London, lately

My daughters have left home.
So I said yes to everything.

Two weeks. Mountain. Bar de Près. Martino’s. The Dover Street counter. Carbone’s summer terrace. China Tang at the Dorchester. A rooftop at Raffles. Lunch at a new Thai restaurant in Mayfair. A food market in Mare Street. At Sloane. A coffee on Lower Sloane Street I almost skipped and then didn’t. A Condé Nast Traveller dinner in Bayswater. A Marrakech anniversary. A David Bowie archive on a Sunday morning I finally walked into without a booking because the hype had gone and London had quietly handed it over, the way it does when you stop chasing it.

Two weeks.

Then one week of nothing. Curtains. Quiet. Refusing everything. Sick in bed.

Then it starts again.

I am not sure this is a strategy. I think it might just be what happens when the house goes silent and you haven’t quite worked out what to do with the silence yet.

The calendar fills up because I let it. Because a full diary feels like proof of something, even when I’m not entirely sure what.

I should tell you something about these evenings.

I am not good at walking into a room of strangers alone.

I will talk to anyone. Put me next to someone and I will find the thread, follow it, stay with it. But I won’t approach. I hover. I wait. I look for a face I recognise.

My husband is so much smoother than I am at all of this. He moves through a room like he’s been there before. Finds the person worth talking to in thirty seconds flat. Makes everyone feel like the most interesting person in the room.

I try to bring him everywhere.

But not every invitation allows it. Depends on the night. Depends on the room.

So sometimes I stand there, champagne in hand, the best view in London spread out behind me, and think where is everyone I actually know?

In Rome, probably. Miami. Madrid. Monaco. Somewhere that isn’t here.

And here I am, moving through London evenings, meeting all kinds of new people. Sometimes wishing I was just having a simple dinner with a friend, someone who already knows the story and doesn’t need the context.

Other times I sit next to a stranger and we talk for two hours and I leave thinking, well. That was unexpected.

I float somewhere in between. Most evenings I can’t tell you in advance which kind it will be.

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Photo: By Mooez for Conde Nast Traveller & Abercrombie & Kent curated trips launch party

At 52, I find myself less interested in fixing my life and more interested in enjoying it. Not in a dramatic, sell-everything-and-move-to-Italy way (though sometimes I do think, why not?), but in smaller, quieter decisions. The good coffee. The extra five minutes. The walk that wasn’t strictly necessary.

Nothing has changed overnight. But something has shifted.

These are the things that, somewhere along the way, I’ve decided are actually worth it.

1. The long coffee in bed

After years of 5am rowing training and driving to the river before dawn, this is not laziness. This is knowing what you’ve earned.

2. A second coffee

Because sometimes one simply isn’t enough.

3. The 5.45pm dinner reservation

I resisted this for years. Then I got the best seat at the Dover Street counter, ate without rushing, was home by 8.30. I will never book an 8pm table again and I refuse to be embarrassed about it.

4. Not attending everything

Energy is a currency. I spend it differently now. Recently declined a Gordon Ramsay breakfast. My 20-year-old self would have been dressed and out the door in minutes. My 52-year-old self thought: do I really want to face a film crew at 9.30am when I haven’t slept properly all week? I stayed in bed. Made coffee. Zero regrets. This isn’t becoming boring. It’s becoming yourself.

5. The cinnamon bun

I don’t have a sweet tooth, except for this. A bad one is an insult. A good one is worth crossing the city for. First discovered in Boston as a student and never recovered. May have spent a considerable amount at Cedric Grolet during his seasonal window. Almost relieved it’s gone. Hjem is my current answer.

6. The Basque cheesecake from Le Maritxu

Ordered. Delivered. Presented to guests as if the morning involved effort. I don’t bake. I curate. This is after twenty years of baking. I think I deserve the break.

7. Ice cream, but only when stressed

I barely touch it under normal circumstances. But apparently my body has its own coping strategy. Ben & Jerry’s Cookie Dough or Oddono’s salted caramel and hazelnut. Nothing else qualifies. I don’t make the rules.

8. The empty fridge problem

Twenty years of meal planning. Twenty years of making sure there was always something to eat, always enough, always more than enough. And now. Nothing. An almost empty fridge that I keep meaning to fill and somehow never do. The girls arrive unannounced and are furious. I find this funnier than I should. I am working on keeping snacks. I am not working very hard on it. Twenty years of feeding everyone is apparently followed by a period of feeding almost no one, and the adjustment, it turns out, is stranger than anyone warned me.

9. The sneakers

I own heels. Many heels. Beautiful, expensive, carefully chosen heels that I have not worn in longer than I care to admit. Every time I open the wardrobe they look at me. I look at them. We have an understanding. One day I will wear them again. One day. In the meantime, I am walking everywhere in London in sneakers and I have never been happier or covered more ground. The heels are not going anywhere. Neither am I. We are simply in different chapters right now.

10. Jeans, a t-shirt and a blazer

There was a time when it was all about dressing up. The outfit. The heels. The full effort. Now I walk into rooms full of women in beautiful clothes and feel underdressed — hair done, nails done, everything else resolutely simple and I find I don’t mind. I have nothing to prove anymore. I am happy for the photographer to pretend I wasn’t there. To be clear: I will dress up for the right occasion. But for lunch when I want to walk home afterwards? Sorry. The walk takes priority. The alternative is an Uber, and the walk always wins. This is not giving up. This is knowing yourself well enough to plan your outfit around your feet.

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11. Walking everywhere in London

Still, always, my favourite thing. London never runs out of surprises. You just have to keep showing up on foot. A magnolia exploding pink overnight. St Paul’s framed by cherry blossom when you turned a corner expecting nothing. Wisteria hanging indifferent to your Monday mood. You cannot see any of this from a taxi.

Love the fact he is journaling in the middle of the crowds - Columbia Road Flower Market

12. A market, most weekends

Non-negotiable. If lazy, Bute Street or Duke of York Square. Close, calm, familiar. If I want to feel properly alive, Broadway Market on a Saturday or Columbia Road on a Sunday morning. I’ve never once regretted going. I’ve occasionally regretted not.

13. Fresh flowers by Monday

Columbia Road flower market when I want abundance. Marks & Spencer when I don’t. Either way, fresh flowers in the house by Monday morning. Keeps the house happy for the rest of the week.

14. The countryside pub lunch

A 1.5 hour drive each way, a walk nearby, back home by early evening. Some people think this is excessive for a lunch. Those people are wrong.

15. Hiding in the Lanesborough library

More often than I should probably admit. The Caesar salad from the library kitchen — not the garden kitchen, there is a difference and it matters — a quiet corner, and Lilibet the cat draped across the fireplace overlooking Hyde Park Corner as if she owns the place. She does, really. Every time I see her I think: she has worked out something about life that most of us are still trying to figure out. I want her spot. I want her energy. I want her complete and utter indifference to having to be anywhere else.

16. Ladurée at Burlington Arcade

More often than is strictly necessary. A coffee, a macaroon, a window seat and absolutely nowhere to be. The people watching alone is worth the price of the macaroon. I have ended up there with no plan more times than I can count. I have never once wished I had gone somewhere else instead. Some places just know how to hold you.

I’ll take a good cheese platter over any dinner nowadays….

17. The summer evening ritual

A glass of rosé. A cheese plate. Olives and nuts. Pistachios if we’re doing this properly. Outside, wherever outside is available. Watching the stars until there is no good reason to go in. Netflix can wait. Netflix can wait all summer. This is the only screen I need.

18. Not having a garden

The one thing I have always wanted in London and never had. I think about it every summer. A small table outside. Morning coffee without getting dressed. The kind of evening that ends because you finally got cold, not because something better was waiting indoors. One day. Until then, I borrow other people’s gardens, restaurant terraces, park benches and the occasional hotel courtyard. London is generous if you know where to look. But still. A garden. One day.

19. Summers in Çeşme

The one place I will still wake up early without complaint. Before the crowds arrive, my husband and I take our own chairs down to the water. Sometimes we bring coffee from home. Sometimes we order Turkish coffee and wait for it in the silence. Then we stop at the bakery on the way back for fresh bread. We’ve been doing this for years. It costs almost nothing. It is the best part of every summer. Some rituals don’t need improving.

20. Never saying no to the sea

London is my home and I love it completely. But the sea does something to me that the city cannot. It always has. I grew up near it. I think some part of me never really left. The sound, the light, the way it makes everything feel both smaller and larger at the same time. I will always say yes to the sea. Without hesitation. Without needing a reason.

Wishful thinking. If only these were my views today.

21. Lazy days on a friend’s boat in Greece

No itinerary. No agenda. Just the sea, the sun, the sound of water against the hull, and the particular happiness that only exists when you are going nowhere slowly. After London even a slower, more intentional London. Nothing quite compares to a Greek island seen from the water. The Dolce Vita is not a fantasy. It is a Tuesday in August and you are anchored in a bay that has no name and you don’t need it to.

22. The Claridge’s sourdough mission

Every Saturday, my husband is dispatched. It comes back sliced. Goes straight in the freezer. Lasts a week now that the girls are no longer at home. I choose not to think about that too hard.

23. The Sunday chicken roast

Non-negotiable. The recipe changes. I’m always trying something new, always convinced this version will be the best one yet. My husband has learned to accept this with grace. But if the week has been long and the energy is gone, Pavilion Road butcher or Eli’s on Bute Street will do it properly and I feel no shame whatsoever. The chicken roast is not about the recipe. It is about the ritual. The smell of it in the house. The table set. The sense that the week is ending the right way. Some things hold a home together quietly. This is one of them.

24. Jago’s butcher at Chelsea Green

Not just for the steak. For the girls. They are students now, on student budgets, and they are not spending their money on steak. So I do. I always bump into the same friend there, also quietly feeding her boys who are in town. We never plan it. We couldn’t coordinate it better if we tried. This is what motherhood looks like at 52. Not packed lunches. Not school runs. Just a good butcher on a Chelsea side street and the quiet satisfaction of knowing they will eat well tonight.

25. The espresso martini

I don’t drink much. But when the moment calls for it and sometimes it does. An espresso martini or a margarita, accompanied by nuts, is a very good answer to a very long day. I have strong feelings about nuts. Pistachios in particular. I hope my teeth hold out long enough that I never have to find out what life is like without them. This is not a small concern. This is forward planning.

26. Getting rid of the grey

Once a month. In the budget. Non-negotiable. I have no interest in the conversation about whether women should embrace their grey. Some do it beautifully. I am not one of them. Zero regrets. Zero apologies.

27. Getting my nails done

Also in the budget. Also non-negotiable. There is something about well-kept nails that makes everything else feel slightly more under control. I can’t fully explain it. I’ve stopped trying.

28. Stopping the to-do list

I have written more to-do lists in my life than I can count. I understand the satisfaction of crossing something off. What I can no longer tolerate is everything that doesn’t get crossed off just sitting there, quietly judging. The undone list is not a productivity tool. It is a guilt machine. I’ve retired it. Things still get done. Somehow.

Apparently this is what 52 looks like from the inside.

29. Making a mood board

Cut out from magazines. Pinned to a board in my office. Full of places I want to go, things I want to feel, words that are currently holding something I can’t yet articulate. The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express is on there. So is Sense of Purpose. So is Voyage of a Lifetime. My 20-year-old self made mood boards too. The difference is that this time, I actually believe it.

30. Keeping a diary again

Not every day. Not perfectly. But the notebook is open and the pen is moving, which is more than I can say for the last few years. I kept one from the age of sixteen. Somewhere along the way I stopped. I’m not entirely sure why. I’m not asking too many questions. I’m just writing it down.

31. Writing a Substack Note every single day

A new mission. A new accountability. Sometimes I overthink it. Sometimes I don’t. Either way, two months in and I haven’t missed a day yet. Small observations. London through the seasons. Things I notice on foot that I would have missed from a taxi. It turns out showing up every day even imperfectly, even briefly is its own kind of discipline. And its own kind of joy.

32. A different relationship with social media

I use it less. And more. But differently. Less browsing, more searching. Less consuming, more creating with intention. Less anxiety about what everyone else is doing, more focus on what I actually want to say. When your business depends on being seen, this shift is not without its complications. I notice it. I think about it. I haven’t resolved it. But I know that the version of me that spent hours scrolling was not the version doing her best work. The quieter, more deliberate version is. I’m choosing her.

33. A lightbulb moment

The kind that arrives quietly, usually when you’re not looking for it. The kind that makes you think: why didn’t I think of this sooner?

34. A new project I’m not ready to talk about yet

It will either be a genius idea or a complete free fall. Either way, I’m excited. There is no loser here. You’ll need to wait until September to find out.

At the Lanesborough Garden Party on a random weekday - pay attention to the jeans….

35. Spontaneous evenings with my husband

The empty nest has an unexpected gift nobody mentions: him. Last minute drinks. Evening events we actually both want to attend. Saying yes to things because he can join and he makes everything more fun. I have been doing this long enough to know that PRs who have discovered him love having him in the room. Possibly more than me. I choose not to think about this too hard. He is the more fun one. I married well.

36. FaceTiming my daughters wherever they are

I will drop everything. I will always pick up. I will not, however, do it in the middle of a coffee shop with strangers listening in. Some conversations belong only to us. The world does not need to hear my children’s lives. Neither does the table next to me.

37. My daughters as plus ones

When they are in town, everything rearranges itself. Plans get cancelled. Invitations get extended. If I can bring them, they become my plus one. If I can’t, I’ll choose them anyway. Dozo for a bento box. The chicken baguette from the French grocer on Bute Street. There is always a queue and it is always worth it. Lunch at Chucks on a sunny day. None of these are grand gestures. All of them are everything.

38. Driving my daughter to the bus stop at Victoria

I insist on it. She doesn’t always need me to. I go anyway. And I always insist on getting her a snack for the journey because some habits from when they were small don’t need to be retired just because they are grown. We always end up stopping by Peggy Porschen on the way. I take a photograph of the storefront. Every time. As if it might have changed since last week. It never has. But the moment always has.

39. The four women lunch

Whenever my daughters are in town, I organise lunch. Just us. My mother, my daughters, me. No partners, no agenda, just four women who would not exist without each other, at a table with good food and too much to say. We always try somewhere new. The last one was Martino’s at Sloane Square. Already thinking about where next. These lunches are not in the diary far enough in advance. That is something I am quietly correcting.

40. Tuesday morning bridge club

No other obligations can take over a Tuesday morning now. It means time with my mother. It means learning something I should probably have learned years ago. It means three other women around a table doing something that has nothing to do with productivity or content or being useful to anyone. Is it a sign of getting older? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just one of the best decisions I’ve made this year.

41. Making time for friends who come back

So many have left. In the past few years, more than I expected to other countries, other lives, other versions of themselves. London is not what it was, and some people needed somewhere else. But when they come back, even briefly, I will drop everything. A coffee, a last minute dinner, a walk around Hyde Park. No advance notice required. No diary coordination. Just: you’re here, I’m here, let’s not waste it. The friendships that survive distance are the ones worth everything. London’s energy has changed. But these people carry what London used to feel like, and I want to be near that when I can.

42. Restarting Pilates

It’s on the list. It has been on the list. It will make it off the list. Probably September.

43. Weight training

Everyone says we should. Every woman over fifty I respect says it changed everything. I believe them. I am not yet doing it. This is me holding myself publicly accountable.

44. Reading a book in two days

The empty nest has an upside nobody mentions.

45. Deliberately making time for books

Not finding it. Making it. There’s a difference.

46. Finally being the person at book club who actually finished it

After years of bluffing, I’m not sure which feels better. The book or the moment.

47. My car

I love driving. I know. I know. But there is something about being in a car just parking somewhere, music on, nowhere to be that nothing else replicates. It is one of the few places that is entirely mine. The first thing I told both my daughters when they turned eighteen: get your driving licence. Not because they need to drive everywhere. Because independence is not an app. It is knowing you can leave under your own power whenever you need to. I learned that early. I have never stopped being grateful for it.

48. The car we drove for 22 years

We finally passed it on to our daughter. I know. 22 years. The same car. Call it loyalty. Call it sentimentality. Call it not being able to let go of something that carried so much. I still remember the day we bought it. The drives to the hospital. Twice. Endless school runs. Christmas drives to Belgium through the night. The girls growing up in the back seat, then growing too big for the back seat, then leaving the back seat for good. You could write a book about what happened in that car. Actually, maybe I will. It now belongs to her. Which means the memories do too. I can’t think of a better place for them to go.

49. Family time trumps everything

You don’t know how much time you have. You think you do. You don’t. The Belgium Christmas that felt complete. The breakfast tin of biscuits handed over on the last morning. The goodbye you don’t know is a goodbye until it already is. Make the most of it. Don’t overthink. Don’t wait. Whatever it is, the lunch, the trip, the phone call you keep meaning to make. Just go. Just go.

50. Allowing yourself to cry

The losses don’t stop coming. I don’t think they ever do, not at this age, not at any age. But I’ve learned something about grief that nobody told me: the pain comes because of the love. If someone is worth crying for, it means you were lucky enough to have them. Not everyone gets that. The tears are not the opposite of gratitude. They are gratitude. Just in a different form.

51. Making more phone calls

Since my father died, I retreated. Not dramatically, not all at once just gradually, the way you do when grief makes the world feel smaller and your own four walls feel safer. I used to bring people together. Hosted dinners, made the calls, held the centre. This year I’ve hosted more dinners than the year before. I’m finding my way back. But there is still more spontaneity to recover. More calls to make. More tables to set. The empty nest made it easier to disappear into quiet. I’m choosing, slowly, to come back out. Not because I have to. Because I remember how good it feels when I do.

52. Manifesting travel. Finally.

For years there was always a reason to stay. My father’s illness. My daughters’ final years at home. My husband’s schedule. All of them real. All of them worth it. But I look at the mood board on my office wall — the Orient Express, the islands, the words Voyage of a Lifetime and I think: when is it time for ourselves? I think the answer, at 52, is now. Not instead of everything else. Not abandoning anyone. Just finally adding myself to the list of people I make plans for. I have waited long enough. The board says so.

—

Awkward posing celebrating Mo-Marrakech turning 10 at Kensington Roof Gardens

At 52, I don’t feel finished. If anything, I feel more selective. More aware of what matters. And more willing to let the rest go.

Not everything needs to be improved. Some things just need to be noticed.

And some things — the coffee, the walk, the four women around a table, the stars watched over a cheese plate — just need to be lived.

There’s more I’m still figuring out.

What would be on your list?

This was meant to be my birthday letter.
It arrived a few months late, but then, so did spring.

Consider it a belated gift, from me to you.
The whole list, left open.

If these letters keep you company, the best way to say so is here.
It’s what allows me to keep writing them.

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October 2019. My father was in a coma.

I was walking home from St Mary’s Hospital through Hyde Park, that long path that takes you from the hospital toward Kensington, past the trees, past the palace, past the world carrying on as if nothing had changed.

It was one of those autumn afternoons that London does so well. Crisp air. Golden light. Leaves turning every shade of amber and rust. An old man walking slowly ahead of me with a stick, a small dog beside him. The sunset falling behind Kensington Palace. The leaves dancing in that light way they do just before they fall as if they know their time is almost over but aren’t ready to let go yet.

I was crying. Not quietly. The kind of crying where you stop caring who sees.

And then I stopped walking.

I watched the old man until he disappeared around the bend in the path. He had no idea he was carrying someone else’s grief as he walked.

I thought: my father is 72. I may never see him walk like that. I may never see him age.

And then I took out my phone.

I photographed the leaves. And the light on the water. And the sunset going down behind the palace.

And I posted it.

People said it was beautiful.

It was. That’s the thing. It genuinely was.

But what nobody knew, what I never said, is that I had just come from sitting beside my father who couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, couldn’t know I was there.

That’s when I understood something about the account I had been quietly building.

The brighter the grid, the darker the day.

I wasn’t sharing beauty.

I was surviving by it.

I started my Instagram account years before that walk. It began as an experiment as a way to understand social media before my daughters were old enough to be on it themselves. I didn’t want to post selfies or share my personal life. So I shared London instead. Hidden streets. Colourful doors. The light on a particular morning on a particular corner that made me stop and think: look at that.

It made me happy. And when strangers told me it made them happy too, it gave me something I hadn’t expected. A purpose I hadn’t been looking for.

Then my father had his accident and the walks became something else entirely. They became my escape. They kept me breathing. I would leave the hospital and walk for hours, photographing everything beautiful I could find, as if I could collect enough light to carry back into that ward with me.

Then COVID arrived and the whole world was suddenly where I had been for months. Frightened, isolated, unable to reach the people they loved. And something strange happened. The brightness I had been creating as a private act of survival became, for other people, a reason to hope. My long walks through an empty London. The flowers still blooming on locked streets. The sky still turning gold at evening.

I was sharing what I was desperately looking for myself.

And it resonated. Because everyone was looking for the same thing.

What I never said, what I still rarely say, is that the formula has never changed.

Look at my grid on the days it’s most joyful and you are almost certainly looking at the days I am most afraid.

I have always been a Pollyanna.

Since I was a child. I have always believed genuinely, not as a strategy, not as a performance that things will work out. That every dip has a recovery. That the stock market of life cannot go down forever.

That is not something grief taught me.

That is who I was before any of this happened.

And I know exactly where it comes from.

My father went bankrupt five times.

Five times he lost everything. Five times he rebuilt. And not once, not once did he make me feel that any of it was a problem too large to survive.

He lost his own mother at birth. Never met her. I think about that sometimes. What it means to come into the world already missing someone. To grow up with that particular absence.

Maybe that’s why family meant everything to him. Why he worked so hard to keep us close, to keep us kind to each other, to make us apologise and mean it and move on. He was building the thing he never had. Constructing it carefully, year by year, from scratch.

He always made me feel safe. Even when nothing was safe.

Even at the very bottom of the worst times, he would look at me and say: everything will be okay.

I believed him every single time.

A husband is different. A real marriage and I have been lucky enough to have one, twenty-three years in means sharing everything. The worries and the wins. When one of you goes down, the other lifts them up. That’s the partnership. That’s what it’s supposed to look like.

But a father, at least my father did something else entirely. Even when he was down, he kept everyone else up. I don’t know if my mother experienced him the same way. She has always been a worrier, and perhaps between them the weight was more equally shared. But with me? He was the anchor. Unconditionally. Every time.

I miss that more than almost anything. Not just him, but the specific thing only he could do. The ability to look at whatever was falling apart and say, simply, with complete conviction: it will be fine.

He was the one person whose certainty I never questioned.

I don’t have that voice anymore. And some days, when things don’t go according to plan, I notice its absence more than others.

He gave me that. The stubbornness to keep believing.

And then he died in a hospital during COVID and we were only allowed fifteen people at his funeral.

Fifteen.

This week a friend messaged me on the day she buried her father. There were 300 people at his funeral, she said.

I read that and I sat very still for a moment.

We should have been 300. I always thought we would be. He was that kind of man, the kind who fills a room, who people gravitate toward, who accumulates friendships the way some people accumulate possessions, naturally and without trying. Hundreds of people weeping, telling stories about him for hours. That’s what he deserved. That’s what I always imagined.

He loved a celebration. He loved gathering people together, making an occasion out of an ordinary evening, turning a table of six into a party of twenty. That was him.

I think he would have enjoyed one last big one. One final room full of people, full of noise, full of the life he spent seventy-two years collecting.

He got fifteen, in a pandemic, in silence.

But I think he would have laughed about it eventually. And said: that’s okay. Not a big deal. I had a good run. I had my family with me. That’s all that matters at the end.

I am his daughter in this way above all others.

I don’t give up easily. I never have.

Long before Instagram, people told me no. They told me I’d never get a job in finance. They looked at what I was building. Vintage fur coats sold at private home sales, fine jewellery at pop-up stores, chocolates pitched to the buyers at Harrods and they asked, sometimes kindly, sometimes not: who is going to pay for this? Who is going to say yes to this?

A lot of people said yes, as it turned out.

I have had posts that performed to nobody. Articles that disappeared into silence. Reels that I knew were good and that the algorithm simply swallowed whole. I have failed more times than I can count, in more formats than most people attempt.

And every single time, I have started again.

Not because I didn’t feel the failure. I felt it. I feel it still.

The rejection feels personal. It almost never is.

I keep telling my children: if you don’t ask, you don’t get. What’s the worst that can happen? You get a no. But what if it’s a yes. Imagine that.

Substack was the same. People looked at this adventure with kind scepticism. Why would anyone pay for your writing when there is so much information available for free? What makes you think people will subscribe?

It turns out there are people who genuinely appreciate what you put out into the world. Who find something in it that matters to them. Every time I receive a new paid subscriber and especially when they write to me, the ones I least expect, a quiet message saying something I wrote stayed with them, it fuels me in a way I can’t fully explain. It makes the whole thing feel worth it.

And those who don’t subscribe? That’s life. You cannot get everyone’s support. Not everyone will understand what you are trying to achieve. Not everyone needs to.

That’s okay too.

Consistency always comes through, one way or another. It takes time to build a product, a brand, a newsletter. The key is to keep going.

There was a Duracell advert when I was young, perhaps you remember it. A small pink bunny that just kept going. Long after everything else had stopped. Long after anyone expected it to still be moving.

That bunny has always felt like a self-portrait.

I think I got it from him.

The man who went bankrupt five times and still made me feel, every single time, that everything would work out in the end.

I am still going.

I don’t know what else to do.

Grief never leaves you. That’s something nobody tells you.

They say time is the cure. I think time just gives you better tools to hide your feelings. Life goes on. You learn to carry it differently. But it doesn’t go.

In the past five years I have lost my father. My uncle who was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in October, flown to Canada for treatment in November, gone just before Christmas, a goodbye that didn’t happen in the way goodbyes should. My mother-in-law who, in her last conscious moments, saw us come through the hospital door and said: thank you for coming, thank you for being here. As if, even then, she was thinking of us. A dear friend, gone suddenly, unexpectedly, leaving questions I cannot answer.

One after another.

And each time, I opened Instagram and posted something beautiful.

Not as a performance. Not as a lie. The beauty was always real. I meant every image. But nobody scrolling through those pictures of wisteria and cherry blossom and golden afternoon light knew what the woman taking them was carrying.

I’m not depressed. I want to be clear about that. I’m coping. I function. I find joy, real joy, daily joy, the kind that makes me stop in the street and reach for my phone because something is too beautiful not to capture.

But underneath it all, for five years now, it has just been very, very sad. And I felt it all.

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If this were one of my old diaries, you would see tear marks on the pages.

I have kept diaries since I was sixteen. A box of notebooks, one for every year. The handwriting changes. The preoccupations change. But anyone finding them would know, from the marks on certain pages, that I was crying when I wrote.

You can’t see that here. Not on a screen.

The format doesn’t allow for it. You read these words in the same clean font whether I wrote them dry-eyed at my desk or whether I wrote them as I am writing this one with tears falling onto a keyboard that doesn’t know the difference.

I am crying now, as I write this. I want you to know that. Not for sympathy. But because it seems dishonest not to say it. Because the whole point of this essay is that there has been a version of me you couldn’t see.

This is what she looks like.

She looks like this.

My grandmother was born around 1913 or 1914 — we think. In those days, girls' births in Türkiye were not always registered. She came into the world without a record. She left it knowing exactly when her time had come. A Jewish woman living in Türkiye through the First World War as a child, through the Second World War as a young woman, through decades of history that should have been impossible to survive.

I never asked her what those years were really like. Whether she was scared. Whether she felt safe. I told myself there would be time.

The day she went to hospital, she asked my mother to FaceTime me before they left. She said she wanted to say goodbye. That she wasn’t coming back.

I laughed, not cruelly, from love, from the refusal to accept what she was telling me. I said: of course you’re coming back. We’re going to celebrate your hundredth birthday. I’m already planning it.

She looked at me through the screen for a moment.

She said: no. I just wanted to make sure I said goodbye.

She was gone within the hour. She was 97.

I have thought about that call almost every day since. She knew. She was calm and certain and she offered me a goodbye and I handed it back to her.

I thought I was being hopeful.

I think now I was just being afraid.

My father wanted me to write a book about his life. There were things in his past, turbulent things, frightening things that I was afraid to know. I told myself I would ask him when I was ready. When the time felt right.

The time never felt right.

And then the phone rang at 2am and I drove to the hospital in the dark and he was already gone.

You always think there is more time.

Until there isn’t.

Substack was supposed to be an extension of Instagram.

More depth. More detail. Guides to London, restaurants, hotels, culture, travel. Professional. Controlled. The kind of writing that pairs naturally with a beautiful grid.

Then I wrote my first personal piece about how my walks began, about my father, about grief and something opened that I have not been able to close since.

I am one of the most private people I know. You could scroll through years of my Instagram and find almost nothing personal about me. I have never shown my face much. I have not talked about my family much. I have kept the brightness and kept the rest to myself.

And then Substack happened.

A woman who has known me for ten years read one of my essays and said: after ten years, I feel like I am finally getting to know you.

Ten years.

That’s what I had been protecting. That’s what the brightness had been holding in place. Not dishonestly. I was never performing joy I didn’t feel. But the full picture, the complete woman, the one with the tear marks on her diary pages, she had never been visible before.

She is visible here.

I never meant to tell you any of this.

And now I can’t seem to stop.

Yesterday I posted a picture of a pink door covered in wisteria.

London is slowly turning purple, I wrote. You can already smell it as you walk past.

People liked it. Someone said it made their day.

I was sitting at my kitchen table when I posted it. Thinking about my friend. Thinking about 300 people in a church. Thinking about fifteen people in a pandemic. Thinking about my father, who was bigger than life and deserved every single one of those 300, and got fifteen instead.

Thinking about the small pink bunny in the advert.

Still going.

Still going.

If my father read this essay today or my whole Substack, for that matter, he would probably be very proud. I can see him forwarding each piece to his friends, calling them one by one, making the case for why they absolutely needed to subscribe. It would have made me cringe. The way I possibly make my own daughters cringe.

He would have said: you are finally writing again.

He may have had a tear or two. He was never truly afraid of tears, despite what he told me at my grandmother’s funeral.

And then he would have looked at me and said: you see? Everything turned out okay.

Forrest Gump’s mama always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.

I say it’s a rollercoaster. You are at the top of the world at one point and at the bottom the next, and you keep going round and round. Both are probably true.

I’m still finding out. Still finding answers at 52. As much as we’d like to pass on wisdom to our children and we do have some to pass on, we are also still figuring things out as we go along. Every age brings its own challenges. Its own surprises. Its own ups and downs.

We keep going.

That’s what he gave me.

The stubbornness to keep going and believing that all will be fine in the end.

The woman who posts the wisteria is real. I mean every image she shares. The beauty is genuine. The hope is genuine.

But if this were a diary, you would see the tear marks on the page.

Now you know.

Three things I’ve learned about carrying grief and beauty at the same time:

Post the beautiful thing even when you’re crying. Not to hide the tears, but because beauty and grief are not opposites. They have always lived in the same moment. Both are true.

Write it down somewhere. Not for anyone else. Because the stories you don’t record are the ones that disappear. I know this now in a way I didn’t before my father died. In a way I wish I’d known before my grandmother did.

When someone offers you a goodbye, receive it. Even when you’re not ready. Especially when you’re not ready.

If these essays keep you company, the ones about grief and beauty and the long work of figuring out who you are in the middle of your life, you can support this writing by becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers receive a shorter, more personal monthly letter. The things I didn’t quite say in the main essay. The letter behind the letter.

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One question before you go:

Is there something you’re carrying right now that nobody can see?

Reply to this email. I read every one.

I found my old diaries last week. I didn’t expect them to change the way I see my life.

Not the tidy ones I once imagined keeping to look back on.
The real ones.

Notebooks with rushed handwriting, pages slightly bent, receipts and restaurant cards glued in between, boarding passes, postcards, a parking ticket from Montepulciano dated May 2001.

Little proof that I had been somewhere and wanted to remember it properly before it slipped away.

I sat on the floor and spread them all out.

For a moment, I just looked at them.

Then I started reading.

And I realised something I had never named before:

In my twenties, I wrote to understand my life.
Now, I often find myself shaping it to be seen.

I didn’t have that language then. Back then, it just felt like writing things down before they slipped away.

But reading it now, at fifty-two, I can see it so clearly.

One of the earliest diary is from 1995. I was twenty-one, living in Boston, going to concerts at Symphony Hall and writing bullet points about my days with the energy of someone who believed each one deserved to be recorded.

Back to school — Ohh! Last 2 weeks — hey!
I am really sick.

At night → to Boston Symphony — concert from Bach to Brubeck — it was very nice → (Cana, Batu, Tolga, Sedef et moi)

Then I spoke to my boyfriend. He missed me. Ohh! I miss him too.

A concert ticket tucked between the pages. Seat A49. Balcony 1 Left. $35.

I remember none of it. And yet reading it, I am entirely back inside that evening.

There’s an entry from New Year’s Day which is also my birthday. I had written at the top, in capitals: HAPPY B-DAY TO ME ♪ ♪

Then: At midnight we went to the Harbor to watch fireworks — on the radio the new year music — raining, lots of people — it was very romantic and nice. Then home sweat home → champagne and my cake.

Home sweat home. She meant “sweet.” She always wrote fast, this younger me. She didn’t go back to correct things.

And later: I am very excited.

She was packing for tomorrow’s holiday.

She was always packing for something.

Reading these pages, I kept thinking of Bridget Jones Diaries.

Not the chaos, exactly. But the spirit of it. The bulletins. The emotional honesty. The way she wrote everything down without wondering how it would land.

Bridget Jones wrote her diary because she needed to. Because writing it down was how she processed being alive.

That was me too.

Only mine was less wine, more Turkish passport complications.

On a trip to Caribbean cruise in January 1995, I wrote:

I am going on a cruise to the Caribbean with my only love (Enzo Köt).

Enzo Köt. His nickname. Written in brackets, like a private joke with myself.

We arrived to San Juan at midday and got to our room. A window! He! He! On the 9th floor. Lucky us!

And then, at the midnight pool party in Antigua:

At 12:00 → midnight buffet at the poolside. It was so much fun. Everyone from 8 to 80 was dancing. Very tropical drinks.

She drew a little cocktail glass next to this. And wrote: → pineapple drink.

I stared at that tiny drawing for a long time.

She was so present. She was drawing cocktail glasses in her diary at midnight because she wanted to remember exactly what she was drinking.

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The 2001 diaries are different. Fuller. More self-aware.

By then I was twenty-seven. My boyfriend (now my husband of more than twenty years) and I had decided to travel to Argentina together. It was December. There were riots in Buenos Aires because of an economic crisis. The president had resigned. Twenty-four people had died.

We went anyway.

I wrote this on the plane:

We are finally on our way to Argentina. I should be overjoyed with happiness, but instead I am nervous… I guess I am a bit over-stressed.

And then later, at customs, Roger Marc refused to come with me. On principle, he said, to teach me independence:

Seriously, I don’t understand him sometimes. I’ve travelled enough to know what happens to a person with a Turkish passport.

(They did stop me. I had to call him to get my plane ticket anyway. In his defence, he has since agreed to always pass through customs with me.)

And then, twelve hours into the flight, somewhere over Brazil:

Finally I am starting to get excited. Currently we are flying over Brazil and all I can see is acres of trees. It is magical.

That’s not a travel guide.

That’s a brain trying to catch up with itself.

Anxiety, then frustration, then wonder. Written in ink, in real time, without knowing how it would resolve.

The Tuscany diary from the same year has a page I keep coming back to. We were driving through Montepulciano, the weather had turned foggy and strange and she’d forgotten her glasses, and she started writing a little ghost story to herself about the old farmhouse:

The family has a little girl. She finds a toy in this old house. She fixes it. All of a sudden, the toy starts to speak and Bang! All bad things start to happen. I mean the weather was really foggy, rainy and mysterious.

She was entertaining herself. In her own diary. Building a little story out of an inconvenient afternoon.

That’s the version of me I had forgotten existed.

We had bought the Michelin Guide for that Tuscany trip. A proper red one, the kind that felt authoritative just to hold and planned everything around restaurants we wanted to try.

We drove from village to village. We stopped where we felt like stopping.

We found a supermarket and went slightly mad inside it.

Pasta, cheese, drinks (wine, grappa, vino Santo). By the end, we had no idea how we would carry any of it back to London. Nevertheless, we still bought them.

We had dinner on our last night at a restaurant on a hill overlooking the bay. I wrote just two words at the bottom of the page: Unbelievable. Magical.

Not a hashtag. Not a caption. Not a reel with trending audio.

Just the word that was true.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up collaborating with the Michelin Guide on different projects.

I had to pause when I realised that reading these pages.

I went from planning a trip with the Michelin Guide to eventually working alongside it.

Perhaps nothing was accidental.

Perhaps I was already becoming this, one page at a time, without realising it.

I read something recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Maybe midlife isn’t about starting over.
Maybe it’s about coming back to the woman you were before the roles, the responsibilities, and the expectations took over.

And sitting there on the floor, surrounded by these notebooks, I realised…

That’s exactly what this felt like.

In my twenties, I wrote to understand what I was experiencing.

Now I shape what I share.

And they are not the same thing.

When I film a reel, you see the beautiful corner. The perfect light. The hotel lobby at the right angle.

You don’t see the house in Punta del Este where the pool barely existed and there were no towels. I wrote that down. I wrote it almost doesn’t exist. I don’t think anyone will use it. I wrote about being overdressed in the humidity and not seeing the sun. I wrote about being annoyed at Roger Marc at the Buenos Aires customs and then, privately, being glad he was sitting next to me on that plane.

Back then, I wrote all of it.

Without thinking anyone else would read it.

And perhaps that’s what I miss most.

Not privacy.

Freedom.

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In 2004, my daughter was born.

I started a diary again. A different kind. Filled with first-time motherhood feelings. the worries, the exhaustion, the love that was bigger than anything I had been prepared for. About nights that felt too long. About wanting to slow time. About trying to hold onto small moments. A hand in mine, a child still small enough to carry.

And then I stopped.

Because I got scared.

Scared of what I was writing. Scared of how much I felt. Scared that if I kept putting it all down in ink it would become too real. The fear, the doubt, the love so large it was sometimes hard to breathe inside it.

So I closed the notebook.

And I didn’t open another one, until now.

Instead, life took over. Two children. Work. The machinery of a full house.

I kept calendars, schedules, flights, reservations, where we went, where we ate.

The kind of information people now search for, that algorithms reward, that fills a grid beautifully.

I have all of it.

Perfectly documented.

But there is no soul in those calendars.

No trace of how something felt.

No hesitation. No I am in a paradise written twice just to make it real.

Just information.

Useful. Searchable. Shareable.

But not lived in the same way.

My daughters are now nineteen and twenty-one.

The house is quieter than it has been in two decades.

And something strange has happened in that quiet.

I have space in my head again. Time in my day. Room to think a thought all the way to the end without being interrupted.

And I find myself writing again.

Not the bullet points. Not the diaries.

But something in between.

A Substack piece about my 52nd birthday that surprised me with how honest it was. More honest than anything I’d written in years. It felt closer to the girl writing in Boston than to the content creator thinking about reach.

And then a guide to magnolia season, which brought in thirty-nine new followers and felt, if I’m being honest, like putting on my Instagram hat. Thinking about the algorithm. Thinking about what people were searching for. Useful. But not me, not really.

The difference between those two pieces is the difference between these diaries and those calendars.

One was written from something.

The other was written for something.

And I think, only now, I’m beginning to understand which one I want to do more of.

We went back to Tuscany three times after 2001.

Once with our girls when they were small. Once just the two of us, for our twentieth wedding anniversary.

The same villages. The same roads.

And yet not the same at all.

The last time, I was focused on filming. Capturing. Framing the shot.

And both of us noticed that some of the villages felt different. More worn. More crowded than we remembered.

Was it the place that had changed?

Or the way I was seeing it?

I wish I had read these diaries before going back.

Because what I was really trying to return to was not Tuscany.

It was the way I experienced it the first time.

These notebooks have given me something I didn’t expect.

Not just memory.

Proof.

Proof that I was curious then.

That I am curious now.

That I have always loved travel, atmosphere, the small things that make a day feel like itself.

That I have always written to understand where I am.

I didn’t lose my voice.

I just stopped trusting the first version of it.

Maybe this is what the empty nest gives you, if you let it.

Not just time.

But permission.

Permission to go back to the first version of yourself. The one who drew cocktail glasses in her diary. Who wrote ghost stories to entertain herself on a foggy afternoon. Who ended entries with “THANK YOU GUYS” in capitals because the day had been so good she had to say it to someone, even if that someone was only the page.

Maybe Substack is part of that for me.

Not just a platform.

A place to write the longer version. The real one.

Not polished for an algorithm.

Not shaped for reach.

I keep thinking about how I used to end those pages and what to do with all of this.

Simply.

THANK YOU GUYS!

Or just “THE END.”
No trying to understand what it all meant.

Just the day, as it was.

And somehow… that felt enough.

I didn’t start Rita Farhi Finds with a plan.

But reading these pages, I wonder if it started much earlier than I thought.

In those Boston bullet points.
In the supermarket in Tuscany.
In the sentence I wrote on a plane over Brazil at midnight that I had completely forgotten about until last week.

Perhaps the Finds were always the surface.

And the diaries were always the truth.

Maybe this was never just Rita Farhi Finds.

Maybe it was always Rita Farhi Diaries.

And maybe this is just a new page.

But this time, I’m not going to get scared and close the notebook.

I think the answer is to keep writing.

Not just the reels.
Not just the guides.

This too.

The longer version.
The real one.

Just the truth of what it feels like to travel, to notice, to have lived somewhere in the world with your eyes open and to want, still, at fifty-two, to keep going.

If any of this feels like your kind of thing… there is more to come.

I think I’m just getting started again.

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I’ve been thinking about the idea of a circle of life lately.
Not in any grand way.
Just quietly.

Perhaps it’s because Easter is coming.
Or because my daughter’s birthday is, too.

She was born nineteen years ago, on a very sunny Easter weekend.
I remember the light that day more than anything else.
Soft, but certain.
The kind of light that makes everything feel like it’s beginning.

And somehow, from that moment on, Easter became something else entirely.

—

She came three weeks earlier than expected.

I had gone in for a routine check-up, with other plans entirely. The last thing on my mind was giving birth, but the umbilical cord was tangled, and suddenly everything changed.

We called ahead.
They were waiting for me.
It all happened very quickly after that.

I remember shaking during the birth.
My husband stroking my hair to calm me down.
Later, I was told it had been far more serious than I realised at the time.
He had never seen a baby so tangled.

He saved her life.
And mine.

—

Afterwards, I stayed in hospital to recover.

I remember the room filled with the most beautiful sunshine.
The whole week felt calm in that strange way that sometimes follows chaos.

My older daughter arrived on her new scooter all the way from Hyde Park. She was so proud of herself.

And I remember the overwhelming feeling of relief.
That we were safe.
And somewhere in all of that joy arrived too.

And perhaps that’s where it began.
Not Easter itself, but what it came to mean for us.
A marker in time.
A beginning we didn’t plan, but one that quietly shaped everything that followed.

—

And then, in the years that followed, came the egg hunts.

I used to plan them the night before, long after everyone had gone to sleep.
Little clues written out by hand.
Chocolate eggs hidden in places I thought were clever and sometimes forgotten the next day.

Some years, the grass still damp from the morning.
Other years, everything moved indoors because of the rain.
Cushions lifted.
Drawers opened.
Small footsteps running from room to room.

And always, that same feeling that something simple could feel like everything.

—

Her birthday folded into it all.
So close to Easter that the two became one.
Balloons and eggs.
Candles and spring light.
Happy, uncomplicated days.
The kind you don’t realise you’re collecting at the time.

—

Nineteen years have passed, and I still don’t quite know how.

Easter was never just one day for us.
It became a season.
The start of family holidays.
Time set aside for being together.

And now...
we’re approaching another Easter.
And for the first time in a long time, we haven’t quite managed to plan it.

Everyone has their own schedules now.
Work. Commitments. Life.
We will still celebrate, just before we leave, but it feels different.
Not in a dramatic way.
Just... slightly out of sync.

And I notice it.
Because those holidays used to be non-negotiable.
And now, somehow, they’re not.

—

It’s strange, the things that stay with you.
How certain details, colours, textures, small rituals find their way back, years later, without asking.

Before all of that, there was another version of Easter.

It also made me think of my life before children.
Before Easter became egg hunts and birthdays and family traditions,
it meant something else entirely.

—

That was where my first Easter tradition began.
Not at home, but at work.

With something very small.

Speckled chocolate eggs, tucked inside delicate, egg-shaped boxes. We called them “Creppon Eggs” softly coloured, almost imperfect.

The labels were printed at home, never quite aligned.
And yet, together, they worked.

I remember taking them to Harrods.
A small space.
A quiet opportunity.

“If it sells, we talk.”

So I waited.

—

And then, slowly, something shifted.

What began as a single Easter corner began to grow.
Not because I was making the chocolates myself. I wasn’t, but because I was searching.

Looking for things that felt different.
More crafted.
More expressive.

I started sourcing from small artisan producers. From places not yet known, not yet seen in London.

And that’s how I found them.
An artisan chocolatier in Spain.

Their eggs were unlike anything I had seen at the time. Bold, colourful, almost sculptural.

That year, everything changed.
What had started as a small shelf moved into the windows.
Into the magazine.
Into the story Harrods was telling for Easter.

—

I remember walking through it all. Past displays filled with colour and detail,
past windows that felt almost theatrical and realising, quietly, that something I had started in a very small way had found its place on a much larger stage.

I was slightly outside of it, and yet somehow part of it.

—

Looking back, I can see it more clearly now.
It was never really about the chocolate itself.
It was about the search.

Finding something before it was seen.
Recognising something before it fully revealed itself.

And in many ways, I realise I’ve never stopped doing that.
Whether it was chocolate then, or places, or moments, or corners of London now, it’s always been the same instinct.
Just expressed differently.

—

Last week, I found myself back in that world again.
Not in the same way, but close enough to recognise it.

At Claridge’s.
Tables lined with Easter eggs.
Not the kind you rush to buy.
But the kind you pause for.
Each one shaped with intention.
Built layer by layer.
Each one a different point of view.

—

And then there are the ones that made their way home with me.

A leopard-print egg from Il Gattopardo — bold, playful, almost too beautiful to break.
And a floral one from Café Royal’s Blooms & Bubbles — softer, more delicate, as if spring had been pressed into chocolate.

They’re sitting in the kitchen now.
Waiting.
For Easter.
For everyone to be together.
For that familiar moment when they’re finally broken open. Not carefully, but all at once with pieces shared, passed around, tasted together.

And I realise...
as much as things change, some traditions don’t.

—

Outside of Claridge’s, Easter unfolds across London in quieter ways.

At Fortnum & Mason, it begins with the windows.
Softly moving.
Almost like theatre.

Inside, tables filled with eggs and ribbons.
Not things you necessarily need.
But things that remind you of something you once loved.

—

And then, unexpectedly, you walk past Hedonism.
And you hear it.

Chickens.

Soft, unmistakable, completely out of place.
You stop.

For a moment, your imagination takes over.
Not quite a countryside barn though wouldn’t that be nice.
But just enough.
Just enough to interrupt the city.
Just enough to make you smile.

—

In Covent Garden, at Clos Maggiore, Easter feels different again.

Quieter.
More intimate.
Blossoms suspended above you.
Eggs hanging between branches.

It doesn’t feel like decoration.
It feels like stepping into a moment.

—

And somewhere between all of this, the eggs, the memories, the places,
I realise I’ve been here before.

Not in the same way.
But close enough to recognise it.

Once, Easter was something I was building.
Then it became something I created for my children.
And now...
it’s something I walk through more slowly.

More aware of what it holds.
More aware of what has passed.
And what is quietly changing.

—

The egg hunts don’t happen anymore.
The clues aren’t written the night before.
The house is quieter.

And yet, the feeling hasn’t disappeared.
It’s just... changed.

Softer now.
Less about creating the moment.
More about noticing it.

—

The light.
The colours.
The small details.
The way something unexpected, even the sound of chickens in a shop window
can bring everything back, just for a second.

—

A circle, in its own way.
Not repeating.
Just returning.

If this made you see Easter a little differently, please share it.

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A few Easter eggs I couldn’t stop thinking about

Claridge’s ArtSpace Café — Thibault Hauchard
A playful nod to Claridge’s iconic Art Deco doors, hiding a surprise within.
Dark chocolate, buckwheat and vanilla praline with a smooth caramel centre.
Architectural, clever. An egg that invites you to open it, not just admire it.

The Ritz London — Lewis Wilson
Valrhona 69% dark chocolate with salted Piedmont hazelnut praline and crunchy pearls.
Precise, elegant, almost architectural.

Harrods — Alistair Birt
Grand Cru 42% milk chocolate with sea salt caramel, hazelnut crunch and gold-dusted Piedmont hazelnuts.
Rich, generous, unapologetically indulgent.

The Berkeley — Salvatore Mungiovino
Manjari chocolate with citrus and macadamia praline.
Lighter, brighter, slightly unexpected.

Jumeirah Carlton Tower — Martin Haidar
A trio of almond blossom, golden hazelnut and salted pistachio.
Softly layered like spring translated into chocolate.

The Connaught — Nicolas Rouzaud
A chocolate orchard in miniature.
Dark chocolate layered with caramel and hazelnut praline, scattered with jewel-like fruits.
Playful, intricate almost like stepping into a story.

Valrhona Lantern Egg — Circle Wong
A sculptural, lantern-inspired creation rooted in memory and cultural storytelling.
More than an egg, something ceremonial.

Kayu — Khalil Bouabid
Dark, rich, direct.
Less decorative, more about depth.

Café Royal — Cakes & Bubbles
Floral, delicate as if spring had been pressed into chocolate.

Il Gattopardo
A bold leopard-print egg playful, confident, impossible to ignore.

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The viral blossom house in Notting Hill, London

There is a house in Notting Hill that blooms every spring.

For most of the year, you could walk past it without noticing.
Just another beautiful street in London. Quiet. Lived-in. Ordinary in the way London so often is.

And then, almost overnight, the tree outside it transforms.

Soft pink blossoms spill across the façade, framing the house in a way that feels almost unreal. The kind of beauty that stops you mid-step. Makes you look twice. Makes you reach for your phone without thinking.

It is, quite simply, breathtaking.

I used to go early.

After the school run, on those in-between mornings when London feels like it belongs only to the people who live in it.
You might see one or two others pausing. A quiet admiration. A photo taken quickly, almost respectfully.

It felt like something you had discovered, even if you hadn’t.

Now, you don’t discover it anymore.

You arrive… along with everyone else.

People gathering on the pavement, waiting for their moment.
Phones raised. Outfits planned. Angles considered.

The blossoms haven’t changed.

But everything around them has.

Swiss Cottage Cherry Blossom, London

And it’s not just here.

The once quiet blossom path in Battersea Park is no longer quiet. The spring tree walk by the river, where branches form a soft tunnel towards the Power Station chimneys.

In Greenwich Park, if you want to see the blossom without the crowds, you have to be there when the gates open at 6am, standing under the cherry blossom tunnel near Ranger’s House before the first tour groups arrive.

This year, Swiss Cottage is next the line of cherry trees by the library already turning into a backdrop.

It moves almost like a wave.

From one neighbourhood to another.
From one “hidden gem” to the next.

Until there are no hidden gems left.

Recently, I read a piece about this very house in The Times, and then found myself scrolling through a viral Instagram reel of the same spot.

The language was almost identical.

People climbing on garden walls.
Posing on front steps.
Blocking pavements so residents can’t easily get in or out of their own homes.

One neighbour described it as a pilgrimage.
Another said people behave as though it is their studio, not someone’s front door.

In the comments under one reel, people were blunt:

“The owners should charge an admission fee at this point.”
“Everyone’s having a piece of the cake including you, posting this.”
“Our local magnolia tree was eventually cut down because people kept climbing on it.”

And just beneath those, a quieter frustration:

“Oh no… what a difference a few years makes.”
“Instagram and TikTok have changed everything.”

On other streets, residents have started painting once-pastel façades in deep, almost-black shades, and stringing chains across their front steps. Small, visual ways of saying: this is a home, not a set.

I wrote about that too: Why Notting Hill’s Most Photographed Houses Are Being Painted Black

The street sign sits right beside the house.

There is no real way to keep it anonymous.
Even if no one shared it, it would still be found.

Online, though, it looks simple.

“Where is this?”
“Adding this to my London list.”
“This is unreal 😍”

Saved. Shared. Sent.

The kind of place that travels faster through a screen than it ever could on foot.

But under those same posts, you’ll now always find the other side too.

“People forget someone actually lives here.”
“This used to be such a quiet street.”
“Why does everything have to be ruined once it goes viral?”

And somewhere in between those two reactions… is where most of us sit.

Admiring it.
Saving it.
Wanting to see it for ourselves.

Because I’ve been there too.

I’ve stood across the street, waiting for the light to fall just right.
I’ve shared these places. The quiet corners, the beautiful streets, the moments that feel like something out of a storybook.

I’ve always seen my page as a way to inspire people:

To step outside.
To walk.
To slow down.

To notice the small, fleeting moments that make London feel magical again.

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But somewhere along the way, something shifted.

The more we share,
the more people save.

The more people save,
the more the algorithm rewards it.

And slowly, almost without realising it,
we move from moments to destinations.

From quiet appreciation
to something more curated, more intentional, more… crowded.

Spring in London has always felt like a gentle return.

A soft unfolding after months of grey.
A season that invites you to slow down, not rush.

But lately, it feels different.

Faster.
Louder.
More watched.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what my responsibility is in all of this.

Because it would be easy to stand on the “right” side and say I am not part of the problem.

I don’t climb on walls.
I don’t sit on people’s steps.
I don’t shake branches for better photos.

I go early.
I try to be quick and quiet.
I tell people to be respectful.

And yet.

My work feeds the same machine.
Even when my intention was simply to make someone pause.

The reel that makes someone add “Notting Hill blossom” to their list.
The carousel that becomes a bookmark for a future trip.
The gentle caption that might be the final nudge for someone to go and see it in person.

I don’t control what happens after someone saves a post.
But I can’t pretend I have nothing to do with it.

There’s a very human moment that happens when you’re standing in front of somewhere like this.

You look up at the blossoms.
You look at your phone.
You look at the other people already filming.

And quietly, without saying it out loud, the question appears:

“If everyone else is doing it… why shouldn’t I?”

It’s the same question on both sides.

The person climbing on the wall.
And the creator deciding whether to post the exact address.

We tell ourselves small stories to make it feel harmless.

“I’m only here for a minute.”
“I’m just taking one photo.”
“I’m not as bad as the others.”

But places don’t experience us individually.
They experience us all at once.

I don’t have a neat solution.

I still love sharing London.
I still feel a rush of joy when a street is suddenly covered in blossom or magnolia or wisteria.
I still believe that paying attention to beauty can change the way a day feels.

But I am trying to hold a few new questions alongside that joy:

• Would I still come here if I couldn’t post it?
• Am I sharing this because it moved me, or because it will perform?
• Is this a place, or has it quietly become a backdrop?

If the honest answer makes me uncomfortable, that’s usually a sign to step back.

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Practically, it’s made me change a few things.

I share more impressions and fewer instructions.
More “this is how it felt to walk through London today” and fewer “here is the exact door, at this exact angle, at this exact time of day.”

Instead of geotagging a crescent or typing the full street name, I might simply write, ‘Notting Hill early morning’ and talk about the light instead.

I’m slower to share exact street names while something is going viral.
Sometimes I keep a place for myself until the season has passed.
Often, I’ll show a detail, the petals on the pavement, the light on the branches without turning someone’s front door into a landmark.

And when I do share specific locations, I try to include a reminder:

Please be gentle.
Stay on the pavement.
Remember someone actually lives here.

It’s not perfect.
It’s not enough to undo years of geotags and guides.

But it’s a start.

Because underneath the arguments about influencers and residents and “who is to blame,” there’s a quieter truth that I keep coming back to:

We are all visitors, even in the cities we call home.

We move through streets that belong to other people’s lives.
We stand under trees we did not plant.
We photograph houses we will never step inside.

The least we can do is move through that borrowed beauty with a little more care.

This year, when I visited the Notting Hill tree, I filmed for a moment and then put my phone away.

I watched the queue forming.
I watched a resident trying to edge out of their front door.
I watched a girl in a pink dress shiver in the cold while her friend adjusted the camera.

And then I did something I don’t think I’ve done before.

I crossed the street… and left.

Not because I have the moral high ground now.
But because I wanted, just for a minute, to remember what it felt like when blossom season was less about getting the perfect shot, and more about the quiet surprise of turning a corner and finding a tree in full bloom.

I don’t know if spring in London will ever go back to that.

But I do know this:

The way we share these places is not fixed.
We get to decide what kind of visitors we want to be.

And if paying attention is the first step to loving a city, then maybe the second step is learning how to love it without crushing what made us fall for it in the first place.

Explore more from my London series

Read Next

— Why Notting Hill’s Most Photographed Houses Are Being Painted Black
A story about aesthetics, identity, and how even colour can reshape a neighbourhood.

— Magnolia Season in London: The Most Beautiful Spring Walk Through Chelsea, Kensington & Notting Hill
A seasonal ritual, a fleeting bloom, and why some streets suddenly feel like paintings.

— Highgate Cemetery: A Quiet Walk Through Grief, Memory, and Unexpected Beauty
One of the quietest places in London to notice the seasons changing.

— London at Christmas: My 2025 Tree Walk
Christmas Trees worth visiting in London.

London has quietly turned pink again.

Every year there is a moment when the city seems to change overnight.

Cherry blossoms opening along quiet streets. Magnolias stretching their petals toward a sky that still feels like winter.

Soft, fleeting, hopeful.

Spring has a way of reminding us how quietly life renews itself.

And today, as the city begins to bloom, it also happens to be International Women’s Day.

Which made me think about the women in my life.

The ones who came before me.
The ones who walked beside me.
And the ones who are still becoming who they will be.

My Grandmother

My grandmother belonged to a generation that rarely spoke about itself.

She was born around 1918 (we think), just after the First World War, and lived through decades that shaped women very differently. Years marked by uncertainty, rebuilding, and quiet endurance.

She was also a Jewish woman growing up in Europe during the years surrounding World War II.

I often wonder what that must have been like for her.

She never spoke about those years in detail. Perhaps that was simply the way of that generation. You carried what you had lived through quietly and moved forward.

Looking back now, I wish I had asked her more questions.

When I think of her, the memories come in small images.

Her knitting quietly in the corner of a room.
A book always nearby.
The smell of Turkish coffee.

She spoke French beautifully and loved playing cards.

Bridge, mostly.

And she made the best tarama spread that I still wish I had learned properly.

But the image that remains most clearly in my mind is of her sitting in front of a window.

When my parents travelled to London and she came to stay with us, she would sit there for long stretches, calmly watching the day unfold outside.

Almost like a statue.

Observant. Quietly present.

We weren’t afraid of her. She was gentle and kind.

But that generation simply didn’t interact with children the way we do today. There were no endless conversations or planned activities.

Love lived in quieter places.

She lost her husband very young and suddenly found herself raising two teenage children alone.

For a woman of that generation, at that time, that must have been incredibly difficult.

She never remarried.

Sometimes I wonder if she ever allowed herself the possibility of another love. A companion. Someone she shared quiet moments with that we never knew about.

I honestly don’t know.

Instead, she focused on raising her children and building a life.

She taught bridge to other women, turning something she loved into a way to support her family.

And perhaps that explains why, at ninety-five, she was still playing bridge and even winning tournaments.

How incredible is that.

The Woman Who Raised Us

There is another woman who belongs to the story of my life.

She is not related to us by blood, but in every meaningful way she is family.

She came from a small village and had very little education. She was still a teenager when she began working for my family, originally helping my grandmother.

My mother was still very young herself.

When my mother married, she came with her.

And when my brother and I were born, she helped raise us.

She loved us fiercely, almost as if we were her own children.

We would sneak into her room at night and climb into her bed.

She cooked for us.
She cared for us.
She watched us grow.

Over the years she had suitors and opportunities to leave, but she stayed.

I don’t think she ever imagined that one day we would leave Turkey.

In her mind our lives were meant to unfold together in the same place.

And if we had stayed, perhaps she would have lived with us forever. Perhaps she would have been there when I had my own children.

When we moved to London, she remained with my grandmother as her companion.

Today she is in her eighties, almost blind and deaf.

We do not even know her exact age because girls’ births were not always formally recorded in the village where she was born.

But she has been part of our family since she was a child herself.

Sometimes family is not defined by blood.

Sometimes it is defined by the people who stay.

My Mother

Then comes my mother.

She married very young, barely eighteen or nineteen which was not unusual in her generation.

And then life changed suddenly.

In 1990 we left Istanbul and moved to London.

My mother was forty years old and didn’t know a single person in this city.

For me it was easier. I started high school and quickly found friends.

For her, it meant starting again.

Leaving behind family, friends, language, everything familiar.

The circumstances that brought us to London were complicated and turbulent, a story that could probably fill a book of its own.

But what I remember most about those years is how she carried on.

She created a home for us in a place that was completely unfamiliar to her.

Quietly.

Without making a drama of how difficult it must have been.

Looking back now, I realise how much strength that must have required.

Years later, when we lost my father, another difficult chapter arrived.

And once again she showed that same quiet resilience.

I encouraged her to return to something she had loved when she was younger in Turkey: playing cards, especially playing bridge.

She hadn’t played much in London.

But once she started again, it was as if a part of her came back to life.

Today, in her seventies, she not only plays bridge again, she also teaches it.

Every time I think about that, I feel incredibly proud of her.

It is proof that it is never too late to return to something you love.

Never too late to begin again.

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My Daughters

And then there are my daughters.

Two young women who could not be more different from each other.

I sometimes joke that one is my Mediterranean flower and the other my Nordic scientist.

One studies theoretical physics.
The other studies law.

One approaches the world with careful seriousness.
The other with a lighter, more playful curiosity.

Yet both are thoughtful, hardworking and brave.

They made me a mother. Something I had always wanted, though I don’t think anyone truly understands what that means until it happens.

Motherhood changes the way you see the world.

Your heart suddenly exists outside your own body, walking around in two young human beings you love more than you ever thought possible.

It hasn’t always been easy.

Motherhood comes with worries, sleepless nights, doubts and endless responsibility.

But I would never change it for anything in the world.

Having them in my life has been one of the greatest privileges of my life.

Their generation has grown up in a world very different from the one I knew.

They experienced COVID during important years of their lives — years when friendships and ordinary teenage moments suddenly disappeared.

They saw friends struggle in ways we rarely did when we were young.

And yet they still carry hope.

Their resilience amazes me.

Perhaps every generation of women learns strength differently.

My grandmother through survival.
My mother through reinvention.
My daughters through navigating an uncertain world with courage.

And me, perhaps through witnessing them all.

The Women Who Walk Beside Us

And then there are the friendships.

By the time you reach your mid-fifties, you realise that a life is almost mapped through the women who have walked beside you at different moments.

Some friendships begin when you are so young you cannot imagine life without those people.

Growing up in Istanbul, I had a group of girlfriends — six or seven of us — who were completely inseparable.

Summers on the islands.
Endless conversations.
Laughter that seemed to stretch through entire days.

We knew everything about each other: first crushes, teenage dreams, small heartbreaks that felt enormous at the time.

When we moved to London in 1990, those girls became my lifeline.

There were no mobile phones then. No WhatsApp. No social media.

If you wanted to stay connected, you wrote letters.

So we did.

Long letters that travelled slowly between Istanbul and London but carried enormous comfort. I would wait for them to arrive and read them again and again.

In those early years of starting a new life in a new country, those friendships held me up more than they probably realised.

And somehow those friendships never disappeared.

I haven’t lived in the same city as them for more than thirty years. Yet every time we meet wherever it may be in the world, we slip back into our younger selves within minutes.

There is something irreplaceable about childhood friends.

They know the entire story of who you are.

There was also another small circle of girls who appeared in my life during those years of transition.

When I first arrived in London for school, everything felt unfamiliar.

A new culture.
A different way of speaking.
Thinking.
Even socialising.

It was exciting, but also overwhelming.

And somehow, in the middle of all that, I found three girls.

One Brazilian.
One Lebanese.
One Japanese.

And then there was me.

We were the girls from the American School in London, the ASL girls, as I still think of them.

Each of us came from very different cultures, yet in many ways our worlds felt strangely similar.

We all understood what it meant to live between places, between identities, between expectations.

Those two years were not always easy, but those friendships carried me through more than they probably realised.

They helped me navigate that strange moment of being young and far from what felt familiar.

And somehow, like so many of the women in my life, they are still there.

They saw those formative years.

They saw the beginning of the person I was becoming.

Then came the university years.

Boston felt like a completely different world.

We were all far from our families, living in shared apartments, studying hard, discovering independence for the first time.

Our building felt like something out of the television show Friends.

Different apartments.
Doors always open.
Constantly walking in and out of each other’s lives.

We studied hard.
We partied hard.
We had endless conversations about the future.

Those were years when life still felt wide open.

And somehow those women are still part of my life today.

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Later came my first real job at the World Bank.

Those women became what we still call the World Bank girls.

Over the decades we have watched each other move through marriages, children, divorces, illnesses and loss.

Life has not always been easy for any of us.

But somehow those friendships remain.

Then came motherhood in London.

When my daughters were little and attending nursery, another group of women entered my life, the Young England mothers.

Those women made those years colourful and joyful.

Later came another circle through Falkner House School.

And when my father had his accident in 2020, those friendships became something much deeper.

Those women created a WhatsApp group called Rita’s Relief Squad.

Every day I wrote updates from the hospital.

They listened.
They encouraged.
They simply showed up.

One of them even sent homemade food to my house every single day.

Even today I struggle to find words to describe that kind of kindness.

And then there are the friendships that arrive in the most unexpected ways.

For me, some of those came through Instagram.

Women I met through curiosity, creativity, and the strange modern world of social media.

Many of them are younger than I am.

But that has never really mattered.

Once, I was the youngest person in the room when I started my career.

Now the roles have reversed.

They may teach me about algorithms and the digital world.

Perhaps I can offer something different in return. A different perspective, experience, maybe a little life wisdom.

Friendship evolves like that.

A Quiet Thread

Looking back, I realise that a life is never built alone. It is held together by the women who walk beside us.

My grandmother’s endurance.
My mother’s courage.
My daughters’ hope.
The friendships that appeared exactly when they were needed.

Resilience does not always look dramatic.

Sometimes it simply looks like women showing up for each other.

Again and again.

Across generations.

And today feels like a good day to celebrate that.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Rita x

P.S. If you have a grandmother, mother, daughter or friend in your life who shaped who you are, today might be a good day to tell her.

If this essay made you think of a woman who shaped your life, send it to her today.

Sometimes the smallest message can mean the most.

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I have been walking Hyde Park for thirty years. This week, I saw something I had never noticed before.

A starling, perched on a railing by the Serpentine, beak lifted, singing at considerable volume. Iridescent feathers with green, purple and black colours, depending on the light.

Extraordinary, when you look. I had never, in all that time, noticed that bird.

I thought this said something about the bird.

It says something about me.

I have been telling myself and telling you, which is worse, that I have been learning to slow down. That I have been paying attention. That I notice the small things. The light on a particular street. The quality of a Tuesday morning. The beauty in the unremarkable.

I write about this. I have written about it a great deal.

And then I went to Hyde Park on an ordinary morning with a friend, walked and talked properly (no phones, no destinations, no photographs being composed) and in the space of two hours saw things I have been walking past for three decades without registering.

The starling.
Goslings taking their first steps by the water.
Household Cavalry on horseback with the Shard visible in the background, impossibly like two versions of London that shouldn’t be in the same frame.
A game of volleyball being played, cheerfully and without irony, in front of the Albert Memorial.

None of this was new. All of it had been there every spring.

The day wasn’t dramatic. It was ordinary and that’s the point.
The ordinary holds the gifts if you stand still long enough to notice them.

I was the one who was different or rather, I was finally, briefly, slow enough.

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The Same Park, Different Years

This is where we taught our children to ride a bike.

I remember taking my daughter to the playground and waiting for the Household Cavalry to pass at 10.30am sharp, on their way to the Changing of the Guard. This was before Instagram/social media existed.

We would stand there, watching them go past the sound of hooves on the path, the uniforms, the horses impossibly tall at her height.

Her excitement is what got me excited.

Now I chase them for Instagram reels.

Though yesterday I saw them and didn’t reach for my phone.

They were coming back, which I almost never see. I am usually there early enough to catch them leaving. We met at noon, my friend and I, long after my old morning routines would have brought me through the park with a purpose.

There was the time my daughter fell into the Serpentine because she couldn’t stop her scooter in time, and we had to return home, soaked and indignant, to change her clothes.

The time we were having a picnic and were attacked, decisively by squirrels, and I wasn’t sure whether to save the food or my initially excited but then genuinely frightened child.

During Covid, when the parks became everyone’s sanctuary, this was where I walked when there was nowhere else to go.

After my father’s accident, it was the path I took home where I could cry without anyone noticing. Where I could breathe properly again before opening the front door.

Later it was about chasing the horses against daffodils.
Filming swimmers in the frozen lake.
Catching parakeets eating cherry blossoms.

I have the pictures and videos to prove it.

Some were planned. Most weren’t.

Each time, in a way, I did slow down to capture the moment.

But did I really slow down enough to enjoy it?

The Walk We Don’t Count

There is a particular kind of walking that doesn’t count as exercise in the fitness app sense, doesn’t produce a photograph, and doesn’t result in a destination.

It’s just walking with someone you’ve known long enough that the conversation can go anywhere and does, across two hours, from something serious to something trivial to a long silence that neither of you feel the need to fill.

At one point she said,

“I don’t think we’ve walked like this since the girls were in primary school.”

And I realised she was right.

Back then the walks were always between something:
the school gate and the car,
the park and the next activity,
the end of the day and bedtime.

This was the first one that didn’t lead anywhere.

I walked this park that morning.

And when the horses appeared, I did reach for my phone out of habit more than intention.

In the past I would have taken photographs and video from every possible angle. I would have moved closer. Followed them down the path. Filmed again when they turned.

This time I stopped where I was, zoomed in, took a video and a single photograph, and put it back in my pocket.

I watched them instead.
The strange contrast of the Shard framed between the trees behind them.

I have the footage.
I also have the memory.

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I write about slow living.
I have also, for the past few years, been chasing virality.

Both of these things are true simultaneously.

The chasing has looked like checking which reels performed. Thinking about hooks before I’ve finished experiencing whatever the hook is about. Arriving somewhere beautiful and feeling the faint disappointment that it’s not quite photographable.

Noticing a bird, then reaching for the phone before I’ve actually looked at the bird.

The Hyde Park morning was the first time in a while that I went out without that orientation. Not because I decided to. I had simply arranged to meet a friend, and you don’t check your save count when you’re walking and talking with someone you love.

Learning to Slow Down for the First Time

My daughters are grown. I am no longer running.

For years, the running was necessary and real. The particular velocity of a life with children in it, the way your attention is always partial, always divided, always managing the next thing while handling the current one.

You don’t see the starling because you are watching the child who is about to feed the geese something they shouldn’t eat.

I knew that when the children grew up, things would slow down.

I assumed that I would slow down with them.

What I didn’t anticipate is how long the running continues even after the thing you were running for has ended.

The body and the mind don’t receive the memo immediately.

You keep moving at the old speed, arriving at a quieter version of the same life, and wondering why it doesn’t feel different yet.

Slowing down is not a destination.
It’s a practice you are apparently
always at the beginning of.

What the Starling Was Doing

The starling on the railing was singing.

Not performing. Not demonstrating. Singing. Beak lifted, completely absorbed in the song, indifferent to the park and everyone in it.

I hadn’t reached for my phone at first.

We were watching it, the way you do when something unexpected appears close enough that you don’t want to startle it by moving.

At one point my friend said,

“She’s literally talking to us. So chatty. This is your kind of thing you should film it.”

So I did.

Before, I would have felt the familiar anxiety that I might miss the moment. I would have reached for my phone immediately, trying to catch it before it flew away.

This time, I didn’t rush.

The bird stayed.

We stood there for longer than you’d think, two grown women watching a starling sing by a lake in London on an ordinary morning in early spring.

And because it stayed, I could enjoy her company first.

I have a video now.
And a photograph.

Thank you for walking with me, for slowing down with me, for choosing not just to observe, but to participate in a practice that makes the ordinary glow just a little brighter.

Thirty years of starlings singing on that railing, and I never stood still long enough to hear one.

What I learned, almost without realizing, is that the practice of paying attention doesn’t end with a single walk or a single realization. It’s a discipline, a muscle that grows when you choose not to rush past the day’s textures. The starling reminded me of that. The park reminded me of that. And a long career of trying to capture life reminded me, too: beauty doesn’t arrive; you do.

I haven’t arrived.

I walked somewhere beautiful on Tuesday and saw a bird I’d been walking past for thirty years.

That’s where I am.

At the beginning of it all.
xo Rita

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If you enjoy these slower London walks — the blossom routes, the early morning cafés, the quiet streets before 9am. I share those each week in my paid notes.

The free posts will always offer the spark.
The paid space is where the conversation continues.

You can upgrade here if that sounds like your kind of London.

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If you’re new here, I wrote earlier this week about how February has changed for me over the past five years.

You can read that here.

Still dancing with him in my dreams…

Five years ago today, the hospital called in the middle of the night.

It was still during Covid. The time when we weren’t allowed inside hospitals unless something had already gone very wrong. So when they tell you that you may want to come in to see your father, you know this is not good news. You know the end is near.

I remember driving to the hospital in the dark, speaking with my brother about how we would break the news to my mother.

We had been fighting for a year and a half to keep my father alive, through some of the most chaotic times of our lifetime. Since his accident in October 2019, there had always been a goal, a summer in Turkey, one more season together, one more walk, one more memory to make.

We had somehow managed it until then.
But this felt different.

The hospital felt different.
The doctors felt different.
And for the first time since his accident, I felt defeated.

He looked tired.

Before I left in the morning, so that my mother could take my place (because we weren’t even allowed to be in the room together as it was covid times), I told him that if he felt like he needed to leave, it was ok. That we would be ok. That we would look after Mum.

He squeezed my hands and I saw tears in his eyes.

I will never forget that moment.
And I will never quite forget the guilt that followed.

Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to say that.
Perhaps I was supposed to promise him another summer.
Perhaps hope was the only thing I should have left behind in that room.

So I changed my tone immediately and told him I would see him tomorrow. That Mum was coming. That we’d be back.

That night, when my mother wanted to stay with him, we told her to go home and rest. History had shown us this battle was always a long one. She would need her strength.

None of us despite all the hints given to us thought this would be the end.

I will never forget that moment.

Hope is a funny thing.
Losing hope is terrifying.

And for the first time in his battle, I had lost mine.

He passed away quietly on his own at 2am.

When the phone rang, I wasn’t ready. No one had actually said he was gone. My husband didn’t know. I didn’t fully understand. I just took the keys and drove to the hospital in the middle of the night, because that’s what you do when someone calls and says you should come.

You are never ready to say goodbye to someone who felt bigger than life, someone who made you feel safe in the world simply by being in it.

When I arrived, his room was dark. Music was playing softly. And when I stepped inside, I realised I was too late.

In a way, I had said goodbye earlier that morning, even though I hadn’t meant it as a goodbye.

Afterwards, I remember getting into my car alone while it was still dark outside. I don’t remember how I drove home. I don’t remember where I parked. I don’t remember how I found my way back into bed and cried in my husband’s arms.

Adrenaline is a powerful thing. When you need it, survival takes over. Somehow you move through tragedy. You make phone calls. You tell people. You organise. You stand. You sit. You nod. You breathe.

And then comes the funeral.

We still couldn’t gather properly. We couldn’t say goodbye in the way we had imagined. He was buried in the same cemetery as Amy Winehouse, which the girls were oddly excited about. I remember thinking how children will always look for something to hold on to, some small point of light, even on the darkest days. Maybe we all do.

My daughter gave a beautiful speech. I couldn’t speak at all, even though I had so much to say. Grief does that sometimes. It takes the words from the person who has carried the story the longest.

But the sun came out that morning just as it has today in London.

Children’s voices drifted in from a nearby school as we walked towards the burial site.

He would have loved that.

He loved children. He played with me constantly when I was little. He adored his grandchildren, all four of them, and they adored him right back.

He had a child’s soul himself in a way of taking life lightly, of believing no problem was ever big enough to darken everything else.

Even at rock bottom, he made you feel things would sort themselves out.

Think positive, he would say.

Spring in London

I catch myself hearing that in my head now whenever the sky finally clears after days of grey, or when the first signs of spring begin to appear along the streets of London.

That’s what I miss most.
Someone who made you feel secure.
Safe.
Light.

January has been difficult again this year. The loss of my mother-in-law, the loss of a dear friend, and endless grey skies that refused to lift. A month meant to mark beginnings quietly became something I wanted to erase from the calendar.

And yet this morning, five years later, the sun came out again.

Spring flowers are beginning to open along the streets of London. The first magnolias have appeared in Kensington, those pearled buds that always seem too delicate to endure this city’s cold air, and yet they return, year after year.

It feels significant.

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Maybe March will feel more like the new year this time.

Maybe moving forward doesn’t mean leaving anything behind.
Maybe it means allowing light to sit beside what we carry, grief and gratitude, side by side.

A walk.
A longer afternoon.
A warmer day than expected.

Because after all the dark winters, spring always remembers how to return.
And five years later, under this same London sun, it feels like a small permission to begin again.

If this felt familiar in any way, you can share it with someone who might need a little light this week.

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London has held many chapters for me over the years.

If you’re new here, you might also like:

• This is not the 52nd birthday letter I planned to write
A walk through Hyde Park, motherhood, and remembering a friend who’s gone.

• How to Capture the Magic: iPhone Photography & Reels in London
Creator tools

• When everything changed. The story behind the walks
On seasonal rituals, memory, and the comfort of returning to familiar paths.

A pause between decades….

Every year on my birthday, I wait to feel different.
From 29 to 30.
From 39 to 40.
From 49 to 50.

People make such a fuss about these numbers that you almost expect an announcement from the universe, as if a new version of you has been quietly installed overnight.

And yet, every time, it feels mostly like the day before.
Same face in the mirror.
Same coffee.
Same to‑do list.
No dramatic shift.
Just a slightly better cake and a few more jokes about getting older.

But when I zoom out, not year to year, but decade to decade, everything has changed.
My twenties, thirties, forties, and now fifties feel like they belonged to four different women who share my name and body, but very little else.

Year to year, nothing changes.
Decade to decade, everything does.

My 20s — Pure Momentum

When everything felt possible….

In my twenties, I was absolutely convinced I could conquer the world.
Not in a motivational‑quote way.
Not in a manifesting way.
In a quiet, unquestioned way.

It genuinely didn’t occur to me that I couldn’t do what I wanted. I didn’t experience this as confidence at the time. It simply felt like normality. Looking back, I realise how rare that kind of unexamined belief actually is.

I wanted a job in finance, so I applied.
No perfect CV.
No special access.
I simply assumed it would work out. Which is very different from believing things will work out. Assuming is quieter. Less performative. Almost innocent.

I romanticised office life: tall glass buildings, takeaway coffee, after‑work drinks, the thrill of spreadsheets that felt like freedom.
It was the era of working women and I wanted to be one of them.

When my boyfriend (now husband) got a job in Sydney, I didn’t hesitate.
No visa. No plan. Just curiosity.

Australia felt like another planet.
Huge skies.
Warm evenings.
Bats swirling overhead at dusk.
Two clueless Europeans sitting under a tree for shade until someone casually mentioned it was full of bats.

Shark alarms at Bondi that everyone ignored, except for me.
Weekends climbing Uluru, tracing Aboriginal art, eating mangoes the size of my head.

It was chaotic, sun‑drenched, slightly unhinged and I loved it.
I returned to London eventually.
Big urban city girl, always.
But Sydney taught me something important:

That you don’t need a fully formed identity before you begin. You can become yourself by moving. You don’t need certainty to move forward. You just need curiosity.

That same curiosity led me somewhere else unexpected: chocolate.

People sometimes ask how my chocolates ended up in Harrods.
The truth: nobody cared at first.
Samples. Letters. Silence.

Then came the fax. (Who remembers faxes?)
I figured someone would have to pick up the paper and drop it on a buyer’s desk.
Five minutes later, my phone rang.

That moment summed up my twenties perfectly.
Audacious. Naïve. Fuelled entirely by momentum.

When my chocolates finally arrived in stores, I became obsessed with the displays.
I’d visit so often that staff eventually gave me an employee card so I could sneak in before opening to rearrange the shelves.

Later, with a baby in a pram, I’d march into the buyer’s office with no appointment, just conviction and a crying child insisting the display was empty and handing him a new order form. Years later he told me they secretly loved it.

Apparently, chaos plus conviction is persuasive.

Looking back, that’s what confidence looked like before you realise how rare it is:
Not bravado.
Not hustle.
Just unquestioned belief that things will work out.

My 30s — Children, Chocolate & A Crowded Life

The loud, beautiful middle where life got crowded and meaningful.

My thirties were loud, busy, and full. They were also strangely repetitive. The same mornings. The same small routines. A blur that only later reveals its shape.

I got married, had two daughters, and kept the chocolate business alive part‑time while navigating pregnancy, toddlers, and travel.
Those years built the scaffolding of adult life: marriage, motherhood, community, exhaustion.

Growing up, my parents hardly set foot inside school.
London, however, was an Olympic sport in participation of assemblies, recitals, prayers, bake sales, and fiercely polite competitiveness.
I showed up for everything.

Some mornings I’d be chatting at the school gates while a chocolate order waited across town. Parents would mention spotting my brand at Selfridges or Waitrose, laughing and saying things like, “Did you know there’s a chocolate with your name on it?” as if it were a strange coincidence. When I explained it was actually my brand, they were always genuinely shocked.

As my husband travelled constantly during those years, most of the daily life rested with me. School mornings, dinners, bedtimes. There were stretches where I barely registered the imbalance. You normalise what you have to. You adapt first. You reflect later.
I wanted to work, but I also wanted to be present.
So I gravitated toward work that could flex around life. Chocolate, then private sales, then pop‑ups.

Once the girls were settled in school, I stepped back from chocolate.
My father and brother took over.
Then a small jewellery brand asked if I could host a private sale.

One event became many.

My living room became a boutique with racks of clothes, trays of jewellery, women browsing with coffee cups, chatting as they shopped.
It was half retail, half social club.

People urged me to open a store.
I didn’t want that kind of permanence.
Pop‑ups fit my rhythm.

Those years were exhausting and joyful and full of momentum again.

Looking back, my thirties were about construction. At the time, I didn’t feel like I was “building” anything. I felt like I was maintaining. Surviving. Keeping small humans alive. At the time, it just felt like chaos.

And then years later, that small, unknown jewellery brand — Kismet by Milka — opened their first flagship on Bond Street.
They asked me to host an opening party.
Standing there surrounded by familiar faces from those early pop‑up days was surreal. One of those quiet full‑circle moments that life occasionally gifts you when you’ve been saying yes long enough.

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My 40s — The Decade I Didn’t Plan

Finding calm in unfamiliar territory.

My forties began differently.

At 42, menopause hit early and hard.
I didn’t recognise it at first. Just exhaustion, fog, a slow disappearance of energy.
Then came the moment I forgot to collect my daughter from school.
I sat on the floor and cried, not because of the mistake, but because I didn’t recognise myself.

A doctor confirmed it: my hormones were barely measurable.
I wasn’t thriving. I was functioning. Functioning looks deceptively like coping. From the outside, everything appears intact.

Then in 2019, my father was hit by a car.
Everything stopped. Or maybe more accurately: everything else became irrelevant.
Hospital corridors became a second home.

And then, 2020. Covid hit.
Lockdown.
London fell silent under absurdly blue skies.

As strange as it sounds, I felt relief.
The whole world had stopped, and for once my slowing down didn’t feel like failure.

We stayed home - my husband, our daughters, me.
Long walks, slow lunches, dinners without rush.
After years of scattered schedules, we had found stillness.

I started noticing things again: doors, light, flowers growing through pavement cracks.
To understand my teenage daughters’ world, I had opened an Instagram account.
During lockdown it became something of its own. An escapism first, then work.

I didn’t set out to build anything. I was simply responding to what felt alive.

What surprised me most wasn’t the growth. It was that something creative had quietly survived inside me.

I began collaborating with hotels, brands, and eventually magazines.
The unexpected photography‑meets‑storytelling career took shape almost by accident as things in my life often have.

But near the end of my forties, I felt another shift.
Surrounded by younger creators full of sparkle, I realised I was done chasing novelty.
I wanted depth, meaning, continuity.

Novelty is intoxicating when you’re younger. Meaning is steadier. Quieter. Harder to articulate. But impossible to ignore once you feel it.

That’s how you know another decade is beginning. I didn’t know yet that I was grieving several things at once: my father’s old self, my own energy, and the version of life I thought my forties would be.

My 50s — Turbulence, Space & A Conscious Yes

Beginning again, from scratch.

Turning 50 didn’t feel like a crisis; it felt like a reordering.

My eldest left for university, and suddenly the house sounded different.
My younger daughter was still home, but now there was a visible countdown.

My default setting shifted from yes to no.
Not from resistance. From choice.
I wanted to be fully present for these last school years together.

Around me, the landscape of midlife stretched wide and complex.
More funerals than weddings.
Friends moving, divorcing, reinventing.
Aging parents.
It isn’t grim.
It’s just life feeling heavier, but real.

Heavier doesn’t mean worse. It means more layered.

At the same time, 50 is still young.
If I’m lucky enough to reach my eighties or nineties, I have thirty or forty more years ahead. There’s no reason they should be small.

When children leave, time appears. Not joyful time. Not sad time. Just… open time.
At first, it’s disorienting.
Then it feels like air.

I realised I don’t need to escape to breathe anymore. That might be the biggest shift of midlife.

And lately, my old yes‑energy has started to return. Not reckless, not frantic, but conscious.

Because when I look back, every meaningful chapter began the same way: curiosity, experimentation, and paying attention.

That’s how finance happened.
Chocolate happened.
Private sales happened.
Instagram happened.
Writing happened.

None of it started with a plan.
It all started with a spark.

Now, I’m curious again, drawn to the intersection of storytelling, strategy, and aesthetics. Work that helps people and brands articulate who they are and why they matter.

So I started writing here, on Substack.
Without a master plan.
Just another quiet yes.

Some of my friends don’t really understand Substack yet, the same way they didn’t understand Instagram when I began there. That’s okay. Every platform has its people.

Some scroll.
Some read.
Some like fast.
Some like slow.

I’m quietly building in the slow lane.

The not-knowing feels familiar, like my twenties — just wiser, quieter, less frantic.

If these years have taught me anything, it’s that you can’t control tomorrow.
You may think that you can. You can’t. I suspect many people reading this recognise parts of themselves in at least one of these decades.

So, in my fifties, I’m trying to treat each day as an opportunity rather than a project.

So What Are Birthdays For?

Year to year, nothing dramatic happens.
The change is too subtle to feel.

It happens in tiny daily decisions:
The jobs you apply for.
The people you love.
The babies you rock.
The walks you take.
The posts you write.
The parents you sit beside in hospital.
The invitations you accept or decline.

You only see the transformation when you zoom out by decades.

Maybe that’s what birthdays are for, not to mark a sudden transformation, but to remind us to notice the arc.

If the first thirty years were about building the life I imagined,
and the next twenty about surviving the life I didn’t plan,
then perhaps the decades ahead can be simpler:

Pay attention.
Choose carefully.
Stay open. Long enough to see who you’re still becoming.

You might also enjoy reading

• When Everything Changed: The Story Behind the Walks

• Highgate Cemetery: A Quiet Walk Through Grief, Memory, and Unexpected Beauty

• The Business of Beauty: How to Build a Brand Around Emotion, Not Algorithms

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Small moments from a slow January in London.

January has turned me into a very slow writer.

Not in a romantic, notebook-by-the-window kind of way.
More in a… open document, stare at screen, close document, make coffee, repeat kind of way.

I’ve had things I wanted to say.
Thoughts floating around.
Half-sentences.
Little mental notes.

But the longer I didn’t write, the heavier writing started to feel.
And then writing began to feel like it needed to be important.
And then beautiful.
And then worth the silence.

You know that feeling?

When you haven’t written in a while and suddenly it feels like you can’t just ease back in. You have to re-enter with something meaningful. Something articulate. Something that justifies the gap.

Which, of course, makes you not write at all.

January has been like that for me.

Quiet. Heavy. Uncertain.

The news feels dark.
The world feels unsettled.
And my own two weeks in January have felt… similarly low-key and foggy.

So this piece is me doing the same thing I’ve been gently forcing myself to do all month:

Start anyway.

Not with something polished.
Not with something clever.
Not with something that fixes anything.

Just with honesty.

Because January, for me, hasn’t been a month of grand plans or fresh starts.

It’s been a month of survival.

Of finding small ways to stay inside my life when both the world and my own thoughts feel heavy.

And I wanted to share a few of those small ways with you in case your January has felt heavy too.

January as a Season of In-Between

January arrived quietly this year.

Not with resolutions.
Not with a surge of optimism.

Just a low, steady weight.

Dark mornings.
Grey afternoons.
Headlines you half-read and then carry with you anyway.

My birthday passed gently.
A breakfast I didn’t photograph.
A lunch I barely captured.
Drinks with a few fellow Capricorns where we talked about children growing up, energy shifting, bodies changing, and the strange relief of no longer pretending we have everything figured out.

It might have been the slowest January I’ve ever had.

I’ve started to think January isn’t meant to be a reset at all.

It’s a corridor.

A space between who you were and who you’re becoming.

Midlife seems to contain many of these corridors.

You’re not lost.
But you’re not anchored either.

You’re hovering.

So I stopped trying to fix January.

I tried to make it survivable.

Visiting Museums (Letting Art Hold the Weight)

A slow moment with Turner at Tate Britain, London.

Some days the only goal was to leave the house.

Not to “do culture.”
Not to learn.
Not to tick anything off.

Just to place myself somewhere warm, quiet, and larger than my own thoughts.

My sole purpose was to see the Lee Miller exhibition at Tate Britain before it ends.

Of course, I chose a rainy weekend, mid-day.

Of course, everyone else had the exact same idea.

It was heaving.

Rooms full of bodies inching forward.
Umbrellas dripping in the cloakroom.
That particular museum hum that feels half-excitement, half-exhaustion.

I felt instantly overwhelmed and gently reminded myself why I usually avoid popular exhibitions at peak times.

Not because I don’t love them.
But because I struggle to truly see when it’s that crowded.

Lee Miller’s photography is extraordinary. Powerful. Important. Mesmerising.

But I knew, halfway through, that I wasn’t giving it the attention it deserved.

So I made a quiet mental note: I’ll come back to this one. On a weekday. Early. When I can linger.

And then I wandered into the Turner & Constable rooms.

And something shifted.

Constable is beautiful, of course.

But Turner.

Turner spoke to me in a different way.

I stood in front of his paintings longer than I expected to. Longer than I usually allow myself. The way Turner used light, not neatly, not politely, but as something alive, something almost breathing completely disarmed me.

The light in his work isn’t perfect.

It’s hazy.
Blurry.
Sometimes barely there.

And yet it’s the entire point.

It reminded me that light doesn’t always arrive as brightness.

Sometimes it arrives as atmosphere.
As suggestion.
As a soft glow you only notice if you slow down.

I walked through those rooms thinking:

Maybe I don’t need January to suddenly feel good.
Maybe I just need small flickers of light inside it.

So now I find myself quietly waiting for sunshine to come out and play.

Not in a dramatic, life-changing way.

Just in the way you wait for a pale winter sun to briefly touch a wall.

That feels like enough.

Visiting New Openings (Tiny Anchors in the Day)

Coffee, cake and places that asks nothing from me. Claridge’s Bakery and Le Cafe by Nicolas Rouzaud at Burlington Arcade

Other days, leaving the house looked smaller.

There was Le Café by Nicolas Rouzaud at Burlington Arcade, sitting beneath the glass canopy, with something sweet, watching people drift past, letting the space do some emotional heavy lifting for me. It feels like stepping into a very chic Parisian daydream.

There was Claridge’s Bakery, warm loaves, nostalgic sweets, iced buns, jammy favourites, and that slightly ridiculous joy of watching beautiful things come to life behind the counter.

I also went to Martino’s at Sloane Square, a new breakfast/lunch spot that already feels like somewhere you fall in love with quietly. The kind of place you’d expect yourself to photograph.

And yet I didn’t take a single picture.

Not of the room.
Not of the coffee.
Not of the breakfast.

I just sat there.

And honestly? That felt like progress.

And then there are places that don’t need to be new at all.

Daphne’s, warm, classic, candlelit, reliable in the best possible way. Perfect for celebrating a friend’s birthday. Perfect for lingering. Perfect for conversation.

None of these outings were “content.”

Most of them came with:

Warm cups held between both hands.
Bread eaten without thinking about angles.
Smiles shared softly.

They became part of the practice.

Noticing life without needing to post it.

Unlock the Gentle January Practice Guide

Reading (And Admitting When a Book Meets the Wrong Mood)

I’ve been reading more.

For book club, we picked up Flesh, by David Szalay.

I read it in two days.

Which usually means I loved something.

But this time, it felt more complicated.

I enjoyed it.
I respected it.
I stayed with it.

Did I love it?

I’m not entirely sure.

It’s spare. Controlled. Unsentimental. A life traced through trauma, drift, and difficult choices. Not comforting. Not trying to be.

And maybe that’s the point.

But halfway through, I realised I might have wanted something else.

Something warmer.
Something more hopeful.
Something that held a little more light.

I had high expectations.

And while Flesh is undoubtedly well written, I sometimes found myself sensing where the emotional direction was heading.

Or maybe this is simply January speaking.

Maybe January doesn’t want starkness.

Maybe January wants tenderness.

I’m learning that what I need from books changes with my inner weather.

Right now, I think I’m craving stories that feel like open windows.

Still, I don’t regret reading it.

Sometimes a book doesn’t become a favourite, but it still becomes a mirror.

And that counts too.

Seeing People (Life Without Receipts)

Quiet company counts.

I’ve been seeing friends.

Lunch.
Coffee.
Walks.
Breakfast.
Dinner.
Drinks.
Comedy.

Most of it undocumented.

No stories.
No carousels.
No proof.

Tomorrow I’m meeting a friend for lunch that I haven’t seen in years.

The kind where time collapses once you’re sitting across from each other.

I’m also going to see Jack Skipper at Jump On Comedy with a friend because we both admitted the same thing:

We need to laugh more.

And sometimes laughter doesn’t arrive spontaneously anymore.

Sometimes you have to build a small container for it.

So we are.

Chasing Colour

When I need brightness, I go where things are colourful and growing. Kew Gardens Orchid Festival

This week I’m going to Kew Gardens for the orchid festival.

Not for content.

For colour.

Pink.
Orange.
Yellow.
Purple.

I’ve been buying pink roses.
Orange tulips.

Lighting candles constantly.

If the world feels harsh, I try to make my immediate surroundings kind.

A Gentle January Practice

Not a reset.
Not a glow-up.
Not a transformation.

A handrail.

Shrink the horizon.
Leave the house gently.
Seek colour.
Let accidental moments count.
Make home kind.
Allow escapism without shame.
Notice one small beautiful thing a day.

That’s it.

Unlock the Gentle Winter Practice Guide

January isn’t asking us to become new people.

It’s asking us to stay.

To remain in our own lives, even when they feel muted.

Romanticising January isn’t pretending everything is fine.

It’s refusing to abandon yourself during heavy weeks.

It’s saying:

I’m still here.
I’m still walking.
I’m still open to small joys.
I’m still participating in my own life.

And for now, that feels like enough.

THE GENTLE JANUARY/WINTER PRACTICE GUIDE

A quiet companion for heavy months

This is not a reset.
It’s not a productivity system.
It’s not a plan to fix you, your life, or this season.

Think of this as a small collection of handrails with simple, repeatable ways to remain inside your own life when the days feel foggy, the news feels sharp, and your energy feels low.

Nothing here is about becoming better.
Everything here is about staying.

You don’t need to do all of this.
You don’t need to do any of this perfectly.
You don’t need to turn this into a project.

Move through it slowly.
Pick one or two things.
Return to others later.

This guide is meant to be lived with, not completed.

Read more

Belgium, January 2026

I didn’t mean to take a break.

When I started this newsletter, I promised myself I would publish once a week, no matter what, a small commitment to show up, even when life was busy. And then December 28th happened, and everything I planned to write, everything I thought January would be fell apart overnight.

It’s now January 13th as I write this, and I’ll probably send it tomorrow. Two weeks later. A pause that somehow felt like a year of its own.

This was meant to be a fun birthday letter. Something light about turning 52 on the 1st of January, with fresh starts, and the kind of hope we love to pin onto a new year. I may still write that letter next week. But first, I need to write what actually happened.

The quarter when everything felt possible

The last quarter of 2025 was a fun one.

From September to December, London came alive in that way it always does with Halloween and Christmas: lights everywhere, too many invitations, press parties and personal parties competing for space in the calendar.

By November, I felt as if I had finally come to terms with the empty nest. The shock had worn off; the quiet house felt less like an absence and more like a possibility. I caught myself telling my husband:

“It’s funny… I’m actually not dreading 2026. I’m looking forward to it.”

I had ideas. Projects. A list of things I wanted to start. For the first time in a long time, the future felt wide open.

In November, we went back to Belgium for the wedding of my husband’s best friend’s son. It was surreal to realise we had reached the stage of life where we attend our friends’ children’s weddings and some of them are already becoming grandparents.

My husband is seven years older than I am. Watching his friend group edge into their sixties made that shift from fifties to sixties feel very real.

After the wedding we had brunch with some of our dearest friends, then drove to see my husband’s parents. On the way home, I said:

“They’re ageing. This Christmas, I really want to be in Belgium with your parents and the whole family.”

It wasn’t a morbid thought. More an instinct. A sense that these big family moments are not infinite… and I didn’t want to take any of them for granted.

December proved me right in ways I didn’t expect.

We went to Belgium and had a truly lovely Christmas with everyone. My mother-in-law had a bit of a tummy ache, so she spent some time in bed, but it didn’t seem serious. On our last morning, the 26th of December, she came downstairs, sat with us while we had breakfast, said goodbye, and handed us the tin of Christmas biscuits she bakes every year.

We left feeling full and content.

We stopped by the seaside near Knokke on the way home, had lunch, walked on the beach like we always do. We drove back to London uplifted… excited about New Year’s Eve with some of our closest friends, and strangely proud that I had convinced the kids to spend the evening with us until 11 p.m. before heading off to their own parties.

For the first time, we decided to skip our traditional pancake party on the 1st of January. Instead, we planned a quiet family day in the countryside for my birthday: lunch, a long walk, a gentle start to the year.

I was genuinely excited about 2026 and the way it was beginning to take shape in my mind.

And then, on Sunday the 28th of December, the phone rang.

The call you never forget

We were easing back into normal life.

That afternoon we did what we always do before having friends over: a big Waitrose shop, planning an easy family-and-friends dinner for the 29th. We parked the car in the car park, joking about how far we’d parked from the lift, when my husband’s phone buzzed with a message from a friend who lives in Asia.

He looked at the screen and said:

“Oh my God… someone died.”

The text didn’t actually say that but the tone was wrong, and both of us felt it. His mind jumped to an old friend in Japan who had been ill.

I told him, “Let’s not imagine the worst. Call and find out.”

We were still sitting in the car, waiting for our daughter to come down and help with the bags, when he made the call.

On the other end of the line, our friend’s voice was shaking.

“It’s horrific,” he kept saying. “You really don’t know?”

My husband repeated, “No. Just tell me. Who is it?”

There was a long pause. Then the name: A (for the sake of the family’s privacy, I will not be using his name here).

I screamed. My husband went very quiet.

At that exact moment, our daughter opened the car door, annoyed about the parking distance, and saw me crying. My husband stepped out, hugged her, and told her.

She started crying too.

The unthinkable news

A and his family are not casual friends.

My husband went to university with him. I’ve known his wife for twenty-five years. Their children are the same age as ours. They are the people we spend summers with windsurfing, boat days, long brunches, the kind of rituals that become the spine of your family life without you quite noticing.

We had just seen them in November in Belgium. The house was full of laughter, plans, pride. It felt unthinkable that the story could have changed this much in a few weeks.

They were on their annual ski trip. He left the hotel for a walk… and he didn’t come back. And then the news arrived, final and impossible: he was gone.

There are sentences you read that your brain refuses to process. This was one of them.

A was one of the most positive people I have ever known completely in love with his wife, his children, his life. To lose a 58-year-old husband, father, friend like that… to have to explain it to your kids, who see them as a second family…

It made the world feel suddenly very cruel and very dark.

We went upstairs and the three of us just sat there and cried. My husband, my daughter and I all in that first stage of grief where your brain refuses to accept what it knows is true.

We kept saying, “No… this can’t be right,” as if repetition might somehow change the facts.

My husband started calling friends in Belgium, trying to piece together what had happened and when the funeral might be.

And then as all this was happening, his phone rang again.

The second blow

I was still crying sitting on the couch when I heard him say the word “hospital.”

My heart jumped.

“What do you mean hospital? I thought he was found… who’s in hospital?”

It wasn’t our friend this time. It was my husband’s mother.

My mother-in-law, who’d had that vague stomach pain over Christmas, still wasn’t feeling well. His father had called an ambulance “just to be safe,” and they had taken her in to run tests and monitor her.

It was the second blow of that Sunday.

My husband later said he felt torn in two: part of him wanted to collapse and cry for his friend, knowing nothing could change that outcome; another part snapped into practical mode for his parents, trying to work out what needed to happen next.

We asked if we should come back to Belgium immediately. His father told us not to yet and that she was in good hands. He would keep us updated, and that we should wait until we knew more.

So we did what people always do in limbo: we started planning around a future we couldn’t yet see.

We told ourselves the funeral for A wouldn’t be on the 31st or the 1st. We told ourselves we would probably still somewhat celebrate New Year’s Eve with our friends. Still go on our little countryside birthday walk.

And then head to Belgium afterwards for the funeral… and, hopefully, a visit with his parents once she was home again.

Normal until it isn’t

On the 31st, I went to get my hair done.

My husband went into the office for a few hours. It felt almost normal, the way you keep moving through a day because it’s easier than imagining every possible outcome.

I was in the hairdresser’s chair when he called and asked if I’d seen his messages.

I hadn’t.

“Read them and call me back,” he said.

His father had called again.

My mother-in-law’s condition had deteriorated.

He was asking my husband to come to Belgium as soon as possible. My husband was already at home, throwing clothes into a bag and looking for the next flight.

I stared at the screen in the middle of the salon and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.

We hadn’t even begun to digest the death of our friend and now there was the real possibility of losing his mother too.

Tears started rolling down my face in the mirror. The hairdresser froze, not knowing what to do.

I just said, “Can you dry it quickly, please? I need to go.” Later, I would think about how strange it was that, even then, I still asked him to dry my hair.

At first, my husband didn’t want me to come. In the early hours of panic, before we knew what we were walking into, he said maybe I should stay behind and be with the kids for New Year’s. But having lost my father, I knew what it feels like when a family begins to brace itself for the worst. And I knew that if this was going where it seemed to be going, he would need me there.

There was no version of this where he would go alone. The bitter reality is that I went alone when my father passed away driving an hour and a half to the hospital with tears streaming down my face, somehow keeping the car on the road. To this day, I don’t know how I managed it. I wasn’t going to let him live that.

There were delays on Eurostar, so we booked the next available flight. By 2 p.m., we were on a plane to Belgium, heading into a New Year we had not imagined at all.

On the flight I prayed two contradictory prayers at once: that she would not die before we arrived… and that she would not die at all.

It felt impossible to connect the words “tummy ache” with the word “dying.”

New Year’s Eve in a hospital

We landed in Brussels, rented a car and drove straight to the hospital, arriving at ten to eight.

We made it.

She was conscious. She recognised us. She even seemed happy to see us.

We spoke for a while, trying to keep the conversation light, trying not to let our faces show how scared we were.

Afterwards, we took my father-in-law home with my husband’s brother and his wife, cooked a simple meal in a kitchen that did not feel like ours, and that was New Year’s Eve: no party, no fireworks just the five of us eating because we had to.

My birthday, in limbo

On the 1st of January. my birthday, we went back to the hospital.

She was more fragile, but still with us. Part of me thought: maybe this will be a long recovery. Difficult, yes, but not the end.

The hospital was quiet, shops were closed, and there wasn’t much for the rest of the family to eat. I suggested to my husband that we go out, find whatever was open, and put together a proper lunch at home.

It felt like the only thing I could do: feed people, create some small pocket of normality.

So that’s what we did. We found the one supermarket that was open and bought whatever we could (eggs, smoked salmon, bread, fruit) and went home to make a simple, protein-heavy lunch.

While we were cooking, my husband’s brother called from the hospital.

The doctors were considering putting their mother into an induced coma to stabilise her to give her body a chance to rest while they tried to correct what was failing.

By the time we arrived back at the hospital with food for my father-in-law and brother-in-law, the decision had been made.

I told my husband I couldn’t go in.

My own father had been in an induced coma five years ago, with tubes and machines everywhere, and those images still visit me at night. I couldn’t bear to superimpose that memory onto his mother.

But my husband needed me, so I stayed just outside the door close enough to be there, far enough to breathe.

My phone kept lighting up with messages and calls.

Happy New Year. Happy Birthday.

Little bursts of joy that belonged to a completely different reality.

I ignored them all. It didn’t feel right to accept well-wishes when everything inside me was braced for loss.

By around six o’clock, the doctors sounded cautiously optimistic. The next 48 hours would be critical, they said, but they were more confident now that her body could rest while they supported her organs.

For the first time since we’d arrived, there was a small sense of relief.

We left the hospital around 6:30, went home, and I said, “Let’s cook.”

We set the table. Started preparing dinner.

All of us a little lighter. A little more hopeful.

And then the phone rang.

It was the hospital asking us to come back immediately.

Before anyone said the words, I knew: this was the beginning of the end.

The moment the monitor changes

We drove back to the hospital knowing, this time, what we were walking into.

My mother-in-law was still alive, but barely. All of the children were there apart from one who was on the way; everyone who could be, made it in time.

The doctors told us there was nothing more they could do.

It became a matter of waiting for the monitor to turn red. For the line to flatten. For the sound none of us ever wants to hear.

I tried to give the immediate family space. They were inside the room, holding her hand, crying, talking to her.

I stood just outside the door in this strange in-between.

On one side: a family saying goodbye.

On the other: at the end of the corridor, nurses and doctors gathered around a long table, having their New Year’s Day meal laughing, chatting, clinking cutlery.

It could have been a scene from Grey’s Anatomy: life going on loudly in one room while, a few steps away, life was quietly ending.

I stood in the middle, my phone still lighting up with birthday messages I couldn’t answer, watching my husband move in and out of the room, hugging me, going back to his mother.

In a way, if you have to die, it was a beautiful death.

She left this world surrounded by her children and husband, their hands on her, their voices in her ears.

But nothing prepares you for the moment the machine changes. The colour shifts. The beep becomes a flat line.

It is a sound you dread your whole life.

And once you’ve heard it for someone you love, you never quite forget it.

Afterwards, the staff gently cleared the machines and tubes so the family could say goodbye to her as a person, not a patient.

Because she had just passed, she wasn’t yet cold.

There was still a little colour in her cheeks, and almost a smile on her face. She looked peaceful as if she had simply fallen asleep.

That contrast is something I think I will carry for a long time. By the time I reached the hospital for my father, he was cold and pale. Not him at all.

Two funerals

The rest of that week is a blur.

Endless practicalities: arranging the funeral, coordinating relatives flying in from Norway and Germany, juggling travel plans for our own daughters so they could be there both for their grandmother and for our friend’s family.

Grief does not pause logistics. It just makes every decision heavier.

Our friend’s funeral was on Wednesday, the 7th of January.

Because he was only in his fifties, the cemetery felt young. Hundreds of people there for his children as much as for him. Clusters of teenagers and twenty-somethings, our own age group packed into the pews, and fewer from the older generation.

Outside, it was snowing hard as if the mountains where he died had followed us back to Belgium.

The storm felt like its own kind of farewell. Devastating… and at the same time overflowing with love and support.

My mother-in-law’s funeral was the next day on Thursday, the 8th of January.

The church was full, but the age mix was different: many friends from her and my father-in-law’s generation. The six siblings. Their partners. Almost all of the fourteen grandchildren. Cousins and in-laws from across Europe.

She was deeply respected and loved, and you could feel it in the room in the hugs, the eulogies, the tears.

Both funerals were heartbreakingly beautiful in their own way.

The sense of loss was enormous.

But so was the sense of community around that loss.

It is a strange thing to say, but if you measure a life by the love in the room when you say goodbye, both were as close to perfect as something so painful can be.

And still, it made me think of my father.
He was bigger than life itself. More social than anyone I’ve ever known. The kind of man whose funeral I always imagined would spill out of the doors crowded, noisy, full of stories.

But he died during Covid, when we weren’t allowed more than fifteen people. Fifteen. We had to negotiate just to include one extra friend. It was tragic in a different way: not only losing him, but losing the goodbye he deserved.

The world grieving too

As if our own grief wasn’t enough, the wider world seemed to be mourning too.

That same week, there was a fire at a nightclub in a Swiss ski resort and the kind of loss that makes your stomach turn before your brain can even catch up: teenagers. Young people under the age of 30s.

One of my closest friends who was meant to be with us in Belgium for the funerals, lost her husband’s cousins’, two younger sisters, just 14 and 15. Instead of flying to Belgium to sit beside us in our sorrow, she flew to Lausanne to attend their funeral.

She described it as a room filled with young faces. A crowd that felt impossibly “young” for a funeral. Heartbreak multiplied by the sheer unfairness of it.

It felt like one of those weeks where grief wasn’t contained to one family, or one place, or one age group.

Teenagers. A 58-year-old man. An 82-year-old woman.

Different endings, but the same unbearable truth: life can change in a single evening.

The party

We flew back to London on Friday, the 9th of January.

We had been in Belgium since the 31st of December, and we were both physically and emotionally exhausted. Home felt like the only place we could breathe.

On Saturday, one of our very dear friends was celebrating her 60th birthday. We debated going.

My husband really wanted to be there. He needed to feel something alive after so much darkness. I understood, but part of me felt torn.

You are mourning two huge losses… and now you are supposed to go to a party?

Is that morally right?

Should you stay home crying?

Or should you celebrate with people you love?

In the end, we chose to go. Not because we felt fine but because it felt important to show up for her.

I was happy to be there for her milestone, and at the same time, I felt guilty being there at all.

It was a sliding-doors moment.

If none of this had happened, I would have been one of the first on the dance floor, laughing, present, alive in the moment.

Instead, we were there… but not fully there.

Smiling when we needed to.

Holding space for joy.

But carrying a heaviness no one else could see.

And it crystallised something for me about how life actually works.

While someone is giving birth somewhere, someone else is dying.

Joy and grief run alongside each other and you don’t get to choose one without the other.

Our friend, my mother-in-law… they would be the last people to want us sitting at home frozen in grief. They would want us to embrace life. To celebrate. To keep going.

That’s the hardest part of losing someone you love:

Knowing they are right… even when it feels wrong.

2026, clarified

I return to this space changed, but not defeated. These letters will always be a blend: London and beauty and travel but also the real moments underneath it all.

The bubbly “turning 52” letter I planned evaporated somewhere between Waitrose and that hospital corridor. Yet the excitement for 2026 I felt in November hasn’t vanished. It’s just been postponed and been clarified, made urgent by fragility.

My husband started to work on Monday, playing catch-up on the week he lost. For him, the rhythm of meetings and deadlines will be medicine, a way to keep moving when standing still hurts too much.

I’m slower to re-enter. Slower to post, plan trips, launch projects. There’s space now for tears, quiet mornings, the grief that needs air before excitement can breathe again.

His father’s hip surgery still looms at month’s end, and the care that once fell to my mother-in-law must now be rethought. These are not problems we foresaw when toasting Christmas biscuits.

And then there is her legacy. The part that stays.

When I first met my husband’s family, Christmas was already lively a table of twelve or fifteen, full of warmth and noise and opinion. Over the years, it grew into something almost unmatched: six siblings, their partners, their children… fourteen grandchildren, one on the way.

A whole universe around one table.

This year there were nearly thirty of us, shoulder to shoulder. Proof, in numbers and laughter, of a life that expanded outward. In a world that often feels dark, it is impossible not to look at that table and see light. Not the Instagram kind, the real kind. The kind you can’t curate. The kind you build, one year at a time, by showing up, feeding people, loving them, and holding them together.

But 2026 still calls.

More flights, maybe with the people who matter, before time runs thin. More stories here, blending the pretty (London walks, travel guides) with the real (these letters from midlife’s sharp edges). Friendships to rebuild, not just attend. Work that feels reciprocal, not relentless.

Grief hasn’t erased hope. It has made it precise.

Time isn’t infinite, but it’s enough if we spend it on what lasts.

Back to my roots

Writing this felt like returning to something I’ve always done.

I’ve kept diaries since I was sixteen. I have a box of notebooks, one for every year. I even have pages from the first holiday I ever took with my husband, when we were still just dating. I’ve always written things down. Not for anyone else but because it was the only way I knew how to hold what was happening.

Maybe it’s because I’m an introvert. I’ve never been the loudest person in the room. I’ve always been more observant than performative, more comfortable on paper than mid-conversation. But I’ve also always loved real stories, not just guides because I genuinely believe everyone has one. Everyone.

And this is mine. A small window into my life that I don’t share on Instagram. Not because it’s dramatic, or because it’s unique but because it’s real. And because everyone I know is carrying something too: divorce, celebrations, children growing up, new beginnings, ageing parents, grief, joy. Life, in all directions at once.

Sometimes I still wonder how much is too much to share. But writing here isn’t about transactions. It’s about continuing a conversation, keeping company with people who see themselves in the words.

I’ll keep showing up here: paying attention, telling stories, sharing the quiet corners of life between London walks and dinner tables in Belgium.

If you’re reading this, thank you for being here with me. This letter is me returning to where it all began. A blank page, a full heart, and the simple act of writing it down.

And thank you for reading words from a week I didn’t choose.

If someone you know is walking through their own season of joy and shadow, consider forwarding this. Sometimes we need permission to feel it all.

It’s the simplest way to support these letters and help me keep showing up here. And if you’re already here, reading, thank you!

The Year I Stayed Put

In a year when the world went back to flying at full speed, I quietly chose to stay on the ground.

2025 was probably the least I have travelled as an adult, and for once it wasn’t because I couldn’t go, but because I didn’t want to miss being here.

It was my daughter’s last year at home, and I realised I didn’t just want to catch the highlights. I wanted the filler scenes too. Not because she needed me, but perhaps because I needed her. I wanted to be there for the casual breakfasts, the late-night debriefs, the “Mum, are you awake?” at midnight.

I wanted to be in London, anchored, while so many of the people I love were talking about leaving.

Around me, London felt strangely transient. Friends were considering moving for tax reasons, for work, for family, for some vague idea of better elsewhere. People were splitting their lives between three or four countries, optimising spreadsheets of residency and tax, but not necessarily their happiness.

Staying became my quiet rebellion: I would not scatter, at least not this year. I would stay and soak in this version of my life, this version of my city, this version of my family.

And perhaps that’s why the year felt significant in a way I didn’t fully understand until I looked back.

The long shadow of 2019

My father died five years ago, but in my head the story begins in October 2019, when his accident happened and life quietly split into a before and an after.

What followed was a long stretch of crisis: COVID hit, and my father in hospital for a year and a half. Those years blurred into hospital visits (at the beginning while we still had access), paperwork, phone calls, and the kind of constant alertness you only understand when someone you love is barely alive.

In that blur, Instagram arrived as both an escape and a lifeline.

Rita Farhi Finds began as flowers, pretty doorways, colourful neighbourhoods. Small, curated pockets of beauty against a dark backdrop. My walks weren’t just exercise. They were an attempt to step out of reality for an hour and look at something gentle. To collect calm in tiny, controlled squares when so much else was uncontrollable.

Over time, that little escape became a business. And I’m grateful for it. Genuinely. It gave me creativity when life felt heavy. It gave me movement when standing still would have meant collapsing.

But it also created a new kind of momentum: the kind that asks you to keep going even when your life is changing underneath you.

Refer a friend

Empty nest, empty noise, full days

In September, we became empty nesters.

The beginning felt oddly familiar, like another life I’d already lived.

When I left the trading floor at an investment bank, I went from a floor full of people, screens, noise and constant news to a house that was suddenly, unsettlingly quiet. Back then I coped by turning on CNN, CNBC, BBC, all at once, just to recreate the illusion of movement. Eventually, I learned how to live without that constant hum.

Empty nesting has been similar, but in a different way.

During the school years it’s not as if the children were physically there all day. The hours were still “mine” on paper, but they occupied so much space in my head. You are always holding them somewhere in your mind: what time they’re coming home, whether there’s food in the fridge, who is dropping them where, which kit needs washing, which email needs answering, which friend is staying over.

Their bodies leave the house in the morning, but their logistics and emotions stay with you all day.

And then, almost overnight, it goes quiet.

When they leave for university in another city, it isn’t just that their rooms are empty. It’s that the constant buzzing to-do list attached to them goes silent. There’s no one coming home at 4 p.m. No mental note to start dinner. No door opening with a “Mum?” attached to it.

My husband, who used to work from home, started going into the office full-time too. Suddenly the flat was truly empty.

What surprised me was that the silence itself didn’t bother me. I like quiet.

What unsettled me was the sudden emptiness in my brain.

All the mental space that had been taken up by the children’s lives was abruptly available. I would move through my morning, do my usual things, and then look at the clock: 10:30.

Somehow the day which used to run away from me, now stretched out, slow and elastic. The same routine, the same tasks, but time itself had changed texture.

There’s a strange disorientation in that. For years, the story is “there aren’t enough hours in the day”; now there are. You have what so many parents fantasise about. Time, freedom, an empty calendar and at first it can feel less like a gift and more like walking into a room and forgetting why you went in.

You realise how much of your identity has been built around being needed.

And that is where this new phase meets everything else in this piece: the slower days, the end of hospital visits, the loosening of the social-media treadmill, the children stepping into a tougher world. All of it creates an enormous, unexpected space.

The temptation is to fill it immediately with noise, with travel, with projects, with work, with anything.

But maybe the real work now is resisting the urge to fill every corner just for the sake of it, and instead choosing more carefully what and who gets to live in that space next.

A world that feels harder for them

Looking at my children’s generation, it is impossible to ignore how much the world has hardened since we were in our twenties.

We grew up with the feeling that we could conquer the world if we just bought the ticket. I never thought, Oh, I don’t have a visa, I can’t go to the US. I had friends who went to work in New York, who moved to London, who were casually sponsored by companies that weren’t scared of foreign passports.

Now that ease is gone.

Borders have thickened. Brexit has re-drawn the map for anyone who once saw Europe as a playground. Politics in the US and across Europe has made visas feel like lottery wins, not paperwork.

Graduates search for first jobs in a market that feels narrower and more difficult than anything we faced. I hear bright stories. Someone landing a dream role in London or New York and in the same breath I hear about a Cambridge graduate still without a job two years later, or a young person travelling between cities and countries, unsure where they can actually build a life.

It changes how we think as parents. It changes the conversations.

And it changes how you think about your own work too. About stability, independence, and building something that can hold you through uncertainty.

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The Christmas cards

This year brought another quiet milestone: for the first time since October 2019, I designed and sent a family Christmas card.

Before my father’s accident, it was a ritual. We used to send around 250 cards every year. A physical map of our relationships at that moment in time. This year I printed 100 and still haven’t sent them all.

As I went through my old list, I realised how much has changed in five years. So many people have moved houses, moved countries, moved on or divorced. My address stayed the same; my life did not.

There is something strangely painful about realising you don’t even have the right addresses anymore. On the surface it’s practical, update your spreadsheet, but underneath sits a bigger question: when did I lose touch with this person? Where did those years go?

It made me want to rebuild some of those bridges. Not just to send a card, but to ask: How are you really?

And it made me notice another truth I’ve been living with for years.

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The introvert who looked extrovert

By nature, I’m an introvert. The last five years, my father’s illness, the pandemic, grief made me even more inward, even while looking very social online.

If you only saw my Instagram, you’d think I was constantly out: events, launches, dinners, trips. And there was a season when I was. I said yes to everything. Those yeses gave me experience, opportunity, and if I’m honest distraction.

Then came a season of no. Last year especially, I turned down more invitations than I accepted. It wasn’t rejection. It was self-protection.

And since September, it feels like a third season: not yes, not no, but discovery.

Less interested in chasing, more interested in listening. To myself. To what feels meaningful. To what I actually want to build rather than what I’m supposed to build next.

Torn between niches and real life

All of this sits under a very modern question: what do I do now with my Instagram and Substack?

From a pure business perspective, the advice is simple: pick a niche.

Only London.
Only travel.
Only guides.

Optimise for growth. Clarify the value proposition. Build the funnel. Make it predictable.

And it’s true: niches work. Accounts that are clearly “only travel guides” or “only London tips” grow fast because everyone knows exactly why they’re following. On Substack, writers who publish exclusively actionable guides often scale quicker than those mixing guides with personal essays and reflections. The marketer in me understands this completely. But my work and my life (or anyone else’s life) doesn’t fit neatly into one lane. On Substack, I write city guides and personal pieces like this one. I share frameworks for content creators. I write about travel, about London, about how life changes shape.

On Instagram, I alternate between romanticising everyday life, sharing itineraries, and talking honestly about the realities behind the square.

If a label is needed, it’s lifestyle.

It’s me.

So I find myself in an awkward but honest place: teaching strategy and structure to other creators while openly admitting I’m still in the middle of my own evolution.

Some days I wonder if that’s “a good idea”. Other days it feels like the most real thing I can offer: not Here is the final answer, but Here are the tools I’m using while I figure it out too.

And maybe the question for 2026 isn’t What niche should I choose?

Maybe it’s:

What kind of work can I sustain, enjoy, and be proud of for the next ten years regardless of what any algorithm decides to reward this week?

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A new chapter, not a crisis

People love the phrase “midlife crisis,” but what I feel is closer to a midlife opening.

In my early 50s, with an empty nest, a quieter house, a changed social circle, and a very different internet than the one I started on, I’m asking a question I haven’t asked in a long time:

What do I want?

Not what the children need.
Not what my father needed.
Not what the algorithm wants.

Thirty years is a long time. Think of everything that fits between 20 and 50 — education, careers, relationships, children, losses, reinventions. That entire arc fits into 30 years.

If there is another arc of similar length ahead, then 50 isn’t the end of the book. It’s the moment you realise you’re finally allowed to choose the plot.

I don’t have a neat answer yet, but I do know a few things.

I want to travel more with intention, not as escape. Travel has always given me energy: not just destinations, but movement, curiosity, perspective. If I were to make one of those end-of-year lists, “travel more” would absolutely be on the 2026 page.

And yet I know myself: I don’t enjoy travelling alone. There is a whole aesthetic now around solo female travel, and while it’s wonderful for many, it isn’t my vibe. I love shared jokes, collective memories, the remember when that only exists because you were there together.

At the same time, I often crave a pocket of solitude on trips. A few hours to wander without managing anyone’s mood, to see what I want to see, to let a city speak back. The ideal, for me, is not choosing between solo and together, but weaving both into the same journey: mornings with people I love, an afternoon alone with my thoughts, then coming back together again for dinner.

I want to say yes to fewer but better collaborations. Partnerships that feel reciprocal and respectful of experience, not just transactional.

I want to give more of what I know away through mentoring, conversations, writing like this rather than hoarding it for myself.

And I want to keep doing what this piece is doing: looking back in order to look forward.

The photos and videos tell one story, but my memory tells another. The undocumented dinners. The quiet London nights. The year of not going anywhere. Those might be the very things that prepared me for whatever comes next.

Somewhere, in a corner of my room, there is a suitcase that hasn’t seen an airport in far too long. I imagine opening it in the new year not with the restless urge to escape, but with a calmer feeling:

I stayed when it mattered.
Now I am ready to go again.

Refer a friend

The table that holds decades of stories - it’s a family affair every Christmas….

Holidays are strange things.

They never hold just one emotion. They hold all of them at once.

Joy, longing, exhaustion, nostalgia, humour, memory, chaos.
Sometimes all within the same hour.

Maybe that’s why I found myself scrolling backwards through my phone last week, not searching for an appointment, but for proof.
A timestamp.
A breadcrumb.
The last Christmas that still felt ordinary.

It was 2018.

Since then, the holidays have become layered for me in ways I never expected.

Some years felt magical.
Some were forgettable.
Some I wish I could relive.
Others I would never want to repeat.
And isn’t that true for most of us? We remember moments, not dates, the way someone laughed, the way the room felt, the way time held us or let us down.

Different cultures, different traditions, different ways of belonging and not belonging.

Growing up in Turkey, there was no Christmas.
Hanukkah was gentle, moving, drifting, never anchored to a single calendar moment.
New Year’s Eve carried the magic, and Santa arrived on the 1st of January, which also happened to be my birthday.
The tree went up a few days before, nothing to do with Christmas, a tradition that made perfect sense until it didn’t.

Then I moved to London.
Christmas here is everywhere wrapped around buildings, woven into music, baked into the air.
Hanukkah, too, had a clearer shape here, more consistency, more presence.
When my daughters were born, we began building our own rituals. Candle by candle, even though Hanukkah shifts and slides across the calendar, never quite sitting still.

And then there is my husband’s family Christmas. A glorious, overwhelming, sitcom-level production of 20+ people, noise layered on noise, food appearing by magic, wrapping paper flying, children everywhere, in-laws, partners, cousins, chaos.
It is non-negotiable.
A tradition that existed long before me and will exist long after.

For years I tried to find where I fit inside all of this, the Turkish New Year’s tree, the wandering Hanukkah candles, the Belgian Christmas that belongs to my husband’s side of the family, the feeling of observing more than participating.

And maybe that’s the real truth of this season:

It isn’t about perfection.
It isn’t about the right ritual.
It isn’t even about belonging to one thing.

It’s about noticing.

Noticing the chaos.
Noticing the quiet.
Noticing who sits at the table and who lives now only in memory.
Noticing the strangers who gasp at Christmas trees in The Ritz lobby, the children pulling parents toward Selfridges windows, the way the whole city softens for a moment in the cold.

And that’s where this story begins…

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By October 2019, everything changed.

My father had a car accident and fell into a coma.

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Golden autumn leaves over white terraced houses in South Kensington, London. A quiet moment that captures the beauty of getting lost in the city

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I started sharing on social media.

My purpose, at the beginning, was simple: to help people discover places on a whim.
(Well, the initial reason was to learn about social media so that I could teach my children the ins and outs. That didn’t exactly go according to plan, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Then it became something more.
I found myself wandering off main roads, discovering hidden streets, calmer paths, and beautiful corners simply by getting lost in my own city.

The best way to discover any city, especially London, is to get lost in it.

To take a turn off the main road and find yourself on a quiet street where beauty hides in plain sight.

That’s how I began wandering through neighbourhoods, chasing light, finding peace and magic in a world that often felt chaotic.

And I know I’m not alone in that.
Many of us started sharing for similar reasons to document beauty, to connect, to belong.
But somewhere along the way, the way we share and why changed.

✨ Moments of Shared Joy

A whimsical Fortnum & Mason Christmas window with sparkling pink crystals and playful toy mice. A reminder of London’s childlike wonder.

The other day I stopped by Fortnum & Mason, as I always do this time of year.
I went upstairs to see the Christmas decorations and texted my husband saying,

“We’re perhaps lucky not to have young children anymore because this year’s fairytale theme is so beautiful. I would have spent so much money here if the girls were still little.”

All the details felt straight out of a dream rows of pastel macaron trees, pink and gold hot-air balloons, smiling gift boxes, and snow-dusted villages glimmering under soft light. I wandered for ages, not to film, but simply to feel.

Downstairs, the windows told their own story. Crystal mice polishing pink gemstones, a white unicorn beneath a mirrored disco ball, children pressing faces to the glass.

I haven’t shared any of it yet.
But again, it’s not a race.

Fortnum’s at Christmas is one of London’s small miracles, one of the few places that can still make you feel childlike wonder, no matter how many Decembers you’ve seen.

Maybe that’s what we’re all craving now.
Not more beauty, just more space to feel it.

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🎡 Winter Wonderland & What We Miss

I remember that same joy years ago when I took my daughters to Winter Wonderland holding their small hands as we ran toward the rides, winning an oversized 2kg Toblerone, laughing as we tried to take a picture with it.

Would I go today? Maybe not.
It’s the first year I haven’t chased tickets for the charity preview night.
I’ve been so many times. I have the content.

Back then, I wasn’t there for the content.
I was there for the experience.

And the content simply became a reflection of that joy.
My audience felt it because it was real. It was lived.

That’s what I miss. The excitement that comes from feeling something, not just posting it.

🌙 The Joy of Not Knowing

Fireworks above Battersea Power Station, glowing against the night sky. A moment of beauty found by chance.

This year, I watched the Battersea Park fireworks from a different spot. Somewhere along the Embankment, across from the Power Station.

When the fireworks started, I realised I was in the wrong spot.
I’d had a gut feeling earlier that I might be, though really, there’s no such thing as the wrong place.
It was just the wrong place to get the content I had planned in my head.

It was quieter on this end.
Not so many crowds. Most people tend to stand directly across from the park or by Albert Bridge, where I’ve watched and shared from plenty of times before.
But maybe that change of scenery was exactly what I needed.

It fits my mood these days. Seeing things from a slightly different angle, even if it’s not the one I expected.

So I stayed anyway.

I watched, I filmed a little, I enjoyed it.
The reflections of colour danced on the water, the crowd cheered in the distance, and for a moment, it felt enough. Imperfect, but still beautiful.

Later, I shared the video.
It reached over 40,000 views and hundreds of saves.

Is that even considered anything significant in the viral world we live in?
Maybe not.

But what I remember most isn’t the numbers. It’s the moment I stopped recording and simply looked up.

Maybe when you truly enjoy something, people can feel it too.

This wasn’t planned. We jumped in the car at 8pm, aiming to make it there for the 8:30 start. I wasn’t trying to be front row anywhere. It was a last-minute decision to go and try a new spot.

It wasn’t the perfect shot I had in mind.
But somehow, it was perfect in its own way.

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🎞️ Chasing New Stories Or Rediscovering Old Ones?

Sir Paul Smith beside his imaginative Christmas tree at the Royal Opera House. A reminder that creativity often lies in rediscovering old stories and seeing them anew.

Lately, it feels like we’re all sharing the same storylines, the same restaurants, the same angles of the same streets.
The audience is tired. I’m tired. The brands are tired.
The sparkle that once made everything feel fresh has dulled under repetition and routine.

So where do we go from here?

Because I still believe there’s a story to tell. A deeper one.
One about meaning, connection, and rediscovering why we fell in love with storytelling in the first place.

Maybe it’s time to return to that feeling of getting lost again. Not just in the streets of London, but in the wonder of noticing.

“To film less, and feel more.”

To remember that the best stories don’t come from chasing the newest thing, but from paying attention to what’s already there.

The question isn’t whether there’s still a story.
It’s what kind of story we want to tell now.

“Maybe that’s what this next chapter is about. Finding that story again, together.”

🎆 From Experience to Evidence

Somewhere along the way, the joy of experiencing something began to compete with the need to document it perfectly.

I’ve been to the Battersea Park fireworks so many times with my children holding their small hands, covering their ears, laughing at how the sound still startled us even when we were ready for it.
Back then, I wasn’t thinking about the perfect frame or the crowd behind me. I was thinking about them and about not losing them in the sea of people.

They used to light a huge bonfire before the fireworks, and we would watch it together, feeling the warmth on our faces.
I even knew the DJ who played the event. It always happened around the same time as my daughter’s birthday. So one year, I messaged him and asked if he could give her a shoutout. He did, and the look on her face was priceless.

It was about the experience of it all. The joy, the surprise, the sharing.
Bringing along friends, celebrating together, making memories that had nothing to do with capturing the perfect shot.

🪩 The Age of the Pin

Maybe it’s just the world we live in.

A generation grew up sharing everything from meals, to moods, to movements. All mapped, tagged, and timestamped.

I still can’t quite get my head around sharing one’s exact location in real time.

Borough Market’s new rule banning influencers from filming without a permit made me think about this too.
Because it’s not just about permissions; it’s about boundaries about the quiet art of experiencing something without instantly packaging it for others.

It’s an interesting contrast. We’re surrounded by a generation that grew up on Snapchat maps, where every move is visible, while the rest of us are still learning where to draw the line between personal and performative.

✨ The Beauty of Discovery

A glittering view inside Selfridges at Christmas, with disco balls, café tables, and soft golden light capturing the quiet magic of London’s festive season.

The other day, I walked into Selfridges to comfort a friend.
She wasn’t really in the mood to talk, but somehow we ended up standing in front of a wall of Disney Christmas baubles twinkling, playful, glowing under the lights.

She didn’t take a photo.
She just smiled for the first time that day.

It was pure coincidence.
And it reminded me how beautiful life feels when it surprises you even on a morning when the news felt dark.

The best moments are rarely the ones we plan. They’re the ones that quietly find us.

That excitement of finding something you weren’t looking for can’t be replicated by coordinates or trend lists.
It’s the difference between content and connection.

☀️ Chasing the Sunrise or Letting It Find You

I never set out to chase sunrises.
I was there because I was taking my daughters to rowing practice.

Fifteen dark mornings in a row and then, one would light up the sky.

Sometimes I tried to plan it.
Set an alarm. Pick the spot. Hope for magic.
It rarely worked.

But once, I saw the glow from my window, grabbed my coat, and caught the Tube to St James’s Park. I arrived just in time. The kind of timing you can’t plan, only receive.

So no, I don’t never chase moments.
But that’s the question, isn’t it?
When do we chase the moment and when do we let it happen to us?

🌧️ The Strange Side of Instagram

There’s a new kind of comment these days. Not quite cruel, not quite kind.
A quiet fatigue.
A sigh disguised as feedback.

It’s not about you, not really.
It’s about the overstimulation, the scroll, the forgetting that there’s a person behind the post.

Sometimes I think we’re all writing the same letter:

Dear Instagram,
thank you for the beauty and the community.
But something’s changed.

We came here to share what moved us.
Now we spend half our days trying to move an algorithm.

Somewhere in between, we forgot how to just be.

🕊️ Between Love and Fatigue

I think of the creators I admire. The ones who once crafted quietly,
who now post faster, louder, shorter.

I understand why.
I’ve done it too.

It’s changing the art.
It’s changing the rhythm.
It’s changing us.

And yet, we keep showing up.
Because there’s still something here worth saving.

A thread of connection.
A flicker of magic.
A quiet beauty that refuses to fade.

💭 So Where Do We Go From Here?

I’m not saying we should stop sharing.
Sharing is how we connect, how we see the world.

But maybe the next chapter isn’t about being first or perfectly curated.

Maybe it’s about rediscovering the thrill of not knowing exactly where we’re going.

Leaving space for wonder.
For accidents.
For small, unplanned beauty.

Because maybe the real magic, the kind that stays, still lives in the moments we don’t plan, and the places we don’t pin.

💌 If this piece resonated with you, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps me write more of these quiet reflections about beauty, storytelling, and finding meaning in the everyday.

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🌾 Maybe That’s the Story After All

Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to say all along.
That somewhere between chasing beauty and sharing it, we forgot the joy of simply being moved by it.

So this is where I’ll begin again. Slower, more intentional, with curiosity leading the way.

Is it going to work? Possibly not. But it may help me find my voice again.

Still sharing stories, but rooted in meaning.
Still showing beauty, but not chasing it.
Still walking and getting lost on purpose.

✨ Reflection and Invitation

When was the last time you wandered without a plan and found something unexpected?
Can you remember an experience you felt fully, without reaching for your phone?
Have you noticed when sharing shifts from connection to performance?

Maybe that’s the story we tell next together.

💌 Thank you for reading.
If this piece resonated with you, feel free to share it or leave a comment below. I’d love to know what this brought up for you.

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It was during Frieze Art Week, so the park felt like a living gallery: couples in tailored coats, dogs in tartan jumpers, artists with cameras, and that quiet, creative energy only London in autumn can carry. I filmed it all: the leaves, the light, the people passing by.

One of them, it turned out, was Rose McGowan walking her dog in a beautiful long blue coat I couldn’t help but notice. I didn’t even realise who she was until someone on TikTok commented, “That’s Rose McGowan!” And just like that, the video took on a life of its own.

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Regent’s Park London Autumn — the pathway covered in leaves

When beauty becomes suspicious

The clip went viral (half a million views and counting), but not for the reasons I expected.

Instead of comments about autumn or London, my feed filled with accusations:

“This has to be AI.”
“It looks too perfect.”
“Fake leaves.”

I read them with a mix of amusement and sadness. Because no, nothing in that video was AI. No leaves were added, no skies replaced, no park invented. It was filmed on that day, in that light, with that weather. The only editing was colour. My attempt to bring back what the eye actually sees and what the camera dulls.

I like warm tones, vivid hues, light that feels alive. I want people to feel what I felt. The rustle of leaves, the echo of footsteps, the quiet joy of being somewhere so beautiful it feels like a dream.

The fine line between real and artificial

But perhaps that’s the problem now. Beauty itself looks suspicious.

We live in a world where AI can conjure perfect sunsets, flawless faces, even entire cities that don’t exist. So when something real looks too lovely, too cinematic, too polished, people assume it must be fake.

And I understand why. The line between real and artificial has never been thinner.
The feed is full of filters, fabrications, and “AI-enhanced” scenes that make even the extraordinary feel ordinary.

Still, it made me think: what happens when we stop believing in real beauty altogether?

Busy with people during Frieze week - Regent’s Park, London Autumn

A few years ago, a video like that would simply make people smile. Saved, shared, enjoyed for what it was. But now, joy often comes with suspicion.

It’s as if people need proof that what they’re seeing isn’t too good to be true.
Maybe that says more about the world than the video.

Because the truth is nature often is unbelievable.
Regent’s Park in autumn doesn’t need AI; it already looks like art.

If you’ve ever searched for the best places to visit in London during autumn, Regent’s Park is always near the top and for good reason. The trees burn gold, the pathways glow, and even on cloudy days, it feels like walking through a living painting.

So perhaps the irony is that the very place famous for its real, breathtaking beauty has now become one people doubt could exist without a digital touch.

What was the last real moment that took your breath away, something that looked unreal, but wasn’t?
Sometimes those are the moments that remind us how real life can still outshine anything artificial.

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On AI, truth, and why it still matters

I’ve had brands approach me about using AI for campaigns, and I tried once out of curiosity. It felt wrong. The images were flat, soulless. Beautiful perhaps, but without heartbeat. I turned that collaboration down. It just wasn’t me.

It’s not always about the money. It’s about truth or at least my version of it.

I’ve always believed that part of the magic in what I do is capturing reality as it feels, not as it’s technically recorded. The phone doesn’t smell the rain, or hear the crunch of leaves, or sense the quiet between footsteps. So yes, I edit colour, but only to bring those sensations back.

If autumn teaches us anything, it’s that beauty always changes form, but never its essence.
Maybe that’s the kind of truth worth believing in, no matter how “unreal” it looks online.

Enhanced colours to make it look closer to the way the eye sees colours - Regent’s Park, London Autumn

The real, imperfect, fleeting

We’re all living in this strange new world where real and unreal blur.
AI writes poems, paints portraits, even creates travel reels.
And yet, it can’t replicate that slight imperfection. The way wind moves differently through real leaves, or how light flickers unevenly across a puddle.

Maybe that’s what I want people to see when they watch my videos:
the real, imperfect, fleeting moments.

The proof that London for all its noise and grey still knows how to glow.

So yes, my Regent’s Park video was edited. But not faked.
And if believing in beauty makes people question its reality, I’ll take that as a compliment.

Because maybe the most radical thing we can do online now is simply to keep sharing what’s real and remind people that not everything magical needs to be made by a machine.

📸 The “Real, Unreal” Project

Have you ever taken a photo that people thought was “too perfect to be real”?
Do you find yourself second-guessing beautiful things online. Sunsets, skies, faces?
Or maybe you’ve had a real moment lately that felt almost cinematic, one you wish the camera could capture without filters?

Each week, I’ll feature one reader’s “Real, Unreal” photo, a moment that looked almost impossible, but wasn’t.
Tag me or reply to this discussion thread with your image and a few lines about what made it feel magical.

Because maybe that’s how we rebuild trust. Not through algorithms, but through shared, human reminders of what’s still real.

Coming next week

The Colour Edit — how editing can be an act of emotion, not illusion.

If you’ve been following me on Instagram , you already know I’m an autumn person. 🍁
Lately, it’s been 20,000 steps kind of days. Long walks through Regent’s Park, Hyde Park, and Hampstead Heath, chasing colours that never last and moments that somehow always do.

In a city filled with chaos, traffic, and noise, we’re lucky to be surrounded by so much green. You only have to walk a few minutes before you find yourself in stillness again the kind that slows your breath and makes you appreciate life.

Maybe that’s why I share autumn so often. The colours, the calm, the little moments that remind us to pause. Like that viral song says, “I am autumn.”
And if you are too, I’m glad you’re here.

If this piece spoke to you, send it to someone who might need a little reminder that wonder still exists in colour, in motion, in the rustle of autumn leaves.

And if you’d like to support my writing, you can buy me a coffee (or two) by becoming a paid subscriber a small gesture that helps me keep walking, writing, and sharing these London moments with you. Thank you for being here on this journey with me. Appreciate all your love in any shape and form.

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Halloween decorated doors London 2025

I was planning to write about something completely different this week.
But after sharing a simple Halloween doorway on Instagram — one that unexpectedly drew a few unpleasant comments — I found myself wanting to pause and reflect instead.

A few comments left under that post. The kind that remind you how much the internet has changed stayed with me. What began as a photo of a beautifully decorated London doorway somehow attracted a kind of bitterness that had nothing to do with pumpkins or Halloween at all.

A screenshot from my comment section. Proof of how quickly beauty can be met with ugliness.

I read it twice. Not out of hurt, but disbelief. Because what could possibly connect a pumpkin doorway in Holland Park to words like these?

And it made me think: when did we become so angry?

Because this space, I think, should be a place where we can talk about everything,
the good, the beautiful, and sometimes, the unnecessary noise that tries to drown it out.

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Halloween decorations in London - 2025

It started, as these things often do, with a pumpkin.

A beautifully decorated doorway in Holland Park, an autumnal dream of burnt leaves, orange pumpkins, and skeletons arranged with a touch of humour. I shared it simply because it made me smile. It was creative, festive, and, like so many London doorways this time of year, a small reminder that the city still knows how to have fun.

And yet, within minutes, came a string of hateful comments from someone who, quite clearly, had nothing to say about Halloween at all. It wasn’t about pumpkins or decorations or neighbourhoods. It was about something darker: anger.

This isn’t the first time. Last year, I posted a photo of Regent Street under a sea of rainbow flags. It was a bright Sunday morning, the sun catching the colours just right, and I thought it looked beautiful. That was all. No political message, no statement, just a joyful moment in London, as I’ve always shared them.

But the post, like this one, found its way into the wrong corners of the internet. Suddenly it wasn’t about beauty anymore; it became a magnet for people’s frustrations.

Famous autumnal corner in Notting Hill, London

I sometimes think back to the early days of Instagram. Remember when people used to comment “so pretty!”, “love this!”, “adding to my list!” and they meant it? When a photo of a door in Notting Hill or a coffee in Marylebone might quietly go viral because people wanted to feel good?

It was a gentler space then. Or maybe we were gentler.

Now, it feels as if there’s an undercurrent of anger running through everything. A collective fatigue. Between wars, politics, and endless bad news, the smallest things seem to set people off. The world feels heavy, and in that heaviness, beauty sometimes becomes a target.

And yet, I still believe that’s precisely why we need beauty. Perhaps more than ever.

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Because for me, walking through London in October is pure magic.

The light softens, the ivy turns red, and even the air feels like it’s dressed for the season. You can walk from South Kensington to Hampstead, or from Greenwich to Chiswick, and be met with the same sight: golden leaves drifting down like confetti, doorways blooming with autumnal wreaths, shop windows lined with pumpkins.

Every corner feels like a postcard. Every moment, a reminder that life is still worth noticing.

And maybe that’s what I’ve always loved about social media at its best. It invites you to notice. To look up from the chaos and see that the world, in all its imperfections, still holds beauty.

Halloween decorated houses in London

Of course, not everyone sees it that way.
Some people scroll not to connect, but to provoke.
And when you’ve been online long enough, you learn that not every comment deserves a reply.

I’m in my fifties now, and I’ve built enough resilience to shrug off the noise. But I often think of the younger ones — the teenagers, the new creators — who are still learning how to navigate this strange, unpredictable digital world. Words hurt. Tone matters. And sometimes, silence is the kinder option.

Halloween, for me, isn’t just about pumpkins or decorations. It’s about nostalgia.
I think back to when my daughters were little, carving pumpkins, decorating the house, hosting messy, joyful Halloween parties. The smell of roasted nuts, the sound of laughter, the thrill of trick-or-treating down streets just like the one I photographed this week.

Those moments live on in the decorations I pass now. They make me smile because I see other families creating their own versions of those memories. Why shouldn’t they? Why shouldn’t anyone celebrate something that brings joy, light, and a touch of silliness to darker days?

Kew Gardens runs an entire Halloween trail for families — complete with marshmallows, hot chocolate, and a headless horseman galloping through the trees. You hear the squeals of laughter, the mock fear, the excitement. It’s wonderful.

So why should we not celebrate the things that make people happy?

Just a pretty, colourful Autumnal corner in Notting Hill London

Maybe the answer is that people have forgotten how to simply let others be happy.

In a world overflowing with outrage, it almost feels rebellious to post something lighthearted, to share a moment of colour, to romanticise the ordinary. But I’ll keep doing it. Because I’ve seen what happens when you stop, when people give in to cynicism, when they stop noticing the good, when they forget that beauty is part of what keeps us human.

So, I’ll keep sharing London’s pumpkins and rainbow flags and golden leaves.
Not because they’re grand or important, but because they remind us that joy still exists — quietly, stubbornly, right here.

And if that annoys someone on the internet?
Well, so be it.

I’d rather live in a world where people still find magic in a doorway.

Enjoying Halloween decorations and walking away from all the negativity in the world

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If this resonated with you, share it with someone who might need a reminder that it’s still okay, essential, even to find joy in small things. Because sometimes the smallest things are the ones that hold us together.

A lunch of diamonds and nostalgia — the Foyer Room bathed in soft light and gold accents

There are few places in London where time seems to stand still. Claridge’s is one of them.

This week, I attended a lunch that celebrated a collaboration between two icons of British craftsmanship: Claridge’s and Annoushka Jewellery. The hotel transformed its history — bellboy bears, the rocking zebra, and Art Deco motifs into a series of exquisite 18-carat gold charms, each telling a story from its glittering past.

It was the kind of partnership that goes beyond product. Rooted in heritage, craftsmanship, and emotion, it reminded me why storytelling still matters in the world of luxury.

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✨ A Story Told in Gold

Before lunch, we were invited into Claridge’s archives. It’s a hidden room lined with ledgers, sketches, and mementos from more than a century of London life. There were coronation menus from 1937, old Tatler covers, and handwritten notes about the hotel’s beloved bellboy teddy bear, a symbol that has quietly become part of Claridge’s DNA.

It was this very history that inspired the Claridge’s x Annoushka “Life in Charms” collection, launched just this week.

Inside the Claridge’s archives where more than a century of stories are carefully kept.

The collection features seven charms, each handcrafted in 18ct yellow gold and set with diamonds, mother of pearl, and gemstones:

• The rocking zebra from the lobby

• The bellboy teddy

• The Claridge’s crest

• A champagne glass, of course

• The foyer teapot

• A vintage suitcase

• And the revolving door — the gateway to all who have walked through this storied hotel.

Together, they feel like miniature pieces of London history. A love letter to timeless glamour.

Annoushka’s ‘Life in Charms’ — Claridge’s history reimagined in 18ct gold and diamonds

✨ A Lunch Steeped in Storytelling

We then moved to the Foyer Room, where a long table glimmered beneath chandeliers. Each seat was marked with a personalised Claridge’s bear, dressed as a bellboy and embroidered with our names. Mine sat neatly on the chair. A small detail that instantly made me smile. Around the table, everyone’s reaction was the same: pure joy.

It was such a thoughtful idea, a way to make each guest feel part of the story and, in a sense, part of the Claridge’s family itself.

Our bellboy bears with Kelly Eastwood— a small token of joy, and a reminder that Claridge’s magic lies in the details.

Lunch itself felt like a continuation of the collaboration, a celebration in every sense. The menu was beautifully thought out, seasonal, and as refined as you’d expect from Claridge’s. Each course arrived like a little work of art, quietly echoing the hotel’s signature elegance.

Dessert, though, was pure theatre. I had the chocolate bomb, which melted dramatically under a glossy pour of sauce, while my neighbour ordered the baked figs, equally beautiful and fragrant. Every dish was an experience in its own right — the kind that makes everyone reach for their phones to capture the moment. Because that’s what happens when you dine at Claridge’s. Even dessert feels like a performance.

✨ Charms We Never Knew We Needed

As for the jewellery itself, they’re the charms we never knew we needed — tiny tokens that carry nostalgia, joy, and a touch of whimsy. My daughter turns 21 this November, and my first thought, naturally, was how perfect one of these charms would be as a birthday gift.

A few minutes later, I was online checking the prices… and well, let’s just say it might be one to think about. But that’s what makes these pieces so special — they’re not just jewels, they’re heirlooms, milestones, memories cast in gold.

The charms priced between £2,900 and £4,900, with the complete Life in Charms set at £35,000 are already selling out online. They’re not for everyone, but for collectors and dreamers, they’re miniature keepsakes of a London icon.

Launched only this week, the collection is currently available exclusively through Claridge’s. Several pieces, including the full set and signature chains, are already marked as sold out. Quite remarkable considering how new the launch is.

It says something about the enduring allure of craftsmanship and storytelling in luxury today. Even amid global uncertainty, there remains a hunger for authenticity for objects that hold meaning, history, and artistry in equal measure.

As I left, bear in hand, I thought how fitting it was that the symbol of this collaboration wasn’t just gold or diamonds, but a tiny teddy in uniform, a nod to warmth, tradition, and joy.

Because Claridge’s, after all, has always been more than a hotel. It’s a feeling and now, thanks to Annoushka, it’s one you can wear.

Claridge’s x Annoushka ‘Life in Charms’ Collection
Launched October 2025 | From £2,900 | Exclusively available at Claridge’s London

✨ Reflection

What makes collaborations like this truly special is that they’re not built on trends or timelines. They’re born from genuine connection. Annoushka spoke of childhood teas at Claridge’s, never imagining she would one day design a collection inspired by those very moments. It’s a beautiful reminder that when brands collaborate from a place of shared history and emotion, they create something that lasts far beyond the launch.

✨ If you enjoy stories like this, consider supporting my work — a monthly subscription costs about the same as a London coffee and help keep sharing these moments of beauty, heritage, and slow living. Thank you for being here.

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Rain on the gondolas in Richmond riverside. The weather mirroring my mood

Ever since we returned from summer, I’ve felt a quiet grief settling in. Not dramatic, but the kind that comes with suitcases by the door, Ikea runs, and the anticipation of goodbye. Tomorrow, both my girls leave.

Mourning and Transition in a London Home

I feel like I’ve been mourning ever since we got back from summer. Not mourning in a dramatic sense, but quietly grieving the end of a chapter. The shifting rhythms of life, the bittersweet goodbyes that have begun to settle into our London household.

The house still looks like transition itself: newly packed suitcases lined up for moving out, piles of Ikea bags and Peter Jones finds, the living-room table completely taken over by packages. With the Tube strike forcing everyone to work from home, my daughter, and my husband. There’s been barely a quiet corner to focus. And yet even if there had been, I doubt I could have concentrated. My mind has been elsewhere, circling tomorrow, when both girls leave.

The Hunt for Dorm Room Comforts

This week has been nothing but errands: multiple trips to Ikea Hammersmith (a revelation compared to Oxford Street, easier parking but still full of temptation and of course, we left with more than we planned), and repeated pilgrimages to Peter Jones in Knightsbridge.

The first time I went alone to scout things out, the second time with the whole family — a mistake, as nothing felt “essential” to my husband — and finally, just me and my daughter. That’s when we actually got things done. The victory was small but sweet: a cosy blanket and matching cushion from Ikea she’d been searching for, finally hers for her dorm room.

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Sweet Moments and Unexpected Art

Sotheby’s Pauline Kapridas’ exhibition

There were softer pauses, too: croissants and pains au chocolat from Cédric Grolet, absurdly priced but worth it as a treat; a quick lunch at Colbert; a failed plan to meet visiting friends from Istanbul that ended with me slipping into Sotheby’s instead.

Pauline Karpidas’s exhibition there was like stepping into a surrealist dreamscape. Her London flat recreated in riotous colour, so vivid I wondered how those walls ever contained it. Uplifting and eccentric, a reminder of how much colour life can hold.

A Rainy Day in Richmond

Rainy walks at Richmond riverside chasing Ted Lasso

One rainy morning, I escaped the noise of London life to Richmond, one of the best places for peaceful autumn walks near the city. I lingered by the river as a film crew shot scenes for the new season of Ted Lasso.

I waited under my umbrella, hoping for a glimpse of Jason Sudeikis (Ted Lasso) or Hannah Waddingham (Rebecca, the manager), but no such luck. Instead, I watched the crew mop wet surfaces and extras rehearse ordinary walks.

As I approached the filming location by the riverside, rain scattered across the colourful gondolas moored there with names like Marie, Violet, and Madeline blurred by raindrops. The sun soon returned, making the wet letters sparkle like jewels.

Rain, sun, rain, sun — the weather couldn’t decide, and neither could I.

One moment hopeful and light, the next heavy and stormy, caught between excitement for what’s coming and grief for what’s about to change.

That’s when I glanced at my parking ticket and realised I had been there for over four hours. How did that happen?

The Ted Lasso Store Richmond

Ted Lasso Store Richmond

Before leaving Richmond, I did something I’d never done before. I stepped inside the Ted Lasso store. I’d always dismissed it as too touristy, but it’s a clever, playful space: a red phone booth inside, and upstairs styled like the locker room, complete with a table-tennis table for visitors to play on.

I made a mental note to recommend it to visitors and to bring my husband next time we’re in Richmond together. I left with a mug that simply reads: Believe.

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Finding Calm at Petersham Nurseries

Petersham Nurseries in Richmond, London

Not quite ready to return home, I drove over to Petersham Nurseries, a vibrant autumn destination favoured by Londoners seeking calm and colour.

The orange and yellow dahlias glowed against the grey sky, burning with autumn colour, the kind that lifts your spirits no matter how heavy you feel. Every visit gives me that same sense of calm: the café nestled among plants, the jumble of pots and flowers, the comfort of just sitting still.

For once I didn’t buy anything beyond coffee and a sandwich, because that wasn’t the point. The point was to let the place steady me.

A Wrong Turn and the Deer

Later, on my drive back, I took a wrong turn and found myself in Richmond Park just as the rain began again. Another proof that my mind is all over the place, because I’m usually very good at never taking the wrong turn.

Out of nowhere, a family of deer came sprinting across the grass. For a moment, one baby was left behind, darting alone to catch up. I wished my husband had been driving so I could film it, but there was nowhere safe to stop, so I kept going. I took in the moment with my memory, not my camera roll.

A fleeting gift from Richmond, impossible to hold, but impossible to forget.

And that’s when the tears came. Not because I couldn’t capture the perfect “content creator” moment, but because all the feelings of the past two weeks finally found their way out.

Belief and New Beginnings

Believe cup from Ted Lasso’s store in Richmond, London

And maybe that’s the lesson of this week: September, not January, is our true beginning. This is the month when the moment the year shifts shape. A new job for my husband, university for one daughter, full-time work for the other. None of them at home anymore.

My husband is still in London, of course, but with his new role, he’s no longer working from home. Suddenly the house feels even quieter. At least he’ll still be here at night, but I told him we can’t just have dinner, watch Netflix, and call it a day. We need to go out more with friends or just the two of us. Anywhere, everywhere. Time to bring back a bit of our twenties, even if it sometimes takes energy we don’t have. He’s closer to sixty now (a shocking truth though he neither looks it nor acts it). But what of it? We’re still young.

I keep coming back to that mug from Richmond: Believe.

I believe my eldest will thrive in her first job.
I believe my youngest will love university life.
I believe my husband will find joy in his new role.
I believe I will find my way through the quiet, even if I don’t yet know what that looks like.
I believe mourning is another word for love.
And I believe the universe has plans for us all, beginning now in mid-September.

Do you feel September is the real beginning of the year too?

PS:

• If you know someone who might be feeling this way, please share this piece with them.

• If your September looks very different, I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

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My 10 Best Bakeries in London reel -now at 4.7M vies. Proof that lists work.

The algorithm loves lists.
Top 10 bakeries.
5 prettiest streets.
7 cafés you need to try.

People save them. People share them. They work.

I know this because one of my own reels, “10 Best Bakeries in London” has now been seen by more than 4.7 million people. Proof, if ever I needed it, that lists cut through the noise. They travel far, they spread fast, they resonate.

And I’ll confess: I love lists too. I make them constantly. For myself, for my daughters, for you. They’re shortcuts in a noisy world, a way to make sense of an overwhelming city like London.

If you’re busy, lists are a lifeline. They take away the effort of planning and give you an easy map: go here, try this, don’t miss that. In that way, lists are not the enemy. They’re useful, they’re practical, and sometimes they’re exactly what you need.

But here’s the trap: when everything becomes a list, something gets lost.

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The Problem with Lists

Lists flatten a city.

The algorithm rewards sameness, so the same ten cafés appear again and again. The same Notting Hill pastel row houses. The same “secret” cocktail bars that stop being secret the moment the fifth Reel lands on your feed.

And you start to see the strange paradox of digital discovery: the more visible something is, the less you want it. A city as vast and layered as London starts to look thin, predictable, even boring.

That’s the list trap: discovery reduced to repetition, intimacy lost to virality.

And of course, virality has real-world consequences. Once a place “hits” online, the queues form, the wait times grow, the flavor dulls. The very magic that made it worth noticing slips away in the rush.

Influence vs. De-Influence

“De-influencing” has now become a trend, telling people where not to go, what not to buy. But to me, that often feels like another performance, another marketing angle dressed as honesty. Withholding isn’t always wisdom.

So if not lists, and not cynicism, then what?

Perhaps the opposite of the list trap is not de-influence, but slow influence. Sharing with care. Offering stories rather than slogans.

It’s the difference between:
“This café is pretty.”
and
“This café is run by a baker who wakes at 3 a.m. to hand-roll every croissant, and there’s a little window seat where the sunlight catches the frosted glass just so.”

That’s not a list. That’s an invitation.

Sharing vs. Protecting

Here’s my personal struggle: the act of sharing can be joyous, but it can also feel destructive.

When I stumble upon a tucked-away garden or a cobbled mews that feels like stepping into another century, I often hesitate. If I share it, does it stay special, or does it crack open under the weight of attention?

It’s not about being possessive. Small businesses do deserve visibility. Communities do deserve support. But I think we all sense that fragile beauty can buckle under too much light. That intimacy requires a degree of restraint.

So the question becomes: how do you share beauty without breaking it? How do you honor a place, without weaponising it for views?

Regent’s park on a rainy Autumn day

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The Cost of Discovery

Finding those hidden corners, the cafés worth the queue, the restaurants that truly live up to their reputation. It takes time, money, and trial and error.

People sometimes assume that as a creator I’m invited everywhere, and yes, invitations arrive. But most of them I decline.

The rare ones I do accept are usually because I know I’ll see people I love in the industry, or because it’s a place I truly want to discover. But nothing is ever free. Every invitation carries an expectation behind it. And here’s the dilemma: how do you fairly criticise a place that invited you?

That’s why I’m selective. I listen to my gut and only say yes when I believe it will be worth sharing. For the rest, I pay my own way for hotels, for meals, for experiences. Because discovery isn’t free, and if I want to keep my voice authentic, I can’t rely on invitations alone.

It’s tempting to accept every offer for the sake of content, for the sake of having more lists to post. But sometimes the most powerful choice is to say no.

The Algorithm vs. Intimacy

Algorithms reward hooks. The punchiest captions. The fast, loud hits.

But intimacy, the warm early light in Regent’s Park on a September morning doesn’t trend.

And yet, intimacy is what we remember. No one carries home the listicle itself. What lingers is the feeling of a quiet street, the smell of bread on a cold day, the thrill of stumbling into a courtyard you didn’t expect.

So I return, again and again, to the question: am I chasing the algorithm, or am I chasing beauty?

The Gatekeeping Debate

These days, admitting you don’t share something can feel almost scandalous. “Don’t gatekeep” has become a slogan, a moral imperative.

But maybe, just maybe, we need to reclaim a gentler kind of gatekeeping. Not selfishness, but discernment. A curatorial instinct that recognises not everything belongs on the internet stage.

Taste is never a democracy. It’s shaped by care, by time, by experience. And it’s okay, more than okay to hold some things back, to whisper them quietly to a friend rather than shout them across TikTok.

That is not exclusion. That is preservation.

Where to Go From Here

So where does this leave us?

Maybe the way forward is not endless lists for the algorithm, but trusted curators in an overwhelming stream of sameness. Not every “Top 10” that trends on TikTok, but a few thoughtful voices who share with sincerity and restraint.

As a traveler, or a Londoner, it’s smart to filter out the noise. To listen for those who add depth, who value intimacy, who remind you that a city’s magic isn’t in its most photographed corners, but in the way it feels when you’re quiet enough to notice.

And as creators, perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves:

• Am I chasing clicks, or connections?

• Am I sharing because I can, or because I should?

• Am I adding to the echo, or giving someone a moment to see?

Because maybe the true art isn’t another list. Maybe it’s in learning how to protect, how to preserve, and how to remind people that some forms of discovery are most powerful when they remain just that discovered.

✨ Do you feel caught in the list trap too?
💬 Share your thoughts in the comments. I’d love to know how you balance discovery with protecting what’s special.
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