There is a single drawer in my flat that I have kept untouched in a way that feels almost intentional. It is not the bedside drawer of lip balms and medication, nor the kitchen drawer with spatulas and stray takeaway chopsticks. This is a slim, wooden drawer in the hallway console: a curated jumble...
I decided, on a Monday morning with a cup of coffee cooling beside me, to ignore the headlines for...
I have a habit of lingering on benches. Not in the rom-com, contemplative way that signals a...
There is a small, almost private language living on my bookshelves: the arrangement of spines, the...
I used to love the ritual of my morning coffee. Not the caffeine in itself, but the small...
I was walking home one evening when a stray line from a conversation I’d overheard lit up a...
I have argued online more times than I care to admit — in comment threads under longform...
There is a small, almost private language living on my bookshelves: the arrangement of spines, the odd stack on the coffee table, the way a row of paperbacks thins into a stubborn gap. For years I treated these gaps as mere accidents—space left after lending a book, a book given away, or a late Amazon delivery. Lately, I’ve started to read them more purposefully. Those empty patches are not...
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I used to love the ritual of my morning coffee. Not the caffeine in itself, but the small choreography: the kettle’s whistle, the grind turning into a pile of earthy noise, the slow bloom as hot water met grounds. Lately, the whole thing felt mechanical. I made the cup, sipped it, and noticed nothing — except a vague irritation that something that used to matter to me no longer did. That...
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I was walking home one evening when a stray line from a conversation I’d overheard lit up a corner of my mind: “We forget not because memory fails, but because we never wrote the thought a second time.” The line was half-remembered, italicized by my own imagination, and stubborn enough to hang around the way a song does when you can’t quite find the chorus. That stray line turned into a...
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I have argued online more times than I care to admit — in comment threads under longform journalism, in the unruly back-and-forth of Twitter, in the less performative but still fraught spaces of Facebook groups. Some exchanges fizzled into productive curiosity; others lodged in my chest like a splinter of embarrassment. Over time I began to notice patterns: arguments that preserved curiosity...
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There’s a kind of ridiculous intimacy in keeping tiny regrets. They don’t announce themselves — they’re the half-smile when you realise you could have said something kinder, the quiet twinge when you opted for punctuality over a conversation, the small ache that follows leaving a book unread on your nightstand. For years I treated these little regrets as minor annoyances, the detritus of...
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I remember a scene from a film more clearly than I remember a conversation I had last week. It’s a strange admission, but it’s become a kind of litmus test for how I think about other people: which version of someone lives in my head — the messy, contradictory person I actually know, or the distilled, edited character that filmcraft hands me? Over time I’ve noticed that the ways...
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There is a small ritual I return to whenever I want to understand a place: I go to the supermarket. Not for the convenience of shopping, but because the items on the shelves — their packaging, the fonts, the claims and the price stickers — are a curious kind of public record. Reading supermarket labels has become a hobby of sorts, a way of learning the cultural history that finds its way into...
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Ideas arrive in odd ways: in the margins of a newspaper, halfway through doing the washing up, in a conversation that started about nothing important. Some I keep and scribble in a notebook; others evaporate by the time I reach for a pen. Over the years I’ve developed three quick, forgiving tests I run in my head before I decide whether an idea deserves a second look. They’re not rigorous...
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There’s a particular ache I recognize now: the sudden rush of warmth when a song from my teenage years plays, the way a scent can unspool an entire afternoon from a decade ago, the urge to pull an old sweater from the back of the wardrobe because it feels like a familiar shelter. Nostalgia has a voice that’s both tender and persuasive. It tells you what was good, what was simpler, what you...
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I have a habit of trying to say too much. Sentences pile up like luggage at a station: necessary items, a few souvenirs, and always one thing I convinced myself I absolutely needed but never use. Writing a short, stubbornly honest reflection forces me to leave the excess on the platform and board with only the essentials. Here’s how I do it — the method I return to when I want something...
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