I had a moment in the Enoch Centre: I couldn’t get out. I’d gone in to buy a diffuser from The Body Shop, to mask the smell of cooking wafting up from below. My downstairs neighbour’s tiny yapper has meat cooked for him, and the smell rising through the floorboards…

Returning through Central Station on Saturday afternoon, heading home after an 11-mile walk with a group of women I’d met through Facebook, I was stopped short by the sound of a piano. Public pianos have become a feature of stations and shopping malls, an invitation to contribute to street life…

On the first day of my first post-COVID holiday, on a Greek island, I got the post-COVID ‘super cold’. I’d booked the trip nine months earlier, and it was to be my first overseas trip in over two years, my second beach holiday ever. I did not grow up with…

Wandering through a community fete, held in a small, locally tended garden in the more middle-class zone of my very mixed neighbourhood, I spotted a boy standing behind a little table. To my child-free eyes, he could’ve been anywhere from eight to fourteen. On the table—his wares, I assumed—were a…