Housekeeper's Diary

One of the hardest things about being here, in this house, in this particular stretch of life, is what happens in my relationship with my own reflection. Weeks pass without me really looking. And somehow the distance between the woman I am in my head and the Alis(on) I eventually meet in the looking glass becomes a startling thing, especially for a mind that has long relied on feeling alright because it looks alright.

This weekend, ambushed by the fact of turning 54 (outbloodyrageous, truly), I happened upon a grey hair in my eyebrow, a forest of them on my head, and squinting into the one mirror in this entire house, discovered bags under my eyes capacious enough to pack a whole life into. I sat there and stared at 54 and thought: no. Just that. No.

And so it was that hours before venturing out for a birthday afternoon, I found myself slathered in castor oil, running an ice-cold quartz roller over my face to encourage the fluid gathered there to kindly take its leave, before roping Ben in to box dye my hair. Which is, let it be said, no small undertaking in a bathroom with no natural light, no shower, and no cold water. 

What followed were scenes. Absolute scenes, I tell you! Buckets of water upended over my head. Ben, in a quiet panic, discovering that the final rinse had inducted him into the purple hand gang, a membership he immediately transferred to my back while I shrieked and general drama ensued. Because we are nothing if we are not dramatic.

Two hours later, I felt my own particular version of beautiful.

My happy green dress. Hair glossy and curly and all one colour again. Skin bright, bags banished. And off we went to Hebden Bridge, through the canalside park, Mother Nature had seen fit to drench in the very best of the first day of spring. Couples horizontal in the sun. Dogs in full ecstasy. Families walking four astride. Children zipping up and down the skate park. And us, moving through it all feeling, for the first time in a while, like we were home again.

We had planned a proper dinner at the most formal restaurant in town and ended up eating curried hotdogs in the little brewery bar instead, which was exactly right. Then home, to snuggle into a gorgeous scatter of presents: a complete set of Jane Austen, a huge daffodil cushion the colour of happiness, a ceramic candle painted with peacocks, Ralph Lauren tea-towels, bath oils in glass bottles, a beautiful edition of The Secret Garden, all of it tucked into a box wrapped in navy, jade, and daffodil yellow florals. Gifts themed, tenderly and deliberately, for the next place we live.

The best kind of birthday, in the end. The kind that starts with no and ends with yes, this, exactly this.

This life right now is odd. Difficult to explain, and harder still to pin down in words. Liminal, yes, that overused word that is nonetheless the only one that fits: the space between one life and the next. But we don’t seem to feel the impatience that might consume other people in this same in-between. Somehow, alongside the difficulty and the isolation and the days that ask more of us than they probably should, there is also something else entirely. A kind of giddy silliness. The particular, slightly unhinged lightness that is only available when all other avenues are temporarily closed and there is nothing to do but be exactly here.

So here we are. Every day a Sunday. Every day without shape.

No expectations. Only the tiniest, most carefully gathered pleasures: Jason’s sourdough with Marmite. Too many tangerines. My work, when the internet cooperates, which it does reluctantly and on its own terms. Oil rubbed into the back of my neck. Late afternoons watching the light drop. The narrowboat women on YouTube, their quiet waterway lives a strange comfort. Recipes we send each other, filed away for the day when food no longer depends on a delivery driver and an air-fryer. And each night: back tickles, candles, books.

Nothing to do but be exactly here. In this room. In this moment.

A life in suspended animation. A relationship forged in grief, and making its slow, quiet way toward something that might be called hard-won peace.

We are packing. Chucking drawers full of the accumulated detritus of a life into bin bags, barely pausing to look, because there is no place in the future for keys to doors we no longer have access to. No point debating whether to carry half-used rolls of sellotape into whatever comes next. The things we kept out of obligation, out of habit, out of the quiet anxiety that one day we might need them, none of it is coming with us.

We talk about it endlessly, this ache for a clean slate. The longing for rooms that hold no memory of who we were when things were harder. And I worry out loud, the way I always do for mine is a life examined, that it is a kind of running away. That we should perhaps be made of sterner stuff. That grown women with sense don’t upend everything and start again. And then I tell myself: it is ok to need to run. It is ok to need distance from the lives that carved chunks out of us. That running away and running towards are sometimes, quietly, the same thing, and that knowing the difference matters less than simply moving.

So yes. Packing. Entire days organised around trips to the tip and the slow, considered work of deciding what comes with us into the next life.

We have a suitcase each. One for the things that matter most, not the useful things, not the practical things, but the things that tell us who we are and where we came from. Ben’s is full of university football shorts and medals, a little book of dog breeds he learned by rote as a boy, silver tankards marking birthdays and best man duties and the particular loyalties of a life well-friended. Small, solid evidence of a man I am still, even now, in the process of discovering.

Mine holds a leather zip-up case my Nana bought me on my twelfth birthday, inside it, letters and cards she wrote in her spindly, beautiful handwriting, the kind of writing that makes you feel held even now, even here. My Mum’s velvet nightie-case wrapped carefully around a rag doll. Old brooches. Bundles of dried herbs and flowers that still carry the ghost of a scent. Journals. And the little scraps of paper Finley used to leave on my bedside table - you really are rock n’roll, Mum - folded and kept because some things are too good, and speak too much of love, to ever contemplate throwing away.

Things that matter. Things that tell us who we were. Neither ballast, nor baggage, but evidence. Proof that we lived fully and were loved well, and that we are not leaving any of that behind. You don’t have to forget who you were in order to become who you are going to be. You just have to decide which parts of the story are worth carrying forward.

And now. Ben home, carrying more daffodils and covered in mud because the weather has turned rogue in the way only a British spring can, all bright promise one moment and horizontal rain the next. I make coffee to greet him with. The small ceremony of it. The rightness of having someone to make coffee for.

I browse Rightmove, the way I do most evenings now, falling in and out of other people’s lives through their kitchen photographs and badly described reception rooms. The world feels, improbably, like our oyster. We are still debating which direction to go, a proper house, a proper address, a proper beginning, and the narrowboats are still calling in the background, persistent and romantic and probably impractical and entirely possible. A life with a stove and ducks and buckwheat pillows and ever-changing scenery.

Then a conversation about spirituality that opens something up in me, the way the best conversations do. The kind that doesn’t resolve anything neatly but leaves you feeling larger than you did before it started. I don’t have enough of these conversations. I forget, sometimes, that I need them.

And later: lentil soup, thick and golden, with air-fryer croutons that are frankly better than they have any right to be. A book about Mudlarking borrowed from the online library, other people’s discoveries from the riverbed, the things the Thames gives up when it’s ready. Objects that waited centuries to be found, then carried home by someone who recognised their value not because they were shiny or whole or useful, but simply because they had survived. Because they had a story still worth telling.

I think about that a lot, lately. About what it means to be found. 

To be lifted out of the silt of a life that got away from you and held up to the light by someone who sees not damage but depth. Not ruin but history. I think that might be what we are doing here, Ben and I. Mudlarking each other. Turning the worn and the weathered over in our hands and saying yes. This. This is worth keeping.

The daffodils open on the table. The mud drying on his boots by the door. And my reflection in the dark window, because there I am: not polished. Not performing. Not the woman I thought I was supposed to be by 54. But beautiful, in my own particular way. In the only way that has ever really counted.

This is a life. Quietly and stubbornly, it is a life.