My mother has an eye for beautiful things: the cut of a coat, the plush of a sofa, the brilliance of Turner's Sunrise. She knows too, that beauty is no small thing, understanding that a room, a dress, a table laid for six can alter the destiny of a day. She has always known the art of things: what to keep, what to move, what needs a little more colour, what needs more salt, more spice, more heat, more flare, where the flowers should sit in the sunlight. At her table, nobody i

We took the boat out and the world forgot to follow us. You revved to full speed, as you often do, and Greece opened beneath us; white wake, blue water, the mainland falling further behind us, until it felt as though we had outrun every version of ourselves except the ones we were with each other. There was something about being out there that loosened us. You became entirely yourself - sun-warmed, salt-skinned, dark hair caught wild in the wind, laughing without checking how

Since getting into a new relationship, I have found myself having an almost absurd number of conversations about love, and not just the practical conversations that come with being with someone new, but the much stranger ones that seem to happen when you start looking at your own life from slightly outside of it, trying to understand what it is that is actually happening to you. What does it mean to be in love? How do you know when something is love rather than infatuation, o

We could speak of the lightning and the thunder, the surge of you under me, the plunder, the plough, the release, but today I think only of you as softness. Yes, we are electric, or so people have said, but they will not understand this milder hum that arrives upon me in the same way the smell of honeysuckle tickles your nose in spring, or the way dust specks dance in a spill of sunlight. I think such softness always existed between us. That first time we met, it extended lik

We assume dancing begins as the music does, but so often it begins here: with the erupting, unbridled sound of a woman laughing too loudly outside the bar, her joy escaping her before she can decide whether to be embarrassed by it. Or maybe over there, with the smiling stranger who holds the door open for your friend as though he has always known her, or upstairs where the old man twangs an old guitar. Isn't it wonderful to witness the impossible mathematics of solitary lives

Artist: Emma Statham - "Lust"- Part of the Seven Deadly Sins series. You came to me before your body did. Long before your hands, before your mouth, before the first impossible mercy of touch, you arrived as weather. Not the weather that gathers above us, but the weather that gathers within the earth- the slow accumulation of unbearable pressure, continents shifting by fractions, mountains learning they were always meant to implode. You moved through me with the silent au

Flame is the most honest architecture, moving through lacquer and lintel, through polish and pose, until it finds the load-bearing lie in the city of self and worries it loose, and the walls, relieved of their performance, confess what they were built to conceal. It strips varnish back to grain, splits beam from seam and makes seen the fine-veined ligature of desire stitched beneath plaster and praise, and in that bright unhousing what seemed solid admits what it always was:

For years, I slept on one side of the bed. Even alone, I folded myself neatly into half a mattress, leaving room for a future body, an imagined weight, the shape of someone else's shoulder and their breathing in the dark. I became fluent in making space for the many you's that preceded you, each with their hands and their lips to reach for, each giving me a reason to stay close to the edge. I learnt to sleep as if love was something I had to accomodate, as if wanting meant sh

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been traipsing through the hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of photographs Grandad miscellaneously treasured over his lifetime. There’s the many from his childhood spent donkey riding and sand car racing in Blackpool with his sister, Win; even as a wee boy, and regardless of how ill-kept the photo may be, his mischievous grin is so easy to spot in a blurry crowd of many. There’s also bucket loads from his time in Changi and Sembawang, Singa

At some hopeless hour the mirrors gave up. The hallway filled with the mineral smell of rain beginning three streets over. A blue garment on the radiator spread like a bruise that you pushed on. Meanwhile language, poor animal, dragged itself in circles - wet paws over tile, slipping clumsily. I mentioned birds once, how they turn collectively without touching. This was taken incorrectly. Later, a sequence of small disappearances: the cup rinsed, the slam of a door thinning i

Human beings possess a remarkable ability to continue living lives that are slowly destroying them. This is evidenced by the frightening speed in which we adapt to emotional distortion, how we learn to perform enthusiasm we no longer feel, how we sustain ambitions that no longer move us, and how we organise entire identities around forms of labour that leave us internally diminished. Over time this adaptation becomes so normalised that the absence of meaning starts feeling le

There have been moments, recently, where I’ve found it difficult to afford the world even a basic generosity of spirit. Let's face it, the current state of geopolitics does not make this easy; it presses in on the edges of daily life, dulling any easy access to hope, peace, or uncomplicated joy. In conversation after conversation, I’ve found myself sitting opposite people whose view of the world feels so saturated with anger that it begins to reshape everything they see, unt

After a long, draining day in the office last week, I stood in the rain looking at the 90-minute journey home from my friend's house and despaired at the combination of tiredness, anxiety, a stupid little summer dress, wind, no jacket, rain and three tube changes on lines that were all broken in some way. Unsurprisingly, I got an Uber and it's safe to say that the tube journey would have been preferable... Now, it's important you understand that I generally enjoy talking to u

There is a garden now, that will, in time, be mine to tend - but these hands, soft and unsure, still reach for yours, without pause, as they have always done when I don't know how to begin. I stand lost and in awe of the asking, unsure of where to look, of what belongs where, unclear, in fact, of how anything takes root at all. And then there's you, turning up at my door, turning up, always, with herbs from home and pockets full of bluebell seeds. I watch as you tend the dirt