The first week in January always feels like a crossing-over time, doesn’t it? Neither one thing or the other. I feel only half-solid during this week, as though my body is still deliberating with itself. And - because this is more mystical than I was intending, although I do mean it - it’s also the perfect time to do a big fat Year in Books review before we wind everything up and do it all again.

Here are the five books that meant the most to me this year, in no particular order:

Conclave, Robert Harris

I like to include in these lists a proper feet-kicking pleasure, and this year, Conclave was it. I watched the film first and immediately knew I would be all the way in - robes and ritual and petty intrigue are a heady combo for me - and was so happy that the book was as good or better. This twisty little gossip thriller takes us through the secretive backdoor dealings that surround the choosing of a new Pope, told through the perspective of the self-doubting Dean of Cardinals who will direct the process. The stakes feel genuinely high throughout, and Harris obviously loves a scandal - relatable - while never looking down on anyone’s sincere faith.

Ripeness, Sarah Moss

This was a dreamily atmospheric read in September: a two-part story of the same woman in different phases of life. Edith at seventeen is sent to Italy in the late sixties, to look after her aloof ballerina sister in the last phase of an unwanted pregnancy. Edith in her seventies lives in post-pandemic Ireland, in a community that has embraced her as a migrant but is becoming increasingly hostile to refugees. The two settings are so vivid you can touch them, and the split perspective means it’s both a beautiful coming-of-age story, and a late-life reflection on belonging, motherhood and identity.

Shy Creatures, Clare Chambers

Sometimes a book ends up here because, months later, it keeps coming back to me unexpectedly, and that was the case with this one: a gentle story about an art therapist working at a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s, just at the time when drugs and forced lobotomies were giving way to more progressive treatments. It’s fascinating to watch that shift in ideas play out, especially when the therapist is called out to treat a man who has been kept as a semi-prisoner by his aunts for decades, for reasons we don’t initially understand. Every character felt real, and the story was so human and moving.

Sandwich, Catherine Newman

I’d seen this book everywhere, and was fascinated by the number of raving reviews AND vitriolic ones. It’s narrated by the mother of a family, Rocky, precariously sandwiched between young adult children and elderly parents, with an unruly body and a decades-long marriage she’s trying not to explode.

I mean…that’s how it is, isn’t it? Do people not like seeing women of this age be messy and resentful and torn and in love, which is the way most of us actually are? I loved it, if you couldn’t tell. I felt infuriated, moved and seen, and I read it all in one go. (There’s a sequel!)

Death of an Ordinary Man, Sarah Perry

I knew this one would be wonderful, and it WAS. It’s a mini-memoir, of sorts: of the short nine days between Perry’s father-in-law, David, receiving a cancer diagnosis, and his death in 2022. Isn’t it peculiar that this is something we’ll all have to go through eventually - the tedium, sacredness, bureaucracy, horror, tenderness and black humour of seeing someone beloved out of this life - and yet it feels like a foreign country unless you’re in it? I love Sarah Perry’s writing: she captures David, and all the shifting feelings that surround his last fortnight, with a clear eye. Which is to say, there’s so much love in it, it sings.

Honourable Mentions

If you like…

…the nuances of later-life friendships, read Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout

…country house murder mysteries with a spiky modern twist, read Death at the Sign of the Rook, Kate Atkinson

…dreamy poetic meditations on space (and Booker Prize winners), read Orbital, Samantha Harvey

…thoughtful novels about colonial missionaries AND having your heart ripped out of your chest, read The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

…hard-won sibling relationships, read Home, Marilynne Robinson

…a bit of weird English folklore with a beating heart, read Lanny, Max Porter

…midlife romcoms with plenty of snappy lines, read You Are Here, David Nicholls

…star-crossed lovers and twisty time-travel, read The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley

…gossip, meltdowns and British musical history, read Me, Elton John

…high-concept fantasies set in academia, read Katabasis, R.F. Kuang

…unlikely friendships and watching someone reclaim their happiness from a bloodsucker, read The Wedding People, Alison Espach

…medieval women with ecstatic visions, read For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain, Victoria Mackenzie

So many good books in the world! I wish you joy of them!

Here I am, waiting for the train to take me to the Winchester Poetry Festival prize readings (!!!). Getting onto this longlist chosen by Actual Fiona Benson just about knocked me over in September, and I’d said ‘yes please’ to the prize reading without giving a huge amount of thought to the size of the occasion, and now I was on my way to do it in a delicate state of mind.

Taking full-length photos of yourself on the way to do something big and impressive is what people do, isn’t it? And I had given an unholy amount of thought to my outfit. So I propped my phone on the lamppost and took two steps back and pressed the shutter button on my watch. I’m not looking at the camera because the announcement lady started talking about trains at exactly that moment, and I am an anxious traveller so immediately looked over at the arrivals board.

Afterwards I thought a) yes, I do like my outfit; and b) why do I spend so much time being aware of how I might look from the outside; and c) what on earth do I have to do to stop looking old?

I’m not proud of that last one, obviously. I was very worried about turning forty, obsessively worried about it in fact, and then when I actually had my birthday I suddenly felt ageless and powerful and magnificent, like a Valkyrie had sprung fully formed from my temple. It was incredible. I had so much time left and so little care for what other people might think, just like the books said!! And if feelings lasted more than two consecutive minutes that would be alright. Instead I have had to work on maintaining this resilience, even though I’m a person whose ad algorithm is 60% collagen powders and 20% handheld microneedlers and another 20% face yoga for double chins.

Even though my resting-sulk-face is now resting-basset-hound-face and my pelvic floor has its own NHS number and I know from experience that this is not what romantic heroines are made of.

Even though I desperately want expensive skincare to be a scam, but I know someone who’s just got really into it and she looks amazing, damnit, but what good is that to me when I can’t justify the equivalent of a week’s grocery shop for five people on a single milky cleanser?

Even though I stand with my fourteen-year-old in the bathroom at night, side by side, both of us passing the spot cream and anxiously examining our new downy moustaches. When I got a spot inside the downy moustache, bedded in like a shiny conker in its case, I really felt like things had gone far enough.

The last thing I googled was ‘does Emma Thompson tweeze her moustache?’ I am not proud of this either.

It’s no longer true that no one talks about menopause and perimenopause - again, probably my algorithm, but women my age seem to talk about little else - and I’m grateful that I’m not being tossed into it blind and raging like all my foremothers, but I also sort of resent having to spend so much mental energy on it. My husband is the same age as me and nothing has ever permanently broken in his life; his body is one continuous line from his twenties to now. He’s lucky, of course, as well as being a man. And I don’t discount the midlife shifts in identity and purpose that can be so confusing and painful, whoever you are. But not for him this constant bodily fixing, preparing, enduring, readjusting. The dawning realisation that multiple childbirths did things to your body that won’t ever be undone. The BLOOD. So much limitation and change.

I would like to think less about it than I do, but I don’t want to be disembodied because so much of being in a body is joy, right? And the more you live in one, the more those things mean to you. I wonder if this is why I’m more passionately into sex and clothes now than I have ever been. It always makes me think of the angels in Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass - they envy humans their flesh, their eating and sleeping and density and goosebumps and headaches and feeling. They are beings of light, and they know we are stronger than they are because of it. It makes me think too of Andrea Gibson’s poem Tincture, which I have never yet been able to get to the end of without uncontrollably sobbing in a Lidl car park.

Anyway, I went to the prize reading. I met a lovely lady in the semidarkness of the auditorium and asked what her name was because I was being bravely social, and she said ‘I’m [Famous Poet You Have Idolised For Many Years] Fiona Benson’, so that was a great start. I got up when my name was called and read out my poem, watching my hands shake just slightly on the podium, feeling my joints loosen as the high of performance took over, listening to my gravelly voice with its silly uncategorisable accent made of all the places I have lived. The poem got a Commended award. I ecstatically ate a packet of salt and vinegar crisps on the way home, and loosened my belt all the way out.

Hello friends,

I wanted to write about intention today, how I want that to be the watchword of my summer, and every time I’ve tried I sound like my mummy-blogger self from the early 2010s: this is the big parenting revelation I’ve had after a whole two years’ experience, learn from me, I’ve solved it now! If there’s anything I have become severely allergic to in my late thirties and beyond, it’s sounding like I’ve found the thing that solves everything, because hello, that does not exist. Also resolutions always sound like diets to me. From now on, no more biscuits! I can’t do ‘from now on’, it doesn’t work. Life shifts too much for that; you have to keep adjusting as new puzzle pieces go down.

So I will say that I have felt an extreme inability to remember the date, lately - twelve times I had to write it on the boys’ orthodontist forms this morning, and I had to looked at my watch every. single. time - and I think it’s because my brain can’t believe we’re already in late July, with the summer holidays hammering on the door. 2025 has been a lot of things: a three-month wrestle with a mucky flu season, a new job, a big birthday, a lot of against-my-will dental procedures, a phone full of daily appalling atrocities. Something I’ve been in the grip of, not something I’ve navigated through myself. And I am a person who writes and prints off a weekly calendar for every school holiday. I do not like feeling like a cartoon character on a conveyor belt, being repeatedly hit over the head by Events!

(Also Instagram is kind of awful, these days, isn’t it? I want to check in with people I love and/or admire, and instead I get reams of shopping-channel skincare ads, and people doing that tilty-head lifty-foot thing with the Benson Boone song on. Does Benson Boone remind you of that one guy in the year above who learned how to do a wheelie and did one with a smug look on his face whenever there was a car waiting to get past? LET ME GET PAST, BENSON, I’VE GOT ORCHESTRA PRACTICE.)

So anyway, doing things with intention is what I would like to do over the summer, as much as possible. Summer with children, especially, feels like a rotating carousel of their needs and activities, and instead of feeling backed into a corner by this, I would like to intentionally take them out somewhere so we all have a good time, and intentionally do some exercise, and intentionally crash out on the sofa because rest is good, and intentionally read a chapter of a book because I’m an adult who knows best how to manage my own sanity.

We were talking the other day about how being grateful for things, seeking out things to be grateful for and then expressing that gratitude aloud, is another way of feeling intentional. I’ve not historically been one for gratitude journals as I am allergic to everyone’s twee except my own, but I do think there’s a lot of sense and wisdom in this. If you’re thanking someone at home for doing the laundry, or online for making art that’s touched you, you’ve chosen to stop and notice and say something to them; that feels like direction and deliberation to me. The opposite of helpless raging. I’ll let you know if I get as far as being grateful for Benson Boone.

***

I’d also like to finish some projects this summer, the biggest one being my 3/4-built studio at the bottom of the garden. (You can catch up with this build on Instagram if you’re interested.) Right now it has paint, flooring, skirting board, the internet, and a couple of pieces of second-hand furniture, and it needs the attention of an aircon technician and an electrician, then the rest of the furniture and the completion of about eighty snagging jobs. One of the furniture pieces I’ve already found is a desk, so I’m writing this in here now, actually. I would like to intentionally finish it so it’s a beautiful place to spend time in, so we’ve added something lovely to our house, something abundant to my working life.

What I really wanted was to furnish it entirely second-hand - this felt intentional to me too - but I’d underestimated Facebook Marketplace, which is of course like the Wild West for boomers. Here are some things I have had to come to terms with about Facebook Marketplace:

• how you have to scroll past eighty scam posts of identical grey sofas or bookcases before you find a real one

• how some people mark the item as ‘free’, and then when you click through, the caption says ‘it’s not really free, that’s just for advertisement’ - this makes me RAGE

• how most people don’t take the item off once it’s been sold, so you could find the most perfect sideboard you ever saw in your life, but you’ll be messaging Susan into the ether forever, she’s never going to reply to you

• how whenever the seller has described something as ‘an upcycling project’, it means ‘this item is so battered I should be embarrassed to ask money for it, but here we are, let’s pretend I’m doing you a favour’

• how a lot of armchairs are obviously from the sale of an elderly person’s house after they’ve passed away, and this + the ingrained grease mark from their head on the chair back makes me feel so melancholy I could weep

• how just occasionally you’ll get a grandad posing on his sofa with his thumbs up, and even though I know this is not a good sales tactic it feels like one to me

I am going to try extremely hard to get this all done by September, which would mean it’s been a year-long process to build it from start to finish. Considering Tim’s done the entire thing in his very scanty spare time, I’d count that as a big win. If you know Susan and her sideboard, please tell her to get in touch.

***

rachel__jeffcoat

A post shared by @rachel__jeffcoat

In my other job-life - the poetry one, not the dressing-up-as-a-Viking one - I’m still having a lovely time. I’ve had a couple of magazine/journal acceptances I was really pleased about, and I won the ‘Emerging Writer Over Forty’ category in the inaugural Kathryn Bevis Memorial Prize - I admired Kathryn hugely so this felt very special to me (not least because I’d only been forty for a month). And a poem of mine was included in a Poetry Pharmacy anthology called First Aid, published by Pan Macmillan. A poem of mine is in a book sold in Waterstones!! The dream.

I’ve got two poetry workshops coming up, if you’re already feeling the hot hand of summer around your neck: in September I’m doing a rerun of the round of Your Anthology Misses You I ran in the spring. If you didn’t manage to catch it then, and you’d like to study poems and write on the themes of hope, home, ancestry and bodies, you can get tickets here.

In October I’ve got a whole new round of Your Anthology Misses You coming, with all new themes: tickets for that one are coming in a couple of weeks. If you’d like first dibs on those, here on Substack and my Instagram page are the best places to follow, or you can follow my profile on Eventbrite.

I really love doing these four-week courses, watching people rest and grow in creative confidence over the course of the month. If you’d like an hour-ish a week where I pretend to be your emotional support English teacher and give you a bit of space to be creative, I’d love to see you there!

Things the most recent Your Anthology Misses You alumni have said about the course:

“This has been a treat: Rachel has so much insight into both the emotional impact of poems, and the skill and intention with which they're put together.”

“I loved the balance of analysis and creative writing. I wish my lectures had been half as enjoyable and meaningful as these sessions!”

“A bit of space for me to be creative again after many years, and most importantly, NOT anxiety-inducing!”

‘Most importantly NOT anxiety-inducing’ is a personal brand I can get behind.

What’s your summer watchword? How do you feel about Benson Boone? Let me know in the comments, plus anything else that’s on your mind.

x Rachel

I was going to title this post ‘forty lessons I’ve learned at forty’ but that felt like I was angling for a wellness podcast, and ‘forty things I feel very strongly about at forty’ was a bit wordy. (I’ve used it as a sub-heading instead.)

I know you can’t move for these types of posts on the internet, but as a counterpoint, I enjoy compiling lists on a deep spiritual level.

Forty things I feel very strongly about at forty, in no particular order

1. If you start washing your face every night you might not instantly look like Anne Hathaway in that Coachella movie, but it’s a moral victory. And you might also get fewer spots (jury’s out on that one).

2. Go to therapy. Oh my gosh, if you can possibly afford it, GO TO THERAPY. The patterns you fall into when you’re under stress? There’s a reason for them, and you’ll find out the reason in therapy. The things you worry about at 3am? THERAPY KNOWS WHY. It’s clarity and power to understand yourself better. It’s a gesture of respect to the people you live with. It changed my life.

3. I don’t care what the theories say, people love getting praise and I give it as much as possible, especially to children.

4. If you’re not heating up your banana cake and then laying on a thick slab of butter to melt into salty sweetness I don’t even know what to say to you. HAVE YOU PUT IT IN THE AIRFRYER? A revelation!

5. These days it’s the easiest thing in the world to get every damn thing you need to put on your body (except underwear, obviously) second-hand. It’s cheaper and it’s not killing the planet, so you win twice.

6. It is absolutely, 100% worth learning how to make béchamel sauce instead of using the thin white stuff in jars - it’s truly not as hard as you think, and your lasagne and fish pie will thank you.

7. Conversely, if you want to make birthday cakes for children instead of buying them (you can totally buy them!) get yourself a Betty Crocker mix. It’s a rare child who’ll be like ‘oh Mother, what a piquant lemon sponge you’ve made me’. They actually care about the unicorn you’re going to plonk on top.

8. Whether you consider yourself religious or not, find your own set of personal scriptures. Things that help you see into the deeper strata of life: movies, quotes, talks, poems, whatever. This world is muddy; it needs touchstones.

9. When I cannot cope, six times out of ten the reason is because my feet are cold. Cover up your ankles like a good Victorian, see if you feel better.

10. Switching from breastfeeding to formula gave me the space and grace to start being their mother, so I can’t (won’t) feel guilty about it. It’s not that way for everybody, but it was for me.

11. Do you remember, in Circe, when she tells the great sea god that she cannot bear this world a moment longer, and he says ‘Then, child, make another’? That’s one of my personal scriptures.

12. Get a footstool for your toilet; we are NOT supposed to be pooing in that position.

13. It’s ok to make things easy on yourself. I hate swallowing tablets so much and this year I decided to just buy the dispersible ones, forever. Why do I need to be good at this? I don’t, problem solved!

14. This has been a head-spinner for me: you don’t need to get ALL your emotional needs met by your partner. Being someone’s everything is exhausting for them, and friends/podcasts/Cynthia Erivo singing Wicked are right there.

15. There are literally only three acceptable reasons to sound your car horn: 1) polite tap, ‘the light has gone green, just letting you know!’ 2) alarmed, brief, ‘uh oh, you’re going to crash into me if you don’t stop!’, 3) jolly double blast, ‘I see you, person I know and love!’ Any other reason is (male) ego.

16. I’ve never, ever been diminished by travelling somewhere new, only expanded. It helps me make room for all the different ways of being in the world.

17. I have shouted - screamed, sometimes - at my kids more times than I can count, and the only time I feel bad about it is when I don’t apologise afterwards and give them a reason. Kids love it when you admit you’re at fault! ‘That was about me, not you’ gives them something to hang the experience on so they don’t blame themselves, it puts their own meltdowns into context, and it makes them feel so magnanimous to forgive you.

18. Remember that bit in Piranesi when his old self starts waking up and is in great distress, and he puts his hand on his heart and says ‘You are safe. Go back to sleep, I will take care of us both’? That’s one of my personal scriptures.

19. Stupid little walks work. I think our Stone Age brains remember the days when we spent all our time outdoors, which is why it’s regulating, even in the dirty dregs of February when everything’s an affront.

20. Having a pet is an exercise in mess and delayed heartbreak. AND YET. Every kind of love is worth feeling, isn’t it?

21. I hate the whole ‘romanticise your life’ thing but if you eat off a pretty plate and fold yourself a napkin it really does make you feel like a beloved thing. Annoying! Many such cases!

22. Things I will be telling my daughter: I wish I’d done more to keep my foot in the career door when I had children. We work so hard to be equitable in our marriage, but there’s an automatic power differential when one person is earning all or most of the money, and it rarely expresses itself in helpful ways.

23. Touch soft things. When you’re in a shop like Homesense or IKEA and you’re in the blanket section, touch the ones that look the fuzziest. Doesn’t it feel so nice? Now your Saturday is better and you didn’t even get to the meatballs yet.

24. You know that quote that says annoyance is sometimes the price of community? I believe in that; I believe that sometimes you need to show up for people in ways that are irritating or inconvenient. I feel like every time you do something for someone kiiiind of against your will, you’re running a line like a length of yarn between you, for both of you to hold. It’s meaningful, it’s real, it creates something.

25. Do your hobby in front of your children, if you have them. It teaches them that you’re a person, not a laundry-folding cipher, and that they don’t always have to be productive, they also get to find joy in some weird thing. Here’s a phrase that saved me: ‘I’m going to set a timer for 20 minutes, and at the end of that time I’m all yours. Do you want to hold the timer so you can let me know when it goes off?’

26. When you’re cooking dinner and feel that great weariness of soul that, AGAIN, you need to carry out this appalling daily chore that keeps you/everyone else alive, you need a little Cook’s Treat. I suggest a glass of cherry Pepsi Max and a mini Peperami, but you do you.

27. It’s ok for exercise to be totally enjoyable and never difficult at all, if you prefer it that way! Walk all the hills; try something silly; no one’s going to dob you in to Strava.

28. If you cultivate a reputation as someone who either replies to messages in four minutes or eight-to-ten days, no one’s ever mad when you don’t get back to them immediately. Or they might be, but that’s none of your business!

29. Sometimes ‘respect’ means ‘treating someone as a person’ and sometimes it means ‘treating them as an authority’, and you want the first one in all cases, not the second.

30. I have an, ahem, complex relationship with my child self, but listening to the music and watching the TV I was obsessed with as a teenager is helping me feel connected to her again.

31. I read an article years ago about the strange and slippery things that happen to your identity when you have small children, and there was a quote that said something like ‘People tell me “they’ll only be this young once”. I want to say “So will I”.’ I had to stop reading and bawl: I matter too! My life stands on its own, not just in service to the people I made! That’s one of my personal scriptures.

32. There are people online I started following and chatting with when their children were babies, and now they’re at secondary school - don’t let anyone tell you that online friendships aren’t real. I met some of my closest friends on Instagram.

33. I started to enjoy my wardrobe when I a) worked out what rough colour season I’m in, and b) realised I wanted to dress like a secondary school English teacher. It makes me so happy to wear a swishy trouser. (Ironically I would hate being a secondary school English teacher; teenagers frighten me.)

34. Speaking of! The people who are teaching our children every day are doing it for very little money and over brutally long hours - maybe only complain if it’s really important??

35. It means a lot to people when you look delighted to see them, and it’s not that much face work to do it.

36. You don’t ever have to go camping if you hate it, but if your family love it, find the things that make it bearable for you and insist on them. Mine are: air beds, proper pillows and duvets, a campsite with a plug socket for my fringe, fish and chips.

37. If you bite off both ends of a Twirl, you can use it as a straw in hot chocolate for six glorious seconds, before it collapses in a joyous mess in your mouth. Actually a necessary life experience.

38. I once heard Brene Brown say that when you desperately want something and it doesn’t happen, you’re going to be the same amount of disappointed whether you downplayed it and told yourself it wouldn’t happen, or allowed yourself to hope and be excited. So you might as well want. You might as well want.

39. That thing where we look down on regional accents and dialect is silly and made-up. In my late teens I carefully erased as much Yorkshire as possible - partly because people kept making fun of it, and partly because I felt like they should - and it’s made me happy to welcome it back in. I said ‘he’s sweating cobs’ the other day and felt SMASHING.

40. Do you know that part in Wolf Hall where Cromwell is thinking about his daughter who just died of sweating sickness, and she was learning Greek, and Mantel says: ‘He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.’ THAT’S one of my personal scriptures.

How great was my fringe when I was two? I’m real mad about it.

It’s past eight o’clock, which this evening, like most evenings, means I can no longer say anything. I haven’t taken a vow of silence, obviously: my brain is like a rat in a sack; silence is not its natural form. I mean that, most days, moving my mouth hurts more the longer the day goes on, and by 8pm on a busy day it’s usually done.

I say ‘busy day’ but here’s a list of things that set the pain off, in no particular order: a day where I have tried to sing more than twice; a day where I’ve eaten crisps (MY LOVE); a day where I’ve done what I consider to be a regular human amount of talking; a day in which I have not slept well the night before; a day where I have yawned a lot; a day where I forgot to cut up my toast into inch-wide squares; and sometimes, when I’ve avoided all those things, just a day where my mouth wants to watch the world burn.

It’s my first experience with anything chronic, something I keep repeating to hapless visitors who look like they might be listening. Chronic, isn’t it an interesting word, from the Greek, khronikos, ‘of time’, yes, like the leader of the Titans who ate his babies, that’s what my mouth is trying to do, eat my face. Mostly when we say chronic in a medical sense we mean something that keeps coming back - time and time again, right - but actually I think what we mean is that it’s a problem that’s outside time, somehow impervious to the thing the body naturally does over time, which is get better. Generally we want our illnesses to be stories, and there’s no story. We want beginnings and ends to anchor ourselves, and instead there’s just ‘for the present’, and ‘we’ll see’. A dissatisfaction all round!

Yesterday I went for a run in the cold - a bad idea - so had to stop talking by mid-afternoon. I prepped a note in my phone with the large title Best for me not to talk right now so I’ll write things down; how was school? and then, over the next two hours, laboriously typed things like ‘Click on the Chrome icon, then type in My Maths’, and ‘Time for you to get a move on’ and ‘Try the left hand again’ and ‘Did you hoover?’.

It’s a weird vibe with the kids when I can’t talk; I noticed this after my surgery in March. They are used to me running things, asking about their day, chivvying them to the next task, telling them to stop putting each other in headlocks, praising, sympathising. Vocal, all of it. Visible. When I am not talking they talk less too, avoiding me sometimes, or coming silently to type their response in next to mine, as though in solidarity. And I become less visible and tangible to myself. Having to think about whether or not to risk a solid breakfast, or sing along to the radio, or ask how their day went, makes my whole body feel tentative, conditional.

Somewhere at the beginning of winter I wrote a silly poem imagining a woman who wakes up one day, suddenly unable to look at herself in a mirror without starting a fire with her eyes. She tries her best to adapt, taking down mirrors, doing her hair by touch, averting her eyes from the newsagent CCTV. But without being able to see herself she stops feeling real, a poltergeist, haunting her own hallway. At the end of the poem, she walks into a lake to look at her own face one more time before burning up.

It was a fun poem to write and I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but a long, wet-sand slog of winter depression has followed. I wonder, now, how much being silent, and having to think so much about being silent, has made me feel less solid in my life. Do I need to hear myself to feel real? What does that mean? Or is it simpler than that - having obvious limits makes me less useful, and I can only see myself through the prism of being of use? How much of my essential self is body, and how much is mind? How fun am I at parties these days??

Problems for another newsletter. For now it’s January, it’s 2025, and my task this month is to work out how to live inside constraints - without continually setting little fires of rage around the hall.

PS - I have a dentist, an orthodontist, a mean hygienist and a periodontal surgeon all expensively on my case, which has mostly come about through bad luck and accident - thank you, but no need for advice!