Perhaps travel was less about glamour and more about developing the confidence to know I could look after myself in new, unpredictable environments. I hadn’t realised glamour meant the ability to adapt to changes, to find ways to communicate in difficulty, to make myself heard when there’s noise I cannot control. It turned out glamour was an action

There was also the assumption that as a person sleeping alone, I would be happy in a small bed, small room or even to sleep in a makeshift space. I complained about it to my sister once on a family holiday where I had a mattress on a mezzanine level, and people would be walking past my bed as I slept. She snapped at me, ‘We have our own room becaus

My ‘you’ could be liquid, flowing from one thing to another. It could contain many people and things, be so vast as to be God-sized, an oceanic you. Or it could be small and exact like a square of pure pigment, with a startling itselfness, which once it goes beyond me can transform all it touches.

I could see there was an art to the giving and sharing of pleasure and care at a table, or in handing out heaped plates to be eaten from people’s laps. Potential friends – potential lovers – could be wooed by making bouillabaisse, or roast potatoes, or a great fried egg sandwich; my ability to host, to provide domestic care, to cook with love, was

‘Professional Aunt No Kids’, or ‘PANKs’.

My mum arrived the next day and she and I painted the living room and my bedroom, joined by my best pal Becky and Bryony. As they painted alongside me, jobs divided up and walls completed through collaboration, I felt they were layering on something more than colour. I decided to interpret it as an infusion of care into the walls that would hold me

Sontag wrote about the symbolism of moving from one place to another, from an old status to a new one. She encouraged the graduating students to think about the experience as ‘a model for how you should try to live. As if you were always graduating, ending, and, simultaneously, always beginning.’ That’s what transitions in status give us, the chanc

When I called Katia to say thank you, she told me she’d been thinking about how when you’re single you don’t usually get the huge, special presents that people in relationships sometimes give each other, that they labour over and save up for. She wanted me to have that experience and grant herself the pleasure of giving. A grand, loving gesture was

I wanted through motherhood to give myself another try at existing. I thought it might ease my fear of my own disappearance from the world, of my being an endling.