how to be creative @home

 ‘I can’t be really creative until I have a clear horizon

and all the road is clear ahead – then I can be as happy as can be’.

Alfred Hitchcock  

I fell into writing because it gave me a cover to think in print. It gave me time to think big things through in the quiet of my mind. It was low risk. I didn’t court readers or try to persuade anyone of anything. If someone stumbled on a blog post of mine, great. Yet even on the pages I scribbled – I always scribble first – I never told all, revealed all.

Until I realised that keeping quiet while the media blew a gale around me was never going to get my ideas out. Like a baby turtle, I would have to wriggle out of my burrow and waddle across the sand towards the waiting waves. No-one else could do this for me. I had to do it on my own – and I’m not there yet.

Initially I asked if I could publish my next book, HomeWork: essays on love and housekeeping, under a pseudonym. However, no surprise, the publisher refused. So here I am, staring at a blank page, wondering how to inspire other people to make the quarter of the day that they spend looking after themselves, their home and the people they love most feel more valuable. This is my mission. It’s to get more of us to place a higher value on the housekeeping that we do, to do with grace what we have to do anyway. Not as an end in itself, because it isn’t, but as a gateway to expressing ourselves creatively at home.

My aim is to encourage us to make friends with our domestic side – or simply to recognise that we have one. I focus on housekeeping not housework, because housekeeping is hands down the bigger animal of the two. Housekeeping includes deciding what to cook for dinner, finding time to make something for a friend’s birthday, noticing an ailing plant on your way to the front door, and remembering the wet washing in the machine as you fall into bed.

Misconceptions about housekeeping abound. Some people are convinced that the domestic realm is inward-looking, that it’s menial and without meaning. Others feel that, on balance, keeping up an attractive home isn’t a good use of their precious time and energy. Even those of us, like myself, who feel proud of their home, view housekeeping as a stealthy enemy.

Except that housekeeping needn’t be any of these things. And what we do at home really does matter. When we care for where we live, in a loving way, we’re also caring about life itself. Housekeeping has a ripple-on effect. If you make an effort to recycle, as I do, you’re likely to be concerned for the wildlife whose future depends on plastics not ending up in the soil.

Few people read Sigmund Freud’s essays these days. Admittedly, his Pelican paperbacks now sit atop our piano more for their colourful spines than for easy reference. Even so, Freud’s thinking still informs mine and I owe him a lot. ‘You’re not responsible for your parents’, he wrote, ‘your circumstances or, to a large extent, your character and your fate. You are however responsible for discovering what you find satisfying and for pursuing that.’ This is my second hunch about the home. Home is important because it offers us time and space in which to seek our own satisfaction. Seeking satisfaction is mysterious. What satisfies me might not satisfy you; what leaves me content, on a Sunday evening, may not touch you at all. Our satisfactions and contentments are more individual and subtle,than are our pleasures; they feed our soul rather than our ego.

Also, as we get older, the activities that we find satisfying change. What excited us when we were young often isn’t what we end up liking as the years pass. Even so, satisfaction isn’t simply an effect of maturity. If we’re to end the day feeling content, satisfied with how our life is, we need to begin our day in an unstressed, unanxious frame of mind. We need to be able to suspend our disbelief long enough to explore whatever creative possibilities arise across the day, and to do this in a curious, un-judgy way.

We don’t get more satisfaction from an activity because we’re good at it. Often satisfaction is our reward for engaging in activities that we aren’t especially good at. Rather than expertise, what we need most is patience. Especially at the start, we need to be able to push over the hump that all creative activities present us with, and to keep on going until we reach a state of flow in which we lose a sense of time, and of ourselves, as we tap into the energy behind the surface of things. Being in flow is the creative equivalent of being tipsy.

‘Rest’, observed Virginia Woolf, ‘isn’t lying down. It’s doing something that is different’. When we engage in an activity that is new, and that we aren’t particularly good at, we sharpen the lens through which we see the world. We come out the other side of it feeling a tiny bit more complex. Even five minutes, spent in this way, refreshes us, renews us. It doesn’t relax us so much as engage us. It leads to a sense of satisfaction that, though we may struggle to find words for it, is unmistakable to feel. Such feelings don’t last, of course; we have to go back again and again to feel satisfied the next time.

It seems ironic that most of us find it easier to achieve a state of flow at work than at home. However, as American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmilhayi has shown, we do. When we’re at work we overcome our natural state of awareness, that of distraction, by operating within a framework and a set of expectations that keep us on task and that invite flow. Whereas at home, where there’s less structure and not much feedback, we’re tempted to dally, to fall into self-doubt and to question the value of our efforts. We struggle to work from home (or, as Esther Perel observed, ‘with home’). It’s not just the laundry basket and the leaves in need of raking that distract us. We do too.

When we were young – assuming we were lucky – our parents and carers looked after the basics for us. Food appeared at mealtimes, bedlinen was washed and dental appointments were made. This lack of responsibility allowed us free rein to explore our creativity. However, once we become adult, the necessities of life can no longer be escaped. The dust-balls under the sofa and the empty fridge stare us down. Unless we’re easy-going to the point of slovenly, or are very good at delegating, or can pay someone else to do the housekeeping for us, if we’re to express ourselves creatively at home we have to stay on top of the housekeeping. We have to do household tasks that we wouldn’t otherwise choose to do, in order to make space (‘a clear horizon’) for more interesting things to unfold. Because it’s only once the housekeeping is done that can we give ourselves over to the kind of things that we love doing, and that challenge us in a deeper way than a clean home. All of which explains why, if we’re to flourish at home, we need a good, strong relationship with ourselves.

This, it turns out, is one of the biggest challenges that home life presents us with. It’s to get ourselves to do what needs to be done, in terms of basic necessities, to make space for activities that are creative, restful and satisfying. Cooking, gardening, renovating, making things – activities like these are restful because they engage us, challenge us and – because they defy mastery and are never ‘finished’ – keep us coming back to them.

We don’t usually think about the home in these terms. We don’t assume that our relationship to home is as important as our relationship to the people we share it with – or, if we live alone, as important as our relationship to ourselves. Often as not, we avoid talking about domesticity altogether out of fear that doing for others is to subordinate our needs to the demands of unappreciative loved ones. Or we worry that the work we do at home is a siphoning off of our precious energy into an existential cul-de-sac. Why else would we fail to mention the quarter of our day that we spend keeping heart and soul together?

This, however, isn’t my experience of home life – nor that of the 60 people I interviewed for this project. Rather, I came out of these conversations feeling inspired, and a touch more ambitious for my own home life. I came away believing that when you embrace the work that supports a pleasant home – for good food, clean clothes and attractive living spaces – you open yourself to the love that makes everything that you do at home feel worthwhile.

dinner for 13

I first heard the American negotiator Priya Parker speak on a Katherine May podcast in which May confessed to disliking social occasions. She said that she often declined them or attended out of guilt and then scuttled off home early from them. Intrigued by the podcast, I listened to Parker’s book The Art of Gathering – about the importance of getting people together for weddings and funerals and everything in between – while painting the front hall over Easter.

Katherine May has an adult autism diagnosis. Even so, after reading her books and working in mental health, the main difference I can tell between her and myself, a so-called normal person, is that May is willing to say out loud what most of us keep a lid on. So I was interested to hear her voice a view that while I don’t share I do have some sympathy for.

During my marriage, I often left social events before Paul, my ex-husband and a party person, did. Sometimes we made a tacit agreement in the car, on the way to the event, about leaving together at a certain time. However, as our kids got older and Paul worked harder, increasingly I left events before he did. I left because I don’t drink alcohol and tire before midnight. I left on behalf of the morning ahead, wanting to be up and ready for it. And I left because even when I was out I felt tied to home with invisible strings of love and responsibility which alcohol happily dissolved for Paul. Even so, I’ve always enjoyed social occasions and don’t fully understand it when people say they hate parties (though clearly they do).

Having people for dinner was something that Paul and I did well together. Apart from early parenting, it was perhaps as close to teamwork as we got. From the start, it was something we saw eye to eye on. Of course there were surface tensions. He liked a level of formality that I felt embarrassed by (he loved setting the table so it gleamed and had a thing about ironing napkins and having lots of candles). I liked it when people broke into intimate chats around the table whereas he liked to sit at one end and, at the start of dinner, orchestrate one big conversation on a giant theme.

Still, we both agreed that having friends for dinner was about the people not the food, and that a special kind of intimacy springs up around a table when the pressure is off and the lights are low.

It would be easy to romanticise the dinners that Paul and I gave in London, Melbourne and Hobart, when life seemed to be laid out before us – with more years before us than behind us – and when friends tended not to have food restrictions or babysitters or early morning gym sessions.

Even so, having large dinners is something I’ve missed since my marriage ended – two years in July. Over Easter, while painting the hall, I decided to change that. After chatting with a friend, I figured that the only thing holding me back was a lack of chairs to seat guests on. Apart from being an artist, Paul’s father dealt in antiques and, over the years, he passed on countless chairs to us; however, all these found new homes when Paul left for Italy. To remedy this, late one night I went on-line and bought 10 black fold-up IKEA chairs. Then I put a ring around a Friday night, in a few weeks’ time, and set about inviting friends.

Those few weeks have now elapsed, and tonight I’m expecting 12 for dinner, 13 including myself. Meanwhile I have the tail end of a cold that my daughter, who’s moved back home temporarily, gave me. And I have the hardest part of entertaining ahead of me – the prep. Cooking food and setting the table isn’t hard, exactly. The problem for me is that they take place in real time which I have a limited amount of. But it’s not just the time needed to prepare. The problem about entertaining, for me, is that it’s elective. It’s voluntary. No-one is forcing me to have a big dinner. And yet I still want to do it. I want to do it even though I’m socially shy and I’m not a great cook; and even though it means making time to do something I’m conscious that not many of us do nowadays. So why do I do it? Simple. I do it because I believe in the value of bringing people together, especially now that for multiple reasons we do it less often.

*     *     *

As I sit typing this at the kitchen table, the dishwasher whirs in the background. So, how did the dinner go? Well, my vegetarian and gluten-free friend turned out to be in the US and not South Hobart, which meant that my dietary-restricted Lasagne was in vain – although it was pretty nice nonetheless, and even though it could have been served hotter. Overall, I think the dinner was a success. Several times I was pulled out of the room to do something in the kitchen or to talk to my daughter and, from the loud hum of conversation next door I felt confident that I wasn’t missed – always a good sign.

The main thing is that I did the scary thing and had the dinner I wanted to have. I wasn’t put off by the hour-before-the-guests-arrive-nerves that hit me hard when, a rectangular casserole dish in my hands, the oven tray support broke away from the side of a hot oven and I had to beg my daughter to fix it before I lost it. All in all, I didn’t feel nostalgic for the dinners I once had with Paul and wish that I was seated at one of those. Nor do I remember minding not being part of a couple. After the main course, when I moved four people around to change things up, and managed to seat all the men at one end of the table, I decided to leave it and not to fuss. And just after midnight, when I cleaned up the kitchen before going up to bed, leaving the glasses on the table till morning, I felt less tired than I used to do after a big dinner.

spare

 ‘You can disagree with my opinion,

but not with my experience’.

Krista Tippett, On Being

Two weeks ago, late on Sunday, I finished listening to the audio of Prince Harry read his memoir Spare. As the pace quickened towards the end I felt I couldn’t not listen to the final hour, even though it was time for dinner and my son had just come home hungry.

An hour later, as the credits rolled, I felt sad. The spell was broken and I knew it would be a while before another book caught me up in it to the same degree. I also felt that it was too soon for me to write about it, and make sense of it that way. If I did, as countless journalists had already done, I knew that I’d be writing about my personal reactions to Spare, my own emotional backwash, and that any reader who didn’t know the book would be left wondering why I was making such a fuss.

Most of us think, somewhere deep inside, that every memoir is unreliable. It just has to be. How can, or why would, anyone go to the trouble of stringing their life into sentences unless they were unconsciously motivated to make themselves come out on top? Surely, our skeptical thought goes, this is doubly the case if the narrator is a Windsor who is keen to amass enough sales to cover the cost of security into the future to safeguard his American wife and young family.

I started listening to Spare on the day that Audible released it because I was curious to find out my reaction to it, having read reviews by a clutch of journalists and opinion columnists. Besides, I enjoy a good story when it’s read by the author, especially when it’s backed by great production.

The first thing that struck me about listening to Spare was that 17 hours of audio takes place in real time. Even listening to it on dog walks and while cooking and driving and folding laundry and weeding, it took just over a week for me to hear it all the way through. This led me to suspect that even if the journalists whose reviews I read had got their copy of the book prior to its publication, unless they took three days off work it seems unlikely they’d have read the book through before filing their review. More likely, they’d have used the index at the back of the book to orient their reading and skew their responses. They’d also have had to make a careful psychological move to exempt themselves from the packs of journalists that the book is a critique of – in particular, those writers who’ve earned a sizeable income from creating a version of Harry’s experience that disagrees with his own.  

Spare is an attack on the kind of journalism that was tawdry when Princess Diana died in a car crash 1997, and seems to have gotten worse, spawning the kind of stories that make readers feel grubby to read and that, even when we claim not to read them, percolate through.

Spare is a rant against modern media. But even moreit’s a love letter from Harry to his royal family. Clearly William did punch Harry in the kitchen towards the end of the story; however, by this point in a downspiral of events, this scuffle in the kitchen comes across as a sign of William’s humanity rather than of anything sinister. For an heir to the throne to be under that much pressure, in that shiny a fishbowl, and not to throw a punch at his younger brother – this seems more incomprehensible.

Spare reads like an adult version of the Harry Potter novels – and not just because of the protagonist’s name. The story gathers steam as the set scenes change and lead characters come and go. It opens in grand houses (mainly Clarence House and Balmoral, the details of which are stunning), and moves on to schools (Ludgrove and Eton – where Harry exceled in corridor cricket and, later, smoking hash out the bathroom window), game parks (Botswana and South Africa – where Harry is fairly free to roam and discovers that he’s not the centre of the universe), multiple British Army and Air Force training barracks (where Harry’s training starts with being forced to drink diluted urine from a black plastic bottle before early morning runs, and ends with learning how to fly Apache helicopters), various war settings (Iraq and Afghanistan – where every time Harry gets the hang of his job some journalist blows his cover and forces his return home), and on to Frogmore Cottage (Harry and Meghan’s shortlived home after their wedding), Vancouver and, finally, a run of gated houses in California.

Apart from Princess Diana, who doesn’t leave Harry’s thoughts for long yet isn’t fully remembered by him until he enters therapy in his late 20s, King Charles comes across, somewhat surprisingly, as a good guy. Not quite Dumbledore, but not far from it either. Charles calls Harry ‘darling boy’, advises his son not to read the papers (Harry does), embarrasses Harry at the right developmental moments (Charles claps at the wrong places during Harry’s play at Eton), sends his teenage son off to Africa where Harry finds himself and falls in love with the landscape, animals and people in a way that was never possible for him in Britain (bar nights of abandonment that he spent with friends in the underground party room at Clarence House).

The role of Voldemort, the baddie in Harry Potter, is shared between Rupert Murdoch and Rebecca Brooks. They are the people who pay the ‘paps’ who hound Harry and any girl that he happens to date. Things get so bad that for a while Harry resorts to leaving nightclubs in the boot of his security man’s car, arms crossed over his chest – just as, apparently, Diana once did. Eventually he stops going to nightclubs and stays home – which by this point doesn’t feel like home. The other baddies in the story are in the pay of the court. These people form the publicity machines which organise the window displays for each of the royal houses. Only, of course, it’s the press that calls the shots. If one of the royal press offices offers the tabloids a story about little Johnny’s first day at school, in exchange for suppressing a story about Prince Andrew’s most recent transgression, and the tabloids go ahead with the story about Prince Andrew, the royal press office can do nothing. If Harry’s word is to be believed, the sense of fear and vulnerability inside the Royal Family is now so keen that its senior members would rather be in the hands of their two-faced press officers than go naked into the world.

I have no doubt that the Royal Family – who are served up the papers on silver platters with their breakfast – hate the publication of Spare. They must have breathed a collective sigh of relief when the ghost writer cut 400 pages from the 800-page draft that Harry handed over to him in 2021. Even so, each portrait is lovingly detailed. Characters are described in the round – at moments breathtakingly unflinchingly. For a buttoned-up royal family who prefer not to hug or to kiss, to have this much honesty and revelation in print must be tough. Also, if Netflix does go through with its proposed serialisation of Spare, there will be no escape for them. Thanks to Harry’s pen, and The Crown, this generation of Windsor’s will go down in history more indelibly than in any royal biography gathering dust in second-hand bookshops. A televised serialisation ofHarry’s memoir will be riveting on every level. Because whatever else it is, Spare is a work of culture which leaves the reader richer for having been immersed in it. Who’d have thought, after being fed all that pap from the tabloids, that the royal family could be so interesting? Harry and his ghost writer JR Meohringer are to be thanked for this captivating, one-off life story (not over yet). It deserves to be widely shared.

But for all its successes, I ended up feeling that, on an emotional level, Spare fails. Harry’s mission to be understood seems naïve. The people who he cares about most (Charles, William and, from heaven, Queen Elizabeth) will struggle to read between the lines of the text to see the love with which it is written. Journalists, meanwhile, will get their own back by taking Harry down for naming how many soldiers he killed in combat (27), for being open about his drug taking (oh the shame), and for naming a friend of his who later suicided. Meanwhile the public will read a few reviews, now already in the past, use them to bolster their own opinions about The Royal Family, and breathe a collective sigh of relief that Netflix’s planned serialisation absolves them from reading the book for themselves.

Besides, perhaps a bit skepticism for Prince Harry is valid. Even after reading, listening or watching Spare, none of us will really know what it’s like to be him. However successful we happen to be, we’re unlikely to stumble on a death threat as we open our morning emails. We’ll never have to disguise ourselves before shopping at Waitrose or Coles. We’ll never know what it’s like to never to be without security – and to continue to need it into the future for fear of ‘the crazies’. Because, even if we have watched The Truman Show, we’ll never know how it feels to actually live in a goldfish bowl. Except that now, thanks to Harry’s efforts – his persistent and admirable wish to be heard – we know a whole lot more.

Two weeks have passed since I finished listening to Spare. During that time, Prince Harry has taken on some of the characteristics of Shakespeare’s King Lear in my mind. Why so? I think it’s because Prince Harry made a similar mistake to the one that King Lear made, in assuming that his family loved him unconditionally when, as it turned out, they loved him contractually (in his youngest daughter’s words, ‘according to my bonds’). When King Lear divides his kingdom between his three daughters, and lets his army go, he isn’t being reckless. He does it to oblige his eldest daughters who then turn on him and refuse his entry into their castles, where he’d planned to stay. Meanwhile Lear drives his youngest daughter to distraction by pleading for her love (as his daughter) and loyalty (as his subject). As a result, a stripped-down Lear finds himself alone on a heath, railing against fate and going spare. This is not unlike Prince Harry’s panicked scrabble, at the end of his memoir, for security to protect him and his family from the paps who come after them when they flee with a few suitcases to Vancouver.

Hopefully, Prince Harry will realise the impossibility of pleading with his family for what they can’t give him – love and loyalty – before it’s too late and the press machines shut him out of the castle forever. Which would be a pity, because Harry’s love for his family, and for the symbolism of royalty, is genuine. Also, he has red blood in his veins and doesn’t come across as entitled. Like Princess Diana, he loves and is interested in people. This makes him a fabulous observer – surely something the Windsor’s need right now.

when friends leave

It was towards the end of dinner with friends who’d cooked a roast vegetable pasta dish to thank me for looking after their stick insects while they were overseas. ‘Did you hear about those friends of yours’, asked David, ‘you know, the lawyer and her writer partner, who have moved to Sydney?’

‘Which friends?’ I asked, sifting through my mind and trying not to panic.

‘You don’t mean Anna and Zac, who’ve moved to France with their kids?’

‘No’, said David, ‘the ones in West Hobart with the pink camellia bush out the front.’

‘Oh’, I said, ‘That must be Sue and Tom. No, I hadn’t heard that. Just goes to show how out of touch I am.’

That night in bed, I flicked through my notebook to find the list that I made a month ago of friends who, just this year, have left Hobart. After adding Sue and Tom to the list, I counted up 12 names. ’12 friends’, I thought, trying not to make a big deal of it. ‘That’s a lot of friends to lose in one year in a place the size of Hobart’. I stared down at the list. Covid, I thought, had a lot to answer for.

But of course it wasn’t just Covid. Wherever you happen to live, change is real and inevitable, even when it’s unwelcome. Our lives are made up of so many moving parts that it’s impossible to ascribe one cause to the rippling changes that follow from one person putting one foot in front of the other; let alone if that person is part of a couple or family.

Not wanting to feel melancholy before sleep, I shut my notebook, opened up my book – Heather Havrilesky’s quietly brilliant ‘What If This Were Enough?’ – and, after reading an essay or two, found refuge in sleep.

Next morning, I opened my notebook to check that there really were 12 names on the list, and that the mass departure of friends hadn’t been a bad dream. But no, there they were, 12 names staring back from my lined notebook, and this even without including partners or adding my ex-husband to the list.

It wasn’t until evening, walking my dog on the beach, that I had enough headspace to think about this again. Why, with no warning, this sudden exodus? Did the friends who’d left Hobart know something about the place where I live that I don’t?

At the beginning of winter, when I drove Jodie home after dinner at my place, she told me that she’d been offered a new post in Sydney. I wished her well, knowing that it was the right thing for her, although not necessarily for her cats. When Anna – a magazine editor who commissioned 4 stories from me – and her family moved to Europe for her kids’ education, I congratulated her on a brave move. When Tessa, a friend who spent 2 years working for a bank from home, was lured to Brisbane for what we hope will be a dream job, I cooked her dinner before she left and told her, in a follow-up text, that good friends didn’t have to stay in touch. When Natalie gave up trying to make Hobart work for her, after a tricky death in her family, and moved to Eastern Europe (happily, if her Instagram posts are to be believed), I felt relieved that she’d found an existential answer to an impossible situation here. When Phoebe – my first yoga student and now firm friend – and her partner moved to Sydney to return to her roots in Balmain, leaving me with a peony bush which thankfully is thriving in a pot by my front door, I reassured her that she was doing the right thing. And when older ex-neighbours, Missy and Geoff, moved to the north of the state to build a modern house on the banks of a river, I asked them around for dinner so they could show me the plans of their new build.

Still, it’s been hard not to feel the loss of these friends, and four others. Especially when I go on to create a sub-list of friends who, during my marital separation, stayed loyal to James over me (though I vowed friends wouldn’t have to choose between us, some did anyway). I don’t blame anyone for this. It seems to be something that happens among friends in the confoundment that follows an unexpected break-up.

The departure of 12 friends from Hobart might matter less, I tell myself, if Hobart were a bigger place. Except that the sadness I feel, at friends leaving, really has little to do with the scale of the city I live in. Certainly, when Paul and I left London, a truly vast city, and then 8 years later Melbourne, another sprawling city, our friends at the time made it clear that our departure was their loss too.

None of us own our friends. We can’t make them like us any more than we can make them stay near us if they do. Not even a good friend makes life choices based on the impact their leaving-taking will have on us.

When I’m in a self-pitying mood, I can make the leave-taking of friends into a drama; with me, of course, at the middle of it. However, mostly I don’t do this. Mostly I don’t feel that I’ve been forsaken for better places, for better things. I know that life is more like standing on the shore, watching the tide come in or out, while boats sail past, than it is like standing at the front of an orchestra, wearing black and waving a baton. The fact of friends leaving for elsewhere seems tidal, a fact of life and not some paranoid conspiracy designed to leave me feeling friendless. Besides, I know that the various elsewheres that friends have left for aren’t better than the place I call home – and that I’m not just stuck here because this is where my kids and I happen to live and I’ve convinced myself I’ve put down roots.

Some people, I imagine, are never prey to doubts like mine. They stand on the seashore, alive to the comings and goings of the people they care about, without taking it personally. Or they stand at the front of the orchestra, gesturing to the strings at the side and bassoon at the back, shaping their life in their own image. However, I suspect that many of us stand between these two positions. We’re affected by the life choices that friends make, carrying around the impression they’ve made on our souls when they go. But we don’t let on about this, preferring to stay quiet; not wanting to get in anyone’s way and choosing to cheer from the sidelines. And we say, on hearing the news, ‘How exciting!’ without feeling anything like excitement ourselves.

A few days ago, something happened to jolt me out of my introspection. Just as I was worrying that life might be passing me by while I had my head down gardening, writing, cooking and teaching yoga, I received an email from the manager of the big yoga studio where I practice most days, and where I teach the odd class when a teacher can’t make it. For the last few weeks, I’ve hatched the idea that the truth – that I’m not a very good yoga teacher – had filtered through to the studio manager, and that this is why she hadn’t contacted me lately. But no, in the email, the manager asked if I could teach a regular class – 7am on Wednesdays – when the current teacher, who has far more experience than I’ll ever have, goes interstate. Registering the irony, that I was benefiting from this teacher leaving Hobart, I replied straight away to the manager and, in pressing Send, changed my own little world for the better.

what do I really like?

Before I started my on-line design course, bed sheets were just sheets. But then, encouraged by the course, I joined Instagram and, quick smart, my feed filled with images of bedlinen. These linens weren’t just sheets. They were a feature, a statement, even a playlist.

Occasionally, during my latter years in London, when I wasn’t wasting time flicking through the Boden clothing catalogue – and wondering why none of their models were over the age of 25, I was studying the The White Company brochure, waiting for the yearly sale which made their high-end bedlinen temporarily affordable. Even then, I didn’t buy real linen sheets, but white cotton ones. On moving to Melbourne, I switched my loyalty to IKEA, whose cotton/linen blends saw me through the next fifteen years of family life. My kids had coloured duvet covers on their beds, but otherwise our laundry consisted of whites and neutrals.

Within weeks of starting my design course, I lost my innocence in relation to bedlinen. Why choose white sheets, we were schooled to think, when they’re hard to keep bright without resorting to bleach? More importantly, why choose boring old white sheets when niche companies offered an explosion of coloured linens?

Recently, I invited friends to stay. When they accepted, I promptly bought a double bed from Marketplace. That same week, I fell down the bedlinen burrow on the Internet. Within half an hour, a simple search for ‘linen sheets on sale’ found me in an existential morass – not helped by the fact that I hit the search button when I should have been cleaning up the kitchen before bed. There is, I discovered, no such thing as cheap linen sheets. Linen flax – like cashmere and truffles – is expensive to produce. It lasts longer – some say a lifetime – than do cashmere and truffles. However, unless they’ve fallen off the back of a truck, linen sheets just do cost.

‘Wait a minute’, I said to myself, rubbing my eyes and looking up from the computer screen. ‘Do I even want linen sheets?’ Realising that my search had left me feeling seasick, I gave it up and went to bed. After scrolling through pictures of countless beds, made up by ‘bed stylists’ and shot by accomplished photographers in just the right light, I’d started to feel anorexic about bedlinen. Never again, I thought, as I poured myself into bed, would I try to buy sheets on-line.

Last Sunday, after visiting the farmer’s market, I tied up my dog to a pole next to the bookshop and entered the homewares store next door. Inside, I made a beeline for a table of half-price bedlinens, and flicked through white, pink and grey sheets. Within ten minutes, I left the shop with a packet of white linen sheets under my arm. Even as I greeted my dog, I knew that my purchase had been driven by impulse. Still, I asked myself, what was wrong with that?

Half an hour later, in the grip of second thoughts about buying white sheets when coloured sheets might have been a more interesting option, I returned to the shop. First I stared at the grey sheets, wanting myself to like them. However, the inmate-grey shade did nothing for me. What about the baby pink ones? ‘We’re closing in five minutes’, called the manager from the till. I knew that pink sheets weren’t the best possible choice. Even so, they were half price, they were lovely and they were different. In that moment I felt a rush of confidence that I could make them work. With a short breath in, I picked up the pink sheets and exchanged them for my white ones at the till. On arriving home, I pulled the linen sheets from their turtle-strangling plastic and put them straight into the washing machine, wanting to make my purchase irreversible.

Later that day, before going inside after turning off a sprinkler, I visited the pink sheets that I’d pegged to the line. Perhaps because I’d never seen coloured sheets on my line before, they looked pink as pink, to the point of clashing with the garden behind. But, I reassured myself, the fabric was still wet; so perhaps it was hard to tell. Next morning, the sheets looked no less pink. In themselves, they were lovely. The quality of the linen was clear. They were the kind of sheets that you could tie together and climb down from a top-floor window during a house fire on. Still, no matter the quality of the linen, the sheets were too pink. I didn’t want to have to style a whole room around pink sheets. ‘Damn it’, I said to my dog, who looked at me unperturbed. I just wasn’t a pink sheets person. I’d fantasied that I might be, that I could be. But I wasn’t.

Standing at the clothes line, it struck me that I’d spent my whole life caring about the kind of things that, in the grand scheme, don’t really matter. And there was every chance that – short of a labotomy – I would spend the rest of my life caring about things like the colour and quality of bedlinen. I looked back at the dog and laughed, feeling sick in the pit of my stomach. Just as I’d painted my ex-husband’s study three different colours before working out the right colour for the room, I’d made another expensive error in relation to what I really liked. Instead of listening to my inner voice, I’d overriden it in a quest to reinvent myself and to be modern. To be pink.

As I looked at the sheets billowing on the line, I knew that I wasn’t interested in things being different for their own sake. Besides, if I really did like coloured sheets, I’d have worked that out by now. I was too far into my life to change my preference from neutrals to pastels. My son, who’d raised his eyebrows in surprise when I’d mentioned buying pink sheets, had been right. Damn it!

What to do? Pretend I like pink sheets? Sell the sheets on Marketplace? Dye them? Or push them to the back of the cupboard and regret at leisure?

After my next yoga class, I searched ‘textile dyes’ on my phone. I wanted to know if the process of home dyeing had improved since I last failed to dye something in my washing machine. Half an hour later, I stood with my back to the sewing patterns in a vast homes store, staring at a rack of dye colours. Trying not to think too hard, I picked up a washing-machine pod of ‘flint grey’ dye and took it to the till. Two hot washes later, my pink linen sheets were back on the line. They weren’t perfectly dyed; there were spots where the dye was a bit darker. But they definitely weren’t pink, and nor were they inmate grey.

When I returned to the clothes line at dusk, I did a double take. Now that the sheets were dry, they’d turned a beautiful flint grey that I loved all the more because of everything that had gone into creating them. Phew.

the way things were

Last week a neighbour sent through a text, offering to buy my house. For ten minutes, as I cleaned up the kitchen, I contemplated selling it to him. Then I declined the offer, explaining that I felt I hadn’t finished my life in the house.

My ex-husband, who gets a share of the house price if I sell, would probably like it if I sold sooner rather than later. My kids’ path into a crucifying property market would definitely be eased if I sold. But I promised myself to make no big decisions for a year after James left, so it felt simple to decline. So simple that I felt unsettled for days after.

Last weekend, catching myself ruminate at the end of a paint-roller, I called an older friend who recently returned to live interstate. I knew that I needed to talk to someone like Kate. Not about the house offer, which was still on my mind, but about the arrival of another friend who’d just flown in from Europe to work for six months.

‘Have you a minute to talk?’ I asked Kate. ‘Yes’, she said, ‘fire away’. ‘Well’, I said, ‘it’s about Clara’. Clara, I explained to Kate, is a German friend who went to university in the UK with James. Clara is Catholic, a lawyer and mother to a little girl. She’s also godmother to our son. Then I described to Kate how, before Clara left Hobart, 18 months ago, she and I stole a day away from normal life and spent it on Bruny Island. Sitting on a beach, as waves rolled in, Clara schooled me in a sisterly way to do everything that I could to mend my marriage which, I’d just confessed to her, was showing signs of wear. Apart from the emotional pain of separation, which went without saying, Clara warned me of the financial stresses that had befallen all of her separated friends. If James and I broke up, she said plainly, I’d never be compensated for everything that I’d put into family life, and would have less money when I was old. Sitting on the beach, I felt shocked that Clara had taken the strain in my marriage a big step further than I, even in quiet moments, had taken myself. I got up off the sand, brushed myself off, and assured Clara that things were, even if not rosy between James and me, basically fine, and that I was confident that we were in our marriage for the long haul.

Clara, I explained to Kate, was a dear friend. But now I was worried about seeing her because I knew that she felt let down by my separation from James. And there was something else that was upsetting me. I was, I said to Kate, beginning to feel like I was moving on, finding a way forward. And I didn’t want to be dragged back into swirling eddies, to face down questions that I couldn’t answer.

‘Just tell Clara that you’re feeling vulnerable’, advised Kate, ‘and leave it at that’.

‘Yes’, I said, ‘that sounds right. Thank you.’ Then, curious, I asked Kate another question. ‘How long did it take you to get over the end of your first marriage?’

‘A couple of years’, she said. Then she paused. ‘Perhaps a lifetime’.

‘Oh God’, I said, ‘I hope you’re wrong about that’.

It’s not my experience that grief comes in stages. What I do know is that I can be ambling along, writing in the morning and renovating in the afternoon, teaching a bit of yoga, doing good things in the garden and inviting friends round for dinner, when ‘Boom’ – I hit something hard that sends me reeling. And all at once, any strides that I’ve made seem at risk of being swallowed up by the arrival of an old friend who I know only wants the best for me.

Earlier this week, when I finally met Clara and her daughter on the beach with my dog – after her husband recovered from Covid and her family was released from quarantine – she kept the conversation light. Right up until Annie, Clara’s daughter, handed back my dog’s lead at the top of the beach steps, I thought that I’d gotten away with it. During our walk up and down the beach, there had been no glitchy moments between Clara and me, no muddy pauses. Perhaps a studied glance, but no more.

However, when it came time to say goodbye, there was a lull in our chatter that even Clara couldn’t fill. Previously, we’d have filled this gap with a hug or a chatty farewell. But with Covid hanging in the air, a hug was out. And with the breakup of my marriage, neither of us knew what it would mean to meet ‘en famille’ – roast chicken is her favourite for me to cook – as we’d done so many times in the past.

‘See you soon’, I eventually said to Clara and Annie, as I turned and headed for my car. And as I did, glancing down at my sandy feet, I yanked at my dog who was licking fallen icecream off the pavement.

That night, I had a dream about James. I was walking back up the garden – just as I had earlier in the day, after picking up summer plums before my dog gorged on them – as James walked down to meet me, hugging whatever he’d come back to the house for, books perhaps, against his chest. Neither he nor I spoke in the dream, which was short. There seemed no need for words. I could see in James’ face that he was sorry. It wasn’t, ‘I’m so sorry and I want to come back’ that I read in his eyes. It was closer to tenderness than love – even if I know, and I’m not sure that I do, what love is right now.

Waking from the dream, I lay in bed until it was time to get up. I knew that I didn’t want James to come back if he didn’t love me. That made no sense. But it did make sense that I might want my old life back, and that I might want the lack of awkwardness that went with being in a ‘till death to us part’ marriage. Except, of course, I couldn’t have back something that was gone – neither my marriage nor the life I lived around it. Besides, I’d wanted James to be able to break free of me if that’s what he needed to do. And I definitely didn’t want to wait for death to part us if, in his heart, James had already parted ways.

Lying in bed, listening to cars start to pass under the window, I knew that waking up to the way things were before James left wasn’t the answer. ‘Probably just as well’, I thought, as I got out of bed and pulled up the blinds, ‘that life can’t be wound back’.

what I learned from my design course

1. In a room with a lot of straight lines, use some round things (a mirror, a cushion, a bowl) to soften the space.
2. If something goes wrong at your place, fix it straight away in a way that makes it unlikely to happen again.
3. Always clean the lens of your phone before taking a photo.
4. Styling a room isn’t trivial. If you let it, it can be considered, emotional and profound.
5. Hide a second key outside your place, just in case.
6. Consider where you live as a whole, not as separate rooms.
7. When you’re styling a space, listen out for your inner voice and quieten your critical voice.
8. Accept that at some point you will be won over to French linen sheets.
9. Cultivate your relationship to objects. Group them in triangles and play with taking one item away to create a sense of openness.
10. Think about natural objects in an outside-the-box way. Create arrangements with things other than flowers, anything that draws in the eye and gives it something to rest on.
11. Clean surfaces are everything in a simple space.

party

‘If all you do when you get left out, is try to get back in,

you miss out on the surprises that await you in the unexplored life’.

Adam Phillips, Missing Out

In my ex-husband’s opinion, life gets better as you get older. You care less about what others think of you. Your strengths, honed by experience, are better recognised by the world. You have time to focus on what you care about most. And so birthdays are to be celebrated.

Every year, Paul and I hosted drinks or a dinner to celebrate his birthday. When the day came around, he worked solidly until 4pm, at which point he broke off to visit the local foodstore, basket in hand. Half an hour later, he returned, the basket piled high with salad and cheese and berries and smoked salmon and pasta and chocolate. Next he ironed the white napkins. Dinner centred around a pasta dish with lots of oil, some of which found its way on to the floor. For Paul, the success of the occasion was reflected in how long the dinner lasted, which meant long pauses between courses. Keen on everyone having a good time, Paul, a bon viveur, liked to use our special cutlery and to disappear with a possy of friends between courses for a cigarette, glass of wine in hand, in the courtyard.

Paul and I separated four months ago, and he moved out two and a half months ago. So this week was his first birthday in his new life. When, last Sunday, he dropped in for kitchen supplies, I was painting the kitchen cupboards. As I brushed past his wicker basket in the hall, on the way to refill a paint tray, I spied a notebook lying open in it. ’Cutlery’ was at the top of his list. Then ‘table cloth’, ‘sweep stairs’ and ‘clean bathroom’. ‘My God’, I thought, ‘he is keeping house in a way that he never did with me’.

When, two weeks ago, I accepted an invitation to Paul’s party, I felt happy. ‘Do come’, he texted, ‘for a drink in the garden. But is it okay if you don’t stay for dinner?’ ‘Yes, of course’, I texted back, ‘that would be lovely. And,’ I added, ‘it’s fine about not staying for dinner. I totally get that.’ Because I did.

For a week I felt good about going to Paul’s party, mentioning it to friends as proof of how comfortable Paul and I were with our new arrangements. Besides, I was yet to visit his place and was curious to see it. Attending Paul’s party would, I felt, send an important message to friends that there were no hard feelings between Paul and me. They wouldn’t feel that they had to choose to be friends with just one of us. They could go on liking – and seeing – us both.

A few days out from the party, my heart refused to be lie down and be quiet. What was I thinking? Of course I couldn’t pretend that everything was fine between Paul and me, when, on the inside, I felt at sixes and sevens. In a flash, I knew that going to Paul’s party was too much to ask of myself. I couldn’t carry it off, especially around close friends, that I was fine with my weird new normal. However curious I was to see where Paul was living, and who he was seeing, I didn’t want to have to put on a braver face than I felt.

So I texted Paul to bail out, and suggested lunch the day after his birthday. Right up until dusk this last Monday, the night of the party, I felt confident that I’d be fine about not going. I trusted myself not to let my mind play tricks on me. So confident was I about this, that I decided against going to the film I’d planned to see as a distraction. Instead, I set about painting the front room of the house a third colour, light beige. Not yellow, not bluey-green, but Hog Bristle.

It’s plain to everyone in my family that my inability to settle on a colour for the front room reflects my jangled feelings about my marital state. Why else would a grown woman spend so much time and money creating the right look for a room? Although, I partly blame the design course that I’m currently halfway through, which has heightened my sensitivity to colour and atmosphere. It has made me sit back on my heels and wonder what kind of interiors I really like, as opposed to what I think I might like – or that others think I should like.

In the end, I did repaint the front room that night. I did just the first coat, after cutting in which seemed to take forever – ask my dog who was desperate for a walk. Still, it worked. By the time I’d finished, the front room wasn’t Paul’s ex-study any more. All those coats of paint, all that time spent up a ladder with a paintbrush, had transformed it. Now it was a room, possibly the most beautiful, in the house.

Only later, when my son didn’t come home from the party, did it hit me. I was reading a cookery book at the kitchen table, eating an uninspiring dinner that would never have made it into the book I was leafing through, when I became rattled. Putting down my fork, I stared into space. Apart from my son, who exactly was at Paul’s party? Was my absence even noticed by them? And how was it – what could have happened in my world inside one year – that friends of mine were at that moment eating pasta off plates from my kitchen, talking about a life that I was no longer a part of? My thoughts didn’t fit in my head. They jumped around, pretending to settle on the The Shortcut Chef I’d borrowed from the library, but really causing my stomach to churn.

It probably didn’t help that I’ve been recently revising my Will – sitting down with a lawyer I’ve just met to decide what to leave to whom once I’m no longer on the planet. At which point, I can only suppose, life will be one long party at which I’m not present.

Just before midnight, my son’s car rolled into the drive. Seeing my light on, he came up to say hello. He gave me snippets from the evening – enough for me to have some idea what it had been like, and to dispel my fantasies about it. But with not with quite enough detail for me to be able to picture it. Instead, we laughed at the craziness of life.

By the time my son went off to bed, I felt lighter. But also more awake. And it was a long time before I dropped off to sleep. I had missed out, there was no getting round this. Still, I knew that my life would go on. Not as before, but in another way.

paint

I wanted the room – my ex-husband’s study and the first on the left as you enter our house – to look different. I didn’t want the ghost of my marriage whispering dark nothings to me every time I opened the front door. And while I knew that I could wait for time to pass, I also felt that painting over the white walls with a colour would make a dramatic and instant change.

Eleven years ago, when we bought the house, the front room was frocked up with swanky curtains held back with tassled ties, a round dining table in the centre. It was the kind of dining room that looked as if no-one ever ate in it. Thick carpet covered what turned out to be lovely wide floorboards. The ceiling cornice was painted a heritage colour that, to my eye, clashed with the dark brown woodwork framing the 12-paned windows.

The day that I picked up a brush, to paint the brown woodwork around the windows and the floor in a cream semi-gloss, I felt sacriligious. As if the 170-year-old architect of the house might reach forward in time, wag his finger and curse my style decision. But I painted the brown woodwork cream anyway, sighing with relief when it was done. Only now, looking round the empty room a decade later, do I realise that it might have been better if I hadn’t left the painting of the woodwork until last, slapping on two layers of paint in a last gasp of renovating puff.

Shorn of furniture and curtains, the room now posed a question mark that was directed squarely at me. What, really, was this room for? I already had a study next to the kitchen, and I felt no desire to set myself up as a writer at the front of the house. I liked being squirrelled away at the back, overlooking the courtyard and close to whatever was happening in the kitchen, with the dog – sentinel at the back door – just metres away.

As I stood in the middle of the empty room, between two grand windows, I saw a bed along a long wall, with simple furniture under one of the windows. A guest room for friends and relatives, with a three-night limit and their own key. Given that I have just one bathroom in the house, having friends to stay would never be ideal. Still, it was part of a life that I could imagine for myself. Besides, it was a beautiful room, perhaps the most beautiful in the house, and I wanted to live up to its promise. I didn’t want to keep the door closed and so veil that promise.

I rarely buy interiors magazines. Nor do I find my way on to Internet design sites. But every now and then, I borrow design magazines from the library. So I knew that soft yellow walls throw a lovely light, and that yellow is one of this year’s most popular colours. So, yellow it was. But which yellow? Faced with an insane level of choice at the paint shop, I spent ten agonising minutes staring at an array of colours. Then I picked out a colour card which I gave to the paint assistant, along with an explanation of what I was doing. The assistant seemed interested, and suggested that he could give me the yellow tint in a powder to mix up at home, with some of the paint from the huge tub of white paint that I’d bought prior to a recent Covid lockdown with the idea of painting the whole house (ha!).

Eleven years ago, when I painted the inside of our house, everything seemed to be before me. Having moved to Hobart from Melbourne, and from London before that, renovating a big old house was my brave new world. It was my way of adjusting to the enormity of leaving behind a bustling metropolis for a small city under a big mountain.

Now, a decade on, my life had taken a sweeping turn. As I sat on the upstairs landing, my rolled up painting clothes by my side, I stared out the window. I wasn’t lost in thought. I wasn’t full of regrets or what ifs. I was just sitting there, feeling weak at the thought of painting the house again, which had been such a mammoth effort all those years ago.

However, in my weird new normal, I’d decided always to do the next right thing, and only that. And then the one after that. And so I knew that despite it being 4pm on a Sunday afternoon, it was time to start painting the front room.

As I leant down to mix up the paint – which looked decidedly yellow, even after mixing and mixing it – I didn’t feel confident. Was it too yellow? Or was I just not used to working with coloured paint? I started by cutting in – painting the edges of the room with a brush and ladder, working from left to right. To quieten my fears, I switched on an Audible book – 50 Psychology Classics – which did the trick. Two hours later, my son put his head round the door, widened his eyes with surprise, and said that he was off to see the new James Bond film. ‘Good’, I thought. Apart from taking the dog for his evening walk, now there was nothing to stop me from finishing the first coat before dusk.

By the time I finished painting, by which point I’d resorted to listening to loud music, it was dark. A single standing lamp (there are no overhead lights in the house, don’t ask) threw a glow that made the walls look more yellow than the card from the paint shop. But I didn’t worry, assuring myself that the morning sun would cast them in a truer light.

Next morning, when I opened the door, the sun made the walls look the colour of egg yolk. My heart sank. The room looked completely different, in this I had succeeded. But there was no disguising the fact that the room was too yellow – even after I returned from an early yoga class.

That evening, I went back to the paint shop. This time, I was served by a different but equally friendly paint assistant, who told me that a mistake had been made and that I’d used a double-strength yellow tint. Confused but not angry, I went back to the rainbow wall of colour cards. Compared with the massive changes in my life, getting the wrong colour from the paint shop seemed like a minor problem to have. This time, my eye was caught by a soft bluey-green. ‘Don’t do it’, said my head. ‘Go for it’, said my heart. Adrian, the paint assistant, listened to my story. Then he looked at me squarely, like a diagnosing physician, and offered to mix up the bluey-green colour in half strength. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to take a sample pot first?’ he asked. ‘That sounds sensible’, my head told me. ‘Definitely not’, said my heart.

This time round, the walls needed three coats of paint to cover the yellow beneath. The result was dramatic yet subtle, especially after I painted the woodwork off-white. ‘Yes!’, I said to myself, relieved not to have made another mistake. Still, I kept the door closed when I’d done, to let paint smell abate. Now and then, as I passed the room, I peeked in to check that the walls were still bluey-green. Did I like it or didn’t I? I just wasn’t sure. This was first-world problem, clearly. But it felt real to me.

A few days later, my daughter came home for dinner and I asked her to look at the room with me. ‘It looks like an IKEA catalogue’, she said, the moment she entered. ‘Damn it’, I said. ‘How come you’re always right?’

At the end of the week, I went to the coast for a couple of days, to catch up on work for an on-line design course that I’m doing. For a day and a half, I sat at the kitchen table of the shack and, step by step, went through the course work. With no dog to walk, no laundry to do and no shopping to get, I was able to reconnect with the part of myself that has always been interested in how things look and with the impression that interiors can make at a deep level.

One of the course exercises I left till last. We were asked to buy two interiors magazines with an eye to, one day, opening up one of them and seeing photos of our own property promoted in it. We were to study the magazines, research the photographers and then toy with contacting one of them with a view to getting them to photograph our property for one of the publications.

Starting an airbnb is an idea for me, not a reality. So although this exercise seemed brazen, it didn’t scare me. Sitting at the kitchen table, with rain pouring down on the corrugated roof of the shack, miles away from the home that I was reimagining a life in, I leafed through the magazines I’d brought with me. Both of them were UK publications, which perhaps says something about my taste. It was then that I saw it. I stopped turning the pages to stare at the photos of a house in Norway. In that instant, I noticed that although the home had been styled, it was my style. The house was renovated in a shabby chic way, with painted white floors and a rustic, minimal decor. Even so, it wasn’t cold or stark. The house looked old and loved. Gazing at the images, I felt my shoulders drop. I had liked this style my whole life long, and the magazine spread had reminded me of it.

As I stared, I realised something else. There was no colour on any of the walls. All the rooms were painted white, with cream enamel woodwork. Nothing in the photo-spread resembled an IKEA catalogue. I had found my answer. I liked white walls and cream woodwork. What a long journey for such simple knowledge.

I looked up from the magazine, noticed the rain had stopped, and felt glad that there was just enough light for a walk before dinner.

bicheno

I have been on holiday by myself a few times now and have always considered it a privilege. I’ve enjoyed getting away from the washing machine and family dinners and even the garden. I love my work and can do it anywhere. It gives me a kick to open up my computer somewhere completely else and to see the world anew.

A month ago, I decided that I needed, even deserved, a break from being at home. But when it came to packing for three days away, last Tuesday night, I felt no desire to leave. What was the point of going on holiday all by myself? Who exactly, apart from my overly-entitled Labrador, was I taking a break from?

Originally, when I booked two nights on the coast, I assumed that my daughter would be with me. As did she. But that was three weeks ago and, in your early twenties, three weeks may as well be three months. So I wasn’t altogether surprised when Emma sent me a text, last weekend, saying that she couldn’t get time off work. ‘Is it really this week?’ she asked in a whiny voice, in a follow-up call. ‘Don’t worry’, I said quickly. ‘Really. I have lots of things to do and besides, Tess wants me to visit her up there. And I like spending time on my own’.

Once I’d done all the things that needed doing before I left home, and was heading north in my car, I relaxed. I knew in my heart that this trip was the first of many firsts. First holiday without James to go home to. First Christmas without a normal family – whatever that is. First birthday on my own. And so on. So it didn’t really matter where I went on my first trip away. Just that I took it.

The 1960s beach shack that I’d booked successfully disguised, behind sheets of plaster board, a beautiful – shabby chic – renovation. The kitchen cupboards were full of provisions that, like Goldilocks, I could eat. There were heaters to take the edge of the cold. There was a nice sense of enclosure, in the garden outside and in the kitchen inside, despite the shack being around the corner from the main street.

I was doing yoga the next morning, with music playing, when Emma banged at the front door. The moment I saw her, I mentally changed my plans so that we could have the kind of day that the two of us had spent so often in the past. First, she joined me doing yoga without trying to knock me over, her old trick, until the end of the practice. After breakfast, I refused to wear the wetsuit that she’d brought up for me to wear in the surf with her. Instead, I walked along a wild and windy beach. Then I sat on a bench, overlooking the sea, reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism while Emma surfed for way longer than she said she would. Just as she always had. Taking inspiration from the book I was reading, I uninstalled Instagram on my phone there and then. Because I knew that, within a month of installing it, Instagram had become my go-to distraction. I could still use Instagram on my home computer, just not when I was in brilliant sunshine with bright blue water below, pretending to watch my daughter surf.

The main reason why I uninstalled Instagram on my phone, sitting on a bench overlooking the sea, went deeper. I knew that my days away were precious and I didn’t want to distract myself from my need for them. I didn’t want to act as if everything was fine, and that I would be returning to life as I’d known it the following day. Because my life in Hobart wasn’t there anymore. It had taken flight and something else, strange because new, had taken its place.

Bicheno is a coastal town that was once a whaling station and that only became a popular holiday destination after WW2 when petrol rationing let up. The buildings in the main street appear small and, without pitched roofs, flat. Fifty years ago, the RSL built tennis courts and a bowling green but somehow forgot to plant street trees. Luckily, a beautiful coastal walk, the length of the town, was built, alternating between wooded gravel paths and white arrows painted on giant granite boulders next to the sea.

All my life I have loved coastal walks. My curiosity to see what is around the next bend, the next headland, takes over whenever I’m on one. The fact that this coastal path led to the town’s blowhole, quickly became, as I wound my way over roots and through boggy mud, by the by. That first evening, I walked out to the blowhole because it seemed like the right thing to do and, having done it before, I knew that I wouldn’t get lost walking home in the dark. After arriving at the blowhole, I obediently got out my camera and waited for big waves to shoot up through the blowhole. Only, just like in real life, the waves only shot high through the blowhole when I put my camera away.

Taking this as a sign, I walked on, past the blowhole and its handful of tourists, and found a huge flat rock, overlooking waves and rocks below, with mountains and coast receding into the distance. For a few minutes, I felt I could see my whole life in the waves that broke high on the rocks below. Suddenly, I felt so alone, on that rock and in my life, that I cried. I felt surprised, as a minute I hadn’t felt upset. But I was used to this pattern. Once every few days, an intense feeling upset comes from nowhere, washes through me, and then is gone. Once it was gone, I picked myself up, swatted at the mosquitoes flying by and felt lighter. I thought better of walking back in the dark, and instead lost myself in newly-built, brightly lit streets that didn’t join on to the main road where I thought they should, which meant doubling back to the blowhole and starting over again.

After lunch the next day, Emma and I picked our way along the same path, well past the blowhole. This time my mind was chattering, even while talking to Emma. Why, I asked myself, did Emma never wear a hat or sunglasses? Was it because I’d forced too many hats on her as a child? Didn’t she know how easily she burned, with her fair skin and blue eyes? Also, more distractingly, how affected was she, really, by James’ separation from me? However, once we got down to the cove and found our own giant flat rock to sit on, all my chatter fell away. Thanks to that big flat rock, we had the kind of conversation that is hard to have at the kitchen table, or even in a car, that was somehow made possible by the sound of the waves and the sense of an afternoon, and the weeks ahead, stretching into the distance.

Emma – who had a covid shot booked early the next morning – left that night, following an early dinner. As she got into her petrol-guzzling second-hand car, I went to see Tess who, with her husband and father, had built a house outside the town where she and her husband now live and work. Later, back at the shack, I fell into watching a Tom Cruise film on television that became so violent that I had to lunge for the remote for fear of not sleeping. (I don’t have a television at home, I am always drawn, like a toddler to a bag of sweets, to switching on the television when I’m on holiday, just to check that another moon landing hasn’t happened since I last turned one on. But no, there had been no moon landing. The newsreaders seemed a titch older. And the policemen, always in pairs, looked chunkier than in the past. And even though the Tom Cruise film I’d been engrossed in was very clever, too clever for me to follow after a long day, I felt that the world it depicted was a lot less beautiful than the beachside town I was staying in.

As I packed up the next morning, after sleeping in, I realised that I hadn’t done any of the things I’d had in mind to do while away. Not a single drawing. No writing. No phone-calls. No financial planning (hah!). Still, I knew I hadn’t wasted my time. I’d read in bed. I’d done the coastal walk at dusk and early morning. I’d bought Emma’s Christmas present at a surf shop. I’d watched the food channel on television, which I won’t forget in a hurry. And I’d slept in. Together, these things made me feel real, as real as I felt on the coastal walk as I followed white arrows painted on granite rocks that had been washed by rain and sea for thousands of years before I walked over them.

Rushing to leave the shack, before check-out time, I wrote a note in the comments book which was left open for guests to write in. In that moment, I felt a swell of gratitude to the family who had opened their shack to people like myself; to a family who had trusted the world enough to welcome people they’d never meet into spaces they’d made so warm and good to spend time in. A place that was Hygge in the best sense, and that was miles away from clinical hotel rooms of the past.

Even when I got home, to find the kitchen in a mess that took half an hour to clean up, I didn’t mind. Even when my son mentioned, in passing over a late dinner, that he planned to look at a share house with a friend on Monday, I didn’t fuss. Well, that’s not quite true. I did freak out for a moment at the prospect of living on my own, and so soon, in our family home. However, I also knew, in a grown-up part of myself, that it was time for Alex to move on and to fend for himself again. I had enough presence of mind, after three days away, that for Alex to move into a nearby share house was the most that I could hope for.

Late last night, when I should have been in bed, I checked the availability of the shack in Bicheno over the coming months. There were just a couple of nights available in November and two more in December, then nothing until March. I hate planning. It stresses me out paying for accommodation in advance. But I also recognised, as I stood at my computer, that now that things have changed permanently in my life, that I needed to look after myself in a new way.

Nowadays, when I look at my diary – the paper one I carry around with me and the one I keep in my head – I prefer to see, not empty spaces, but days blocked out around which all the other days can fall into place. With a few days in Bicheno blocked out, in the run-up to the end of the year, I can look forward to the months ahead, and can just about but not quite imagine, the years after that. Someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to. Tick.