I suspect I may have come off extremely creepy. Suddenly I was three feet away, he hadn’t seen me and I startled him. Which then startled me. I noticed the grip tighten around the glass. And then, seeing me looking at his knuckles, he thrust it my way. Ok, so far, so awkward. I have no idea what happened next, but the friend melted away. I don’t even know if I had the good grace and presence of mind to say goodbye.

A half dozen conversational false starts and in the half light, with the crowd chattering around me, and a surprisingly resonant bass accent, I inwardly cursed my poor hearing. I couldn’t make head nor tail of what was going on and he kept turning around, looking for a safe place to put the glass I had drained in seconds. You see, I damaged my ears when I was fifteen and have very little hearing in my left ear, making non directional sound very difficult. I rely more heavily than I realise on lip reading and body language to infer meaning and fill in gaps.

Far from feeling disabled, a lifetime of having to pay unusually close attention to verbal and non-verbal cues developed a strong communication muscle. That muscle was foundational to a career in live broadcast journalism. Today it underpins many a friendship and informs how I parent my two kids. By necessity, its relational and rooted firmly in the present. Useful, no doubt, in steering live unscripted news for hours at a time, but life lived as the moving beep on the heart monitor comes at the expense of registering context and appreciation of the long game. Those things come less easily.

Scrabbling in the dark in Zurich, mind racing, I was completely at sea. I had the strangest sensation of living in anticipation of an event, but also in its future memory. Dissociating to avoid discomfort. I’m sure many people experience this. People talk about fight or flight in response to stress. There must be millions of us long term residents of the camp of freeze; where the body becomes small but the mind expands and merrily trots off until the threat has passed.

And then there it was. The eye contact. As unwavering as it was unexpected. Mind accidentally brought back down to body by a pair of extraordinarily grey-blue eyes. Like the colour of moving water before the sun finds its form and dictates the rhythm to the day. We’d accidentally stood directly opposite each other, in virtually identical black t-shirts and simple gold chains, nor more than a foot apart. Both blue eyed, dark haired and tanned from a heatwave that had started in the States and had been sitting over London. Like iron filings to a magnet, I’d seen something of myself, or perhaps its inverse, in this stranger. And it was that pull that had made me board a plane.

He was not at all what I imagined. Physically more robust but also more street than I’d presumed, given what hinted to be a fearsome intellect. For some reason I assumed he’d be more.. I’m not sure. Perhaps more like an old school tweed-clad professor. Less dominant. Less vital. Less healthy, or something. Just not, this. Not this at all. The only other person I knew who has turned up to opera in a black t-shirt and jacket is me.

Bashful, I turned away and he took the cue to suggest a walk along the water. From I’m not even sure where, a sweater appeared. He offered it to me, unsuccessful as I was at hiding my shivering. And for some obscure reason that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and threw him off balance, I flatly refused. Despite being cold to my bones and having thought of little else for over an hour. However, in some perverse, misguided feminist stance I would endure the pain and inconvenience. I did the same when David Cameron offered me milk for my tea in his private office in Downing Street. He was even holding the jug and hovering above my cup. He wasn’t even asking me to make the tea or pour the milk. Yet I was adamant I didn’t want milk. Not from a man in a position of power. He took a beat, too. Who drinks English Breakfast tea without milk? I really wanted the milk, too. How I manage to make normal moments weird is beyond me. But I’m a champion at it.

I babbled, mostly incoherently, flitting across topics as a wasp punch-drunk on the flesh of fermenting fruit. In answer to my earlier question, no. No, I most definitely did not know how to flirt. Seemingly I wasn’t even able to hold a two-way conversation these days. This is what happens, I thought, unable to shut up, when you talk all day for a living and live at home with two kids five and under. I knew I liked him though. I have a terrible habit of walking into people I like. I keep bumping up against them, completely subconsciously. Graciously he listened as he was alternatingly trodden on and elbow-poked in enthusiasm.

One big loop we were nearly back where we started. He turned to me, stopped walking, looked into my face with those wolfish eyes and a steady voice said, “I’d really like to kiss you. Is that ok?”.

Suddenly mute, and rather stunned, I inhaled a spontaneous if thankfully silent “Really!? Why?”. I paused, heart thumping, registered I was safe and exhaled a quiet but definitive “OK”. For all the words, for all the thoughts, the feelings, for all the hurt, a new chapter opened with two syllables.

And that was it. I was gathered slowly, up into the arms of this person. Because I was invited to. As simple and momentous as that. Sixteen years with feet firmly planted on one bank of a river. And here, on foreign soil, I had managed to get to the other side. And I knew then, in that moment, that I’d never go back.

So what the hell happened? I’m sure you’re dying to know.

Part 3 Epilogue is waiting for you behind the pay wall… I’m a cruel mistress, I know.

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This is the story of my first, first date. First Date AD, that is. After Dan.

I’ll still be telling myself this tale in my nineties, giggling away as I’m wheeled around the nursing home. No one ever thinks of dirty old grannies, do they? But I bet the twinkle in the eye of many a shrivelled prune, as I shall one day also be, is not from the memory of a crochet pattern.

The year was 2022. I remember it distinctly. I was lying in my son’s room in the dark. William was sleeping soundly in his bed above me and my daughter, Iris, just gone two, had passed out across my chest as I lay on the floor. In the year since their father had left she’d barely let me out of her grasp. Terrified that I might disappear too, it had been seven long months of sleeping every night on a fold-up mattress next to her cot with my hand contorted and throbbing through the bars. Every part of me ached. So deprived of sleep was I that it became commonplace to first check the fridge for the house keys. Migrating to the guest bed in my son’s room and being used as a human mattress was, believe it or not, a considerable improvement.

Despite the chronic exhaustion and the small hour, my eyes were wide open, snapped back like rubber bands. Today was our wedding anniversary.

My ex had been living the last year in the city with the woman he left me for. Not that I knew it at the time. And here was I, a middle-aged, gaunt, greying Rapunzel, isolated in deepest darkest Sussex, with little contact with the outside world beyond ping-ponging to and from work, few certainties from which to craft a strategy for the future and under round-the-clock surveillance by two pre-schoolers. It was time to hatch a plan of escape.

That’s IT, I thought. I’m making my own time machine to teleport me out of this. I’m going to go on a date. Or at least plan one with a stranger. Baby steps. Anything to escape this one dimensional existence of the same day on loop. The only problem was I hadn’t been on a date for sixteen years. And do they even count when you’re 22? No one I knew was single. No one married had anyone they knew and could vet someone they might shoo my way as a litmus test of whether I could be reintroduced into the wild. One friend’s friend had tragically died, which left a grieving husband... But that really was it.

So I’d have to go to the great Wild West of the world wide web.

When I met my husband there was no Tinder. No Bumble. No Instagram, Tiktok, or Substack for that matter. Hell, Facebook had only just launched. When we met, it was the old fashioned way; eyes meeting across a bar after work and a little Dutch courage. Unconventionally, it was me who’d approached him with a beer. I’ve always been of the opinion that you shouldn’t limit your options to the guys who cross a room to introduce themselves. Why not just go pick the one you like? More on that another time, perhaps.

The long and short of it is I was so clueless I had to first Google the names of the apps. I found myself on a cringeworthy Cosmo article for Gen-Z’ers where I needed to translate every other word into Millenial-speak, whilst very much in two minds as to whether this was a good idea at all, wondering whether the Daily Mail would care enough to expose that I was on a dating app whilst, as far as everyone else beyond a tight circle knew, I was married. I decided they wouldn’t, then cross referenced the content with a couple of other publications and at 2am, downloaded the top five apps. I spent the next couple of hours before dawn assembling dating profiles and then, boom, with a few clicks, I went live.

Then I did the news. Later, after the newsroom debrief, I picked up my phone. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was as if my phone had developed a form of e-leprosy. Dozens and dozens of notifications. Everywhere. People swarming up and out of my phone. I couldn’t keep up. One app sent me a thousand people in five days. It was completely overwhelming. A piranha feeding frenzy. I had to google which way you swiped for yes and which way for no. I got myself in such a pickle with that one. I still can’t remember. How can anyone make a decision in so little time? So, like the complete novice that I was, I diligently read any profile that came my way, cross referenced possibles with their internet footprint for fairness and accuracy, looked for the possibility of peer review by way of overlapping friendship groups, and sense-checked profile photos. I think in that first week I took three hours a night, quietly, methodically, turning down every single person the algorithms spewed out at me.

Completely demoralised, this instant portal into an alternate reality was going to be much more problematic than I thought.

It really is the worst. It’s grim. The statistics are awful. There are many, many more men than women on these apps. And less than 10% of the men clean up with more than 90% of the women anyway. The other 90% of men don’t get a look in. And those hyper-served 10% of dudes tend to be quite happy to plough through a constant stream of identikit, Facetuned females. There’s always the suggestion of another around the corner. So, in a bid to compete, cis women mask their idiosyncrasies, invariably posting bikini shots and yoga poses to satisfy both ends of Freud’s Madonna-Whore dichotomy. And over 50% of men, in my experience, fall into equally binary camps. Those that pose with pets or babies to demonstrate their softer side. Often with the quote “not mine”. Eurgh. And those posing on boats. Weird. The boats thing is very weird. For everyone else, it is nothing but a continual drip-feed of confidence-eroding, hope-crushing depressing content. If you can call self-published autobiographical advertising content. I don’t count myself as special that I had so many approaches. I was nothing more than fresh blood in a stagnant pond of contempt. Some people will even put up dating app selfies in the loo. True. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Its mad. To have that little faith in the process that you’re willing to pose by your toilet just to get people to stare an extra half second.

And then.

And then something nothing short of magic happened…

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Alan Titchmarsh once said “when we’re young, we grow from seed. We take delight in having a hand in the start of new life. But as I’ve got older, the more I’m drawn to the slash and burn of gardening. Pruning. Hacking. Chopping down and making way, with a thrill of excitement, for what is yet to be.”

Or, words to that effect.

Not to disparage anyone in the summer and autumn of their years currently pinching out their sweetpeas. But you know what? He’s right. Pruning had absolutely no appeal a decade or so ago. These days I long for bloody hands and aching intercostal muscles from all the yanking, twisting, and triumphant grunting. There is nothing more cathartic than ripping out the old and having a good clear out. I suppose, when we’re shiny and new ourselves, we might look on blankly and not without scorn at those taking out their frustrations on a wayward laurel or an insipid excuse for a rosebush.

The act of creation is a form of control. Making something, a book, a home, a garden, a picture, is, at its core, manipulating thought and resources into some form of self-expression. And who doesn’t crave a bit more control and order when you’re at a stage in life where things might be running away from you?

So let’s be having those shears. Find yourself some giant garden waste bags and clear out your car boot. You’re gonna need the backseats flat for what’s in store. The mother of all reboots is on its way. Lick your lips, hands on hips and buckle up. Things are about to go off the chain.

If I can do this (below) in nine months of thinking and just three months of plants in the ground on a eeny-weeny plot with a bunch of restrictions, just think what you can manage in your own place. The sky’s the limit, my friend.

101 on Rebooting Your Garden

Gardens, like people, are rarely a blank canvas. Poke around a little and you’ll find all the baggage carried into this relationship with you as caretaker. If you’re lucky, there’ll be a few horticultural triumphs and a number of quietly aborted or abandoned attempts at place-making. Your first job is to listen keenly to what your garden wants to tell you. Imposing your will without an appreciation of what’s in front of your nose always, ALWAYS ends badly.

WHAT TO RESPECT

Active listening is giving the garden time to show what comes up as the seasons cycle through. What the therapists would call “holding the space”. All therapists make notes. It is vital to putting together an initial picture of the presentation of a patient, but regular notes are witness statements to recurring themes and, over time, stand testament to the progress a client makes. You must do the same. Choose a few different vantage points. Take photos from those same spots twice a month. You think you’ll remember. Invariably you’ll forget.

Photographic evidence on a camera roll on your phone has two useful features beyond the obvious. 1, the date stamp and 2) plant ID via AI and intelligent search.

Examine your evidence. Where are the most persistent frost pockets? Where is the deepest shade? Is there a sun trap? How does water drain across the space? How quickly does a lawn brown? Your fact finding can go beyond the garden boundaries. Taking time to learn what grows well locally either in the wild or in neighbouring gardens will pay dividends. I’ve been known to knock on the door of people whose garden is well loved just to say well done and thank you. If you keep your praise specific and show genuine interest you’re often rewarded with a font of knowledge and sometimes even a cutting or an envelope of seeds through the letterbox from your new supporter. Gardeners are a notoriously generous bunch.

If there was just one golden rule, it is this. The best approach to a garden reboot is to listen to your gut and not fight with what a space wants to be.

I often think about the parallels between place-making and starting over as an adult. Look at me. At 41 I’m rebuilding a new life post-divorce, post-illness, with my two children around a new home, a new area, a new community, a new school and a new career path.

What I’ve discovered is that far from being a brand new me, more and more I’m resembling a badass, possibly wiser, definitely more solvent version of my 15 year old self. A time before all the buffeting around of self from being a slave to fads and Other People’s Opinions.

After diligently doing everything by the book and finding that approach fails to lock in guaranteed everlasting happiness, I believe we come to the realisation sooner or later that it’s probably no bad plan to abandon the whole charade and pick up where you left your 15 year old self. Cutting out the noise. Cutting out the distractions. Surrounding yourself only with what works. What is good for you and supports you in your quest for a good life well lived.

Take the same ruthless approach with your garden. If it is shady, abandon all hopes of a semi-arid Arizona tribute-scape. If a large tree dominates, think very carefully about whether it is indeed wise to remove it. If it has made a success of things in your soil and with your aspect, in my view, it has successfully made its case to remain. It is up to you to make a compelling case for the prosecution.

This might sound and feel a little woo-woo, but how does this garden make you feel? What is it that you like? What are you drawn towards? Think beyond what you’re looking at directly to what you can hear and what you can smell. It could be the harnessing of the wind through a canopy of trees, or the scent of early flowering clematis on the neighbour’s wall. Let the eye roam continuously and see where it keeps being drawn back to to rest. That normally gives you a good indication of what speaks to you and where you might be able to forge a stronger connection to this little plot of yours.

Respecting what works, understanding why, and finding your connection to the spot is the first step towards making a brilliant garden that is unique to you and unique to this location.

WHAT TO KEEP

Every estate agent I’ve ever met has balked when I’ve turned up with a trowel. It is somewhat ironic that the place I’ve settled upon is made up entirely of raised beds. But a quick rootle around in the native soil tells you far more about what your future will look like there than any brochure. There’s no better place to start than the soil if you’re planning on putting down roots.

The moment you have a handle on your soil as well AND your climate, you’ll have a blueprint for working out what to keep.

Turning over a sample in a few different areas will tell you if you have claggy, impenetrable clay, dusty sand, builders’ rubble full of aggregate, thick dark loam or somewhere in between.

If you’re a little shy or under-confident about brazenly tunneling about like a human mole, look to the trees. Are they making strong, vigorous growth? Or is their canopy thin and foliage sparse for this time of year? If the grass hasn’t been cut for awhile, is it tall and lush? Or is it sparse, short and lean enough not to flop over? If the latter, you’re likely standing on impoverished and stony soil. That’s no problem. The rubbly roadsides and mountain sides across Europe are strewn with poppies, irises and euphorbias. All garden plants you’ll find in any garden centre or nursery.

Ask yourself: What’s growing? If there are rhododendrons, acers, pieris and summer flowering heathers in the ground, are they doing ok or do they look very yellow? Healthy lime-hating plants suggest your soil is likely acidic. Beware, though, of taking a view on soil acidity from nosing over the wall into other people’s gardens. You rarely know from first glance whether neighbouring plants might be growing in raised beds or pots where they’re growing in specialist compost and watered lavishly with harvested rainwater.

Look at the drainage, especially in any lower areas of the garden. If it is summer, is it boggy? Are there standing dead trees in these areas that may have died from winter waterlogging? If so, don’t despair, you could carve out a natural pond here in future, or plant moisture-loving plants, bog plants and marginals. Conversely, if your soil is high, dry and thin, then drought and very free draining soil will be significant factors in your choice of plants. Don’t worry. There’s a plant for every space.

Look up. Are the trees wind-shaped, with shorter branches on the windward side and longer ones on the leeside? Are evergreens like bay wind-burned? If it feels calm, is that because you’re sheltered by the tangle of overgrowth that’s already there, or are you sheltered by a dip in the land or walls? If you remove that shelter belt, you may end up with a much more exposed sight.

Keep the plants that are doing reasonably well, or would do, with a little creative maintenance from the upper storeys that may be hogging resources and stealing the light. At this stage, I make a list of what’s to stay & categorise into trees (big)> shrubs (medium) >(perennials) small and then divide again into sun>shade. Now you should have a good idea of candidates for keeping, where you’ll find them and how much space they’re taking up between them. And by simple process of subtraction, how much space you really have to play with.

WHAT TO RESCUE

Once you’re back to the skeleton of what is living happily in this space, it is time for a little rearranging of the deck-chairs. Before you redevelop to your own taste, it is worth looking at the structure that already exists. It may be that there is already a strong imposed, logical structure. My old garden in Sussex started at the top of a hill and tumbled sharply down towards lusher meadow and then a shallow depression in which lay a naturally occurring, spring-fed, clay–lined pond. It made sense to terrace the upper slopes for a more formal garden to hug around the house, and allow for an increasingly lighter touch and fewer interventions with increasing distance as the garden descended into copse and pond. It may be that the structure of your garden is historic. Victorian town housing, for example, was often built with a small formal front garden, screened from the road, with tightly shaped beds and rope-tile edges. An old garden may have had a succession of later overlays or there may have been years of neglect. When you find the logic of what has been done before, you can then decide whether to enhance what’s already there and how you might go about it. If no logical structure exists, this is the time to start thinking about how you might create one. Unless you’re extremely wealthy and think nothing of dropping a heavy load of Gs on designers, consultants, a design and build team and plantspeople, do yourself a favour and work with what you’ve got. Mature trees and shrubs, earth moving equipment and cranes cost a small fortune. And you’ll be surprised how much a new plant addiction might hit the ol’ discretionary spend. “But they’re NECESSITIES!” I hear you opine. Yes, yes, I fully sympathise. But let me also tell you this. A long hard look at your own plot costs nothing. You can always move existing plants around to more suitable locations, create groupings that have more visual weight, and the creation of a small pond somewhere would create excavated earth that could make a raised bed or change the angle of an existing bed to increase how much sun your garden receives. Besides, by rolling up your sleeves and getting stuck in with drafting the skeleton and moulding the new bones, you’ll have a far better knowledge of the garden itself. You’ll save yourself both time and money later down the line on maintenance and tweakments. That’s my kind of arithmetic.

At this point it is also a good idea to start thinking about your own needs. What do you want from your garden? What jobs does it need to do and for whom? You may surprise yourself with the answers. What you do you design-wise you are committing to maintaining. List all the functions and then be ruthless about prioritising them.

Take each function in turn and work out whether there are reasonable alternatives that might achieve the same aim. Does your need for seclusion take precedence over a junior cycle track or mini football pitch? Could you create a reading nook in the house that might provide seclusion instead? Or would the kids be happier and better served kicking a ball about in a local park than repeatedly against a brick wall outside annoying the neighbours?

Some functions might be:

• Privacy

• Shade

• Dining Space and or outdoor cooking

• Play area

• Pet Friendly

• Storage

• Escapism

WHAT TO RIP OUT

Anything that’s already dead. Anything that will die if you don’t continually lavish it with compliments and praise. By which I mean elaborate irrigation, regular seaweed extract feeds, layers of horticultural fleece and every pesticide known to man. Discard anything that’s damaged or diseased. I’ve fought so many a losing battle over roses; the showy, highly scented types often need far more air flow and good living than I have been able to accommodate. These days I grow just two. And they’re both close to the species versions native to China, where cultivation began 5,000 years ago.

I waged war with box tree caterpillars on a giant buxus parterre for years with bi-weekly sprays from April to November. I was too afraid of what would happen if I’d allowed nature to take its course and admit the inevitable. The better approach would have been to see it as an opportunity to try something entirely new that suited the west facing, heat retentive spot. For close to a decade I was enslaved to a planting scheme derived by a previous owner twenty years ago when boxtree caterpillars and box blight were largely urban myths in Britain. It was a mistake. The lesson was to adapt. Don’t hold on too tightly to anything. A loving embrace on a garden can quickly become a chokehold.

A good garden is a two way conversation between a place and its gardener. Don’t waste your time on stony silence or sulky plants. Move on.

Perhaps you’re faced with a wall to wall patio or decking that seems too expensive and wasteful to change. If it looks like a prison exercise yard, don’t be surprised to find that you are moving heaven and earth to avoid it. Better to admit a mistake, yours or inherited, and course-correct to restore, rebalance and move forward.

Sometimes compromise is the best solution. I find the divide between hard and soft landscaping in my own little courtyard garden too jarring; leaving the garden a Jekyll and Hyde concoction. Yet the stone, laid by the previous owner, is cathedral grade York stone. It seems incredibly decadent to even think about adjusting it in some way. The halfway house has been to dig out some of the mortar bed between slabs and wedge in creeping thyme, sedums and mexican fleabane. Visually, they act as living cross-hatches of green but ecologically-speaking, they perform as corridors for pollinating insects migrating across the garden.

I will liberally sprinkle ladybird poppy seeds too at random intervals over the spring and early summer to let them find their own way into ingenious footholds that soften the hand of human intervention. I love this kind of low-key rebel gardening. The success of this experiment led me to lift one of the slabs opposite the red earth coloured garden office to plant a Japanese loquat. This particular tropical looking evergreen shrub is pruned as a half standard tree.

That one plant has instantly given a sense of presence and thrilling exoticism to what was an unremarkable, unbroken vista. It has somehow anchored the building to its bed of stone. Baby steps. But you’ll have your loquat moment as you grow in confidence soon enough.

And lastly, There’s nothing worse, in my view, than a garden that tries to do too much and be too many things to too many people. Unless you have rolling acres of varying terrain, most gardeners will be faced with a wishlist as long as their arm with competing functions and favourite plants, and a really rather small patch in which to move mountains. Having started with a quote from Alan, I’ll finish with a quote from another formative gardener for me, my mother.

No garden ever happens by accident. Move forward boldly; armed with knowledge of the garden is, what it was, who it is there for now, and why. Courage, mon ami! We are right behind you, cheering you on with those secateurs. X

You see, home is not just where we start from. It is also where we are headed. Or think we are headed. And those can be two very different things.

Talk of “forever homes” is a dangerous business. It was one of the most devastating lies to seep out of my marriage breakdown, actually; the sudden evaporation of home as it existed in the future tense.

Here’s a question. Are questions still rhetorical if the onus isn’t on the other to respond - because they cannot - but you’re not in possession of the answer either? On a beautiful day in 2021, a fortnight out from our tenth wedding anniversary, I found myself in the meta hinterland somewhere between questions and their rhetorical cousins. I was most definitely not on solid ground, even if, I thought grimly, I was on a freshly seeded and perfectly level lawn beneath my toes. My husband, tanned from a boating holiday with friends, and skittish from the discovery of a long-standing affair, announced he’d be leaving the family home as soon as he’d finished his five day post-holiday covid-compliant quarantine. And then came the questions. Where was I going to live? How would I pay for myself? Would I go back to banking? Banking?! I thought. That’s random. I’d left that world at 21. Here I was at 36 with a respectable 15 year career in a vocation I was passionate about, and pretty good at, and he sees banking in my stars? Wow. You think you know a person. The exasperated stream of questions continued but my mind drifted to more immediate logistics. I was wondering at what point it would be wise to ask whether the anniversary party we’d talked about was definitely off.

Its funny how the mind works. At that precise moment I had a dawning realisation. The seeds that had germinated under my feet would never form the turf under which my daughter would dance at her eighteenth birthday. For months that previous year I’d opened my curtains to what looked like acres of ominous black plastic sheeting protecting the fragile bare earth from the heavy rain and slippage that comes when Wealden clay meets sandstone ridge.

I’d prayed that it would not all slip away. Let it all hold fast. Just until things improve. Mercifully, it did. Hold, I mean. But it was too late.

I looked over his head to the small white bench behind him, luminous in the deep shade of the sunken rose garden, ensconced in the first flush of petals and no doubt vibrating atomically with the pulse of heady fragrance circulating and building in the afternoon heat. A large, shallow ceramic bowl of lily of the valley was resting on the seat. A housewarming gift from my sister-in-law’s mother. It was June and the garden was confidently hitting the end of its first Act. He’d bought me that bench. I’d never liked it but was heartened by its sentiment. He’d suggested that we’d sit down there together in the garden I was magiking and we would have a drink, talk and look back and up at our forever home with the sun setting behind it. I don’t recall ever seeing him sat on that bench. Allison’s lily of the valley had been growing in his spot for years. And the truth is, I’m not much of a drinker either. But still, the future gin & tonics for two and all they signified that I was to be cheated of, left a bitter taste. None of it was going to come to pass.

It took years to adjust and accept. And I never did sit on that bench.

The experience shows just how profound the cognitive dissonance can be between what we think is in our control and what we want to believe is real, and what is, in fact, reality and completely outside our total sphere of influence. It turns out, you cannot manifest a marriage. Much like tango, it takes two.

It was hard to let that garden go. To do so was to acknowledge that it was built on sand. But I was comforted by two things. Two things that I pass on in the hope that they may provide a level of comfort to you, too, if you are also caught in the fast outflowing tide between reality and the beach of an imagined future.

Gardens are the gardener as homes are their occupants and businesses their workers. They are our most autobiographical acts and simply not the same without us. As we move on, our mark upon what remains fades. And that is exactly how it should be. It frees us to allow more experienced, more enlightened, in fact, lighter versions of ourselves to leave new marks upon new places and new people. It would be pretty weird to occupy your childhood bedroom as an adult, complete with stuffed toys and dog-eared posters. Just as it would be unnatural for a garden to stay still as a taxidermied tribute to its creator. They themselves transform form and function also under new stewardship. And it is only then that you realise that you are just passing through. Just one caretaker in a long line that stretches before and after you.

Similarly, we will naturally outgrow a job or a person if they do not allow room for change, development, progression or team-work. If so, we are destined to be passing bit-parts and not the main character in those stories. And crucially, them in ours. And that is ok.

Secondly, we derive more pleasure from the memory of home than what we lose from the sadness of knowing we are not integral to its future. Gardens and rooms live on exactly as we knew them in the mind. As do the myriad of things that populated them. We do not need them with us now to recall their impact. The white cotton canvas hammock under the crab tree. The red and blue mini trampoline I had as a toddler. The tangy prickly pong of the sprawling juniper beside it that I’d often accidentally land in with a misplaced bounce. Homes and all that they contain do not lose their sharpness with the passage of time. I’m sure you can remember the exact smell of your grandparents’ home. The feel of the fabric of your childhood sofa. You do not need to take it all with you for it to stay with you.

The homes we create in others, do however, inevitably lose their shape as we over-write and re-wire. And thank goodness for that small mercy; that relational neuroplasticity means heartbreak respects both time and place.

Homes Past remain. It is us that go through many iterations and seasons. We cannot hold on to all parts simultaneously. To move forward, to grow, as we must, is to leave prior versions we have outgrown behind. Change is only possible with the acknowledgment that it comes at a cost. And that cost is loss.

Change your attitude to change itself, and the possibilities are endless. And what a very exciting place that is to begin.

Oh and the bench? Its coming with me to the new place. I’ve donated it to the little communal garden we’re creating, my new neighbours and I, in the slim, green wedge between the river and our row of little cottages. Long may it host the conversations, thoughts, prayers, first and last kisses of London.

V x

Let me introduce myself. My name is Victoria Valentine. Yes, that’s my real name. I chose it, actually. But that’s a story for another time. And no, I do not work in the adult entertainment business. Although I am led to believe I could make a tidy sum for my feet on Only Fans.. One to file away under EMERGENCY MEASURES should the pension fail to accrue.… Feet don’t age… do they? Mental note to tap up Lily Allen…

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. I’m Victoria and I’m here because I’ve had one hell of a ride of late. Best described as extremely UNfun. Followed by joy of such epic proportions as to flip every single one of your arm hairs up like a million little ketchup bottle lids. All at once.

poppopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopopop :)

Such is life when you’re forcibly ejected from the version you dutifully constructed that populated the excel spreadsheet according to The Plan. And then begin, instead, to freestyle it with No Plan At All. Do you remember those qualifiers for breakdancing as an Olympic sport for the first time? Like that.

So here we are. The Reboot. The Upgrade. The software patch to fix the glitches. VV.2.0. Some of these… discoveries… are genuinely too bonkers or good to keep to myself and simply deserve a wider audience. Other parts I suspect will resonate with anyone going through a big period of change in their lives. I’m here for the chaos. The renovations. The rebuilds; psychologically, structurally, practically.

Let me explain.

Five years ago I had it all. And then I lost it all. And I mean, ALL. And you know what? It was the absolute making of me. Not that I really got that at the time. Now? I could not be more grateful to have been booted down the road less travelled. Because I’m coming back swinging, m*therfuckers. I have wet wipes, cables for every port, paint charts, polyfilla, and I have a A* in Rolling With The Punches. Never was there a more frightening combination standing in line down at your local B&Q.

Let’s start where this all began.

The year is 2021 and I am 36 years old married mother of two. I have a boy and a girl. My daughter is the spit of me; a roiling ball of Celtic fire no happier than face to the wind. We share a wild mane and flashy smile that invariably smooths over our rougher manners and a propensity to speak truth to power when diplomacy would, no doubt, be the shrewder choice.

My boy looks like my husband, that is to say, what happens when a Sephardic Jewish refugee, no stranger to a ruptured sense of home and belonging, meets a pallid, purse lipped Northern Irish academic who grew up on the wrong side of Christianity to the border her father policed. As such, William’s Irish skin tans easily to a deep golden that would stretch all the way back to the Iberian peninsula if it wasn’t for SPF 50 and a quite frankly unhealthy relationship with his Nintendo Switch. My son’s social camouflage, however, comes less readily. He carries in him, I suspect, a long shadow of generational trauma and a genetic wariness of strangers alongside those teardrop ultramarine eyes, a razor mind that sets him well apart, and features set at angles in long slabs of stone. He is his father’s son.

I have a burgeoning career as a TV news anchor with the biggest broadcaster in the world. You may have even seen me. If ever you’d had to get up early for work, for a cheap flight, or were a bit high and still up from the night before.

I work in the twilight hours of your day, before the world, proper, wakes up. I leave home at 1:30am and I am in at 3am. I gather thoughts and assemble the troops, working out who we need where, and for what and why.

How will we tell today’s story of our time? What is it that we omit? What will I absorb so that you don’t have to? After the harder days, the shifts of school shootings, the grind of wars, the shock of natural disasters, the interviews with those of live with fear and loss, I long to return home.

I live in a 500 year old farmhouse in Sussex, 80 miles or so from the BBC newsroom, surrounded by woodland brooks and wildflowers with dogs, chickens, and bees. I taught myself beekeeping & tend to the cedar hives I built and the colony I adopted, split and grew. The bees I fear and revere in equal measure. Females, most of them. I keep my breathing as even as I can whilst my heart beats wildly as I inspect the combs and check for parasites. It is an unusual way to come down from the tide of cortisol that invariably seeps into the ebb and flow of delivering generally bad news to people, day in, day out.

But it works. You must be present and thoroughly absorbed if you to get through it unscathed. Not so different from the day job, I muse.

I grow a lot of our herbs, spices, fruit and vegetables and I swim in our pool next to a greenhouse that houses a riot of guava, melon, passionfruit and pomegranates. If in doubt, I create. If in chaos, I create. It has always been that way. And so now, I live in abundance. Abundance from the chaos. I’ve put asparagus down this winter in the hope and expectation of my first crop three years from now.

That was 2021. My daughter Iris was 1. I often count the years in Iris years. Partly, as the force of nature that she is, it is hard to remember what went before. But largely because her arrival marked both the beginning of the end, but also the beginning of the beginning; the fissure through which all the painful, raw, beautiful, better future would emerge.

It is 2021 and I am thinking about those asparagus and a promise he made. He loves asparagus and wants it fresh. Every year. Zero food miles. Ok, I can do that.

But first. Back to the here and now. Or then. 2021. Let me tell you a thing or two about radishes. Did you know how astonishing radishes are? You sow the seeds in the bitter cold, smaller than a grain of sand, in monumental doubt, and lo and behold they sprout. They sprout with a zest and urgency for life that is wondrous. Even with plucking out the weaklings and the passing pigeon or three, you’re crouched in the same spot, three months later, rubbing off the soil from more golf ball sized rubies than you can find salad recipes. Most of mine never make it back up the hill to the kitchen. They’re irresistible.

Asparagus, on the other hand, are very weird. They defy space and time as we understand it by the stop-clock of the radish. Did you know they might outlive you? Just think of it. The same plant pumping out a harvest whilst you’re laid up after your second hip replacement. They can live for twenty five years. They’re the deep sea angler fish of the soil. Phenomenally ugly, unwieldy, invariably male and with rhizomes bigger than my outstretched palm, they sprawl their fat tentacles beneath the surface and lie in wait. They lurk, seemingly doing nothing but taking up valuable space, for years. For years you must wait. Is it really worth it? Do I really want this? No one likes a disconcerting vegetable. Wouldn’t I be better off planting strawberries in there? Everyone likes strawberries.

Munching on a radish, staring at the empty space above the asparagus bed, I cast forward to 2024, to the certainty of those first spears, as they protrude unabashedly from the soil, like rows of teenage erections. 2024. What a thing. The asparagus I can imagine. But I can’t picture the rest of it. I don’t know how I’ll get there. The rest of life, I mean. Will things be so very different? Will they be even worse than today? All I know is I have to get through today. I force the gathering clouds away. I stomp to the greenhouse and sow twelve different varieties of tomatoes and three different types of basil.

I label it all meticulously on copper labels, and group them by whether they’re bush or vining varietals, whilst I mentally prepare interview questions for politicians, diplomats, analysts, salesmen and scientists for the next day. Our show reaches over 100 million people across the world every week, according to the marketing guys. I try to picture people I know watch. The Canadian guy who uses my British accent to drift off to sleep. The people who use me to teach English as a foreign language in South East Asia. The lonely, tired people in airports dislocated from their colleagues and families. One guy travels the breadth of America administering funds to worthy causes from staggeringly huge college endowments. He sees me more in hotel rooms and airport lounges than his kids back home. My phone buzzes constantly in my pocket as the producers banter back and forth on fiscal policy in-jokes and memes of world leaders. We’re an odd bunch, I think, affectionately.

My infant daughter sleeps soundly now in a wooden crate at my feet on a spare bag of sun warmed compost. She loves the greenhouse, with its pungency and tinny noises, The Roberts radio is always on in the corner. I like to hear it as I approach under the willow boughs. I should probably be listening to Radio 4 but I’m not. 6Music is my guilty pleasure. My toddler son is at nursery down the lane. As a journalist I’m classified as a key worker, along with “real” key workers; the doctors and nurses. Nonetheless Boris Johnson’s government allowed William to keep seeing his little friends during covid and more joined the gaggle when the Tories extended provision to all pre-schoolers. A happy, shrieking, emotionally unstable band of Covid escapees. It was a huge blessing to keep some semblance of routine whilst so many others scrambled desperately with split roles and identities now unhappily coexisting in pressure-cooker homes. My husband was equally desperate to get away from this house, this set-up, this… there’s no other word for it, dolce vita. Ok, two words. He has a duty of care to his trainees to teach them in person, he says. Things just don’t translate over Zoom. Besides, he needs… people. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Under a dead blue sky and forensically bright, refracted light I wonder grimly at the rates of domestic violence and child abuse as public and private commitments are thrust violently together for months on end during these extraordinary times. William though, blonde haired, blue eyed and smiling, comes back today with little rafts he’s made with twigs to sail on the pond.

I have all this. I’m blissfully happy and aware of my unbelievable luck in life. Except for one thing. One tiny wrinkle.

I spend every weekend longing for Monday morning so I can escape from a horrific marriage to a man I adore. I yearn for the time when my kind, shy nanny, all long fringe and upturned hoodie, will arrive, late, as she always is, to start work. And I’ll be, once again, in the presence of someone with a steady, emanating kindness that will gradually bring me out of the foetal position and the numbness that is both weapon and shield.

It is 2021 and I feel little fear and next to no pain. My perma-scratched hands bear testament but it extends much deeper. I am an international broadcaster and yet I am deeply skilled at the art of making myself invisible. At 36, with the world at my feet and a life worthy of a Hello! photoshoot, or maybe the prelude to an Hercule Poirot murder, I pray for sound of the lifted latch and for Beth to skulk in and shatter the waking nightmare.

That tiny wrinkle was the fault line that tore every painstakingly constructed piece of that perfect life I’d built over fifteen years, to shreds.

No part of that life now exists. All of it. Gone. The career, the enormous beautiful house, the dogs, the chickens, the bees, the garden and all of its produce I sowed, planted, nurtured, harvested, pickled, preserved and shared. The marriage. The husband. The saving grace of Beth.

And thank fuck.

Today I am 41. My hair is cut shorter, I’m slighter of build these days and I own far fewer but better things. Its as if all the extraneous crap just shed itself. The diamond rings are long gone but, I notice as I type, I still have soil under my fingernails. I have been a single parent to William and Iris for five years. We have a bond that is the kind of special you can only know if that’s the home you grew up in too.

A mini financial crisis, a cost of living crisis and a turgid housing market, (cheers, Liz Truss) meant three years of living like Rapunzel with multifarious dependents with neither stairs nor a door to a different future. It took me a while to work out I could abseil down the side from time to time. Let me tell you, dating at this age is WILD. Oh God. I can make your milk curdle with stories. Its been a riot. Remind me in future to tell you about Freshers Week Take Two and the Tale of Mr Biggles the Ginger Cat. Speaking of cats, I was repeatedly accused of catfishing… by impersonating, myself! I had to google it. Its a wild west out there for the uninitiated. And I really was, uninitiated. I had been with my husband for fifteen years. One aborted Tinder date ended with being towed out of a ditch by a tractor. Another was so bad I escaped out the restaurant fire escape half way through. Not before getting the waitress’s number though. She was cool and gave me some killer podcast recommendations. There has been love too. And for that I will be eternally grateful. For proof that the heart is a remarkable thing and there is possibility, romance, adventure and much to believe in and look forward to.

I am writing to you from the spare room at my benevolent but somewhat bewildered parents’ place. My son and my daughter share this one room with me. My son takes the sofa and I share the bed with Iris. Seemingly we live here now. I don’t know when we’re leaving. We don’t have a roof, you see. But a few weeks ago we didn’t have a floor either. So I’m taking the wins and whilst the roof goes up I’m ploughing my way through vast quantities of marzipanned fruit cake and chocolate florentine biscuits. Silver linings with early onset diabetes as a bonus. Plus I’m stealing the odd plant from outdoors to squirrel away and replant in the scratchings of my new plot. Yes, I have a new garden. And much of that to come. Tiny. No more than 25 feet by 20. But mine. And a little bit the bank’s.

William’s still asleep. The dogs, both different from the pair I had in 2021, are whining behind the closed door for me. The crescendo of anxiety is approaching door scratch-whinny territory. My time here on my laptop is nearly up. The sunlight is streaming through the window and it is time to start the day. All those years of 3am starts my eyes still snap open in the small hours, ready to commit thought to script.

A new life awaits us. It is time to emerge from the chrysalis.

How many questions do you have at this point? I know, I know. I promise I’ll get to them. I’ve turned all of them over in my own head at some point.

But this is not the story of what happens when everything goes to shit. This is the story of what happens AFTER that point. About the gathering up of self. The practicalities and practice of starting over. Of relocating, in my case, maybe yours, both in real terms, but also of who you are now, and who you will be. The humdrum, the extraordinary and the downright hilarious process of piecing together something different… Something… better. Trust me, if you’re walking this path right now, you have no idea how fruity it’s going to get.

The truth is, you’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep moving forward. Because you, like me, deserve to find out what happens on the other side, when all your hard work pays off. And when you’ve been stuck for so long, you deserve to come flying back out into the world like a rocket.

So, welcome. Welcome to the beginning of the beginning.

I hope your journey from this point feels a little less lonely, a little brighter, and we find the drumbeat for the pilgrimage ahead that honours you and all that you can bring to the world. Its going to be great. I can’t wait.

See you soon.

VV