Earlier this month, I went to London for the first time in almost two years. My last trip was in February 2020, just before lockdown, when ‘the Chinese virus’ was still a news story with no implications for my own life. I stayed with friends, a couple who have finally…

I love browsing in shops for clothes, but recently I’ve become confused. Sartorially, I no longer know who I am. I’m drawn to the colourful prints and jersey dresses of Seasalt, White Stuff and Fatface, but I’m not a yummy mummy with a Labrador and a husband who works in…

Before COVID and the mass experience of solitary confinement inflicted upon single people who lived alone, one of the standard pieces of advice handed down to lonely people and single people, who were considered the one and the same, was to get out and meet people. As if this were…

I was once lucky enough to be awarded a writing residency in France, in a village where Robert Louis Stevenson had spent time with a colony of Swedish landscape painters. At last, I could fulfil my teenage fantasies of being a writer in France, a country, unlike Australia, where creative…