I’m lying on a mattress in a room I once knew 26 years ago as the bedroom of my teenage German host brother.

It’s a room in the basement of my host family’s tall, narrow four-storey house, with a glass window stretching across one wall at garden level outside. The storage space beside the stairs has been converted into a guest bathroom, but the flight of wooden stairs remains the same – tight, winding, and vertiginous to climb.

You thought you might become one of those Manicure Women, the ones with unfailingly smooth, shiny nails – pink, or plum, or pearly white. Ever since your mother’s 70th birthday party – for which you chose a glittery gold polish and sat through lunch bleeding into a maxi pad – you’ve returned to the salon every month, your wrists propped up on a rolled handtowel, pop songs drifting through the air-conditioned chill.

A few weeks ago, I decided to collate a list of songs that make me happy.

Reader, it was slim pickings.

A few years ago, I had a Zoom meeting with a prospective psychologist whom I never ended up speaking to again.

I’m writing this at the end of my second week of full-time teaching, which has been – to be perfectly honest – an assault on both body and mind.

I don’t remember much about the surgery…

I assumed I’d write a lot over the Christmas break. I’d planned to draft a personal essay to submit to a prestigious prize. I wanted to work on my memoir, really iron out the proposal. I thought I might start the academic article that’s been swirling like snow-globe particles in my brain for weeks, maybe months. Instead, I did anything else I could think of.

After complaining about a dearth of decent films in 2025, I enjoyed every moment of The Roses, a contemporary adaptation of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel, The War of the Roses…

Do you make New Year’s resolutions?

Stuff I loved this year.