I went on Hinge again recently, which is apparently something I keep doing despite mounting evidence that Hinge and I are in a deeply incompatible relationship.

There was a man on there who was absolutely not my type. He described himself as a “chunk”, and we all know by now that my preference is very much in the opposite direction. But he had one answer on his profile that I genuinely liked. He asked why everyone suddenly seems to be playing padel, going to Japan and spending three nights a week at the gym.

And I thought: actually, yes. Why is everyone playing padel?

I don’t even know what padel is. I’m not entirely convinced anyone did five years ago.

Dating profiles have started to feel like little aspirational brochures for a version of adulthood that involves constant self-improvement, travel, hiking, fitness classes, city breaks and apparently a very committed relationship with airport lounges.

Everyone wants to “travel more this year”. Everyone is “always planning the next adventure”. Everyone wants someone who can keep up with them at the gym, climb mountains at weekends and presumably play padel on a Tuesday evening before catching a flight to Tokyo.

And maybe they genuinely do. Good for them.

But I don’t want a bigger life.

I want someone in this one.

I already have a life.

It has work in it. Too much work sometimes. It has children and cats and deadlines and livestreams and writing and cups of coffee and things I need to remember to post and things I inevitably forget to post. It has evenings where I want to watch a film I have already seen seventeen times. It has days when leaving the house feels easy and days when it feels like an expedition.

I don’t need someone to make my life more impressive.

I don’t want someone to drag me up a mountain.

I don’t need a gym buddy.

I definitely do not want a padel partner.

What I want is much less photogenic and, to me, much more meaningful.

I want someone I can talk to for hours. Someone whose brain interests me. Someone nerdy and funny and a little bit odd. Someone I can spend a few intense, lovely days with every month and then return to my own life knowing they are still there.

Which brings me to another thing dating apps don’t seem particularly well designed for.

I changed my Hinge profile recently from “long-term relationship” to “life partner”.

And my likes absolutely fell off a cliff.

Maybe that wording frightens people. Maybe “life partner” sounds like I’m already standing outside a registry office holding a folder of venue brochures.

But that isn’t what I mean at all.

I don’t want somebody full-time.

I want somebody long-term.

Those are not the same thing.

I want commitment without constant proximity. I want certainty without having to merge every cupboard and calendar. I want to know where I stand with someone without necessarily sharing a postcode.

“Long-term, not full-time” might actually be the most accurate description of what I want.

And perhaps that sounds very specific.

But the funny thing is that everyone on dating apps seems incredibly keen to tell you how busy they are.

They are travelling. They are training. They are climbing. They are brunching. They are learning Portuguese and paddleboarding through Croatia and doing something with sourdough.

So surely there must be room somewhere in these enormous, packed, exciting lives for a relationship that doesn’t require two people to become one permanent unit.

I think I understand myself well enough now to know why that matters to me.

When I fall in love, I don’t do it gently.

I don’t allocate someone a sensible percentage of my emotional resources and then continue operating at normal capacity.

I make them the centre of the universe.

Not because they demand it. Not because I think relationships should consume everything else.

It is simply how my brain and heart seem to work.

The person becomes fascinating. I want to talk to them. I want to know everything. I want to tell them everything. My attention narrows and suddenly this one human being is lit up in neon while the rest of the world starts losing saturation around the edges.

I’m 52.

I don’t think I’m going to fundamentally rewire that now.

And honestly, I’m not sure I want to.

There are beautiful things about loving someone that intensely.

The problem is that I cannot sustain that level of emotional focus indefinitely without other parts of my life starting to suffer.

Work gets neglected.

Routines disappear.

Friends hear from me less.

I forget that I am a whole person with an entire life outside this glorious human being who has temporarily become the most interesting thing on Earth.

So perhaps the healthiest relationship for me isn’t one where somebody is beside me every day.

Perhaps it is one with space built into it.

A few days where I can give someone everything I have. Where we can disappear into our own little universe together.

And then we go home.

We miss each other.

We live our separate lives.

And then we come back.

That does not feel like less commitment to me.

It feels sustainable.

There is a strange assumption that wanting space means wanting something casual. That if you don’t want to live together, or spend every weekend together, or slowly combine your lives until neither of you remembers which mugs originally belonged to whom, then somehow the relationship must be less serious.

I don’t think that’s true.

I think commitment can look like consistency.

It can look like choosing the same person again and again while still allowing each other to remain separate people.

It can look like saying, I love the life you already have. I’m not here to replace it. I just want a place inside it.

And perhaps that is what bothers me about all those aspirational dating profiles.

They make love sound like another activity you are supposed to add to your lifestyle.

Travel more.

Exercise more.

See more.

Do more.

Become more.

Maybe some of us don’t need more.

Maybe some of us need deeper.

Maybe “something I want to do more this year” could be know myself better.

Celebrate myself more.

Rest more.

Tell people I love them.

Leave the house occasionally, if we are being ambitious.

Maybe our dating profiles could contain slightly fewer mountaintops and slightly more truth.

Because I don’t particularly care whether someone has been to Japan.

I care whether they can communicate.

I don’t care whether they go to the gym three times a week.

I care whether they are kind when I’m overwhelmed.

I don’t care whether they can play padel.

I still don’t actually know what padel is.

I care whether we can sit together doing absolutely nothing and still feel like something important is happening.

I don’t want someone to make my world bigger.

I want someone who looks at the world I already have and says:

There’s room for me here.

And maybe there is.

 

Did I Gain Weight, Or Did Nobody Tell Me I Was Hot Today?

A few days ago, I became convinced I’d put on half a stone.

Not because I’d stepped on the scales. I hadn’t.

Not because my clothes suddenly didn’t fit. They did.

Not because anyone had commented on my body.

I simply tried on a couple of outfits I’d worn earlier this year, looked in the mirror and thought: Oh God. I’ve gained weight.

And the fascinating thing is that I immediately accepted this as fact.

There was no evidence whatsoever.

Except that I didn’t feel hot.

Which, apparently, my brain decided was the same thing.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since, because women’s relationships with their bodies are already complicated enough before you add love, sex, desire, ageing, hormones, weight loss, social media and the small matter of standing under the overhead light in a changing room.

But I wonder how much of the way we perceive ourselves has absolutely nothing to do with what we actually look like.

And how much of it comes down to whether anybody is currently reflecting desirability back at us.

When I was in a relationship earlier this year, I felt incredibly sexy.

Now, I was slightly lighter by the end of that relationship than I had been at the beginning, but not dramatically so. The difference between then and now is certainly not enough to explain the completely different woman I sometimes seem to see when I look in the mirror.

Back then, I had evidence.

There was someone who fancied me.

Someone who looked at me in a particular way.

Someone who touched me.

Someone who told me I was attractive.

Someone who made me feel desirable.

And perhaps most importantly, there was somebody onto whom I could project this version of myself.

Sexy Mandy existed because I felt sexy, but she also existed because somebody else appeared to agree with me.

Then the relationship ended.

And suddenly the evidence stopped arriving.

This is where I want to be very careful, because this isn’t an essay about women needing male validation.

I know women who feel at their absolute hottest when they’re single. They leave relationships, lose half a stone, cut their hair, buy excellent underwear and emerge six weeks later looking like they’ve been personally sponsored by Beyoncé.

There are also women who talk about relationship weight as though it’s an unavoidable side effect of heterosexuality. You fall in love, spend six months ordering Deliveroo together and suddenly none of your jeans fit.

That hasn’t really been my experience.

For me, being in love seems to turn something on.

I dress differently. I go out more. I photograph myself more. I feel observed, in the nicest possible way. There is a kind of erotic electricity running underneath ordinary life.

And when that disappears, I don’t immediately replace it with some fabulous, empowered, single-woman glow.

Sometimes I stay in the house and eat sweets.

Which is probably less cinematic.

There are other things going on for me too. I’ve lost a lot of weight over the last few years, and medication has played a significant part in that. Bodies change. Hormones change. Appetite changes. Menopause changes things. Mood certainly changes things.

But I think there is something else happening.

Perception changes.

The strange thing about bodies is that we never see them objectively.

There is no neutral mirror.

We look through whatever emotional weather happens to be passing through our lives at the time.

When I’m happy, busy, flirted with, photographed, wanted and wearing something fabulous, I can look at myself and think: Bloody hell, you look good.

Give me a lonely Sunday, an unanswered dating app, an old photograph from a happier month and too much time alone with my thoughts, and suddenly I’m apparently three dress sizes bigger.

Same woman.

Same mirror.

Different evidence.

And perhaps that is the part I find most unsettling.

Because I like to think that at 52 I have reached some enlightened stage of womanhood where I know who I am independently of whether somebody fancies me.

I have raised children. Built businesses. Lost five stone. Reinvented myself more times than Madonna. I have survived heartbreak, illness, divorce and the early 2000s eyebrow situation.

Surely I should be beyond needing somebody else to confirm that I’m attractive.

Except perhaps that’s not really what’s happening.

Maybe desire is relational by its very nature.

You can believe that you are attractive in theory, but there is something uniquely powerful about seeing yourself through somebody else’s eyes.

We do this with all sorts of things.

You can believe you’re funny, but hearing somebody laugh feels good.

You can believe you’re talented, but somebody choosing your work feels good.

You can believe you’re beautiful, but somebody looking at you like you are still does something.

That doesn’t necessarily mean our confidence is fake.

It means human beings are social creatures, and our identities are partly constructed through reflection.

The problem comes when the reflection disappears and we mistake the absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

Nobody is telling me I’m hot right now.

That is not the same thing as not being hot.

Nobody is currently lying next to me thinking I look gorgeous in the morning.

That does not mean I suddenly stopped being gorgeous in the morning.

There simply isn’t a witness.

And I think that distinction matters.

Because otherwise it is frighteningly easy to rewrite our bodies according to whatever is happening in our romantic lives.

Loved equals beautiful.

Single equals undesirable.

Wanted equals thin.

Rejected equals fat.

None of those equations make any logical sense.

Yet I suspect quite a lot of women know exactly what I mean.

So perhaps the work of being single, for me at least, isn’t learning to stop caring whether anybody ever finds me desirable again.

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t want to be desired.

I do.

I like sex and romance and chemistry and somebody thinking I look incredible in a dress.

I would quite like all of that again.

The work is learning not to interpret the temporary absence of those things as proof that something has gone wrong with me.

Perhaps the goal isn’t to become so fiercely independent that I never need another person to tell me I’m beautiful.

Perhaps it’s simply to be able to stand in front of the mirror during the quiet periods and remember that beauty doesn’t vanish just because nobody is currently narrating it.

I didn’t gain half a stone that afternoon.

I lost an audience.

Those are not the same thing.

How Nora Ephron Ruined My Life

There are several women who have influenced the trajectory of my life, but very few of them have done quite as much damage as Nora Ephron.

I say “damage” with enormous affection, obviously. The woman was a genius. A writer, director, essayist and general observer of human ridiculousness who somehow managed to make romantic longing feel both completely absurd and entirely reasonable. She convinced an entire generation of women that somewhere out there was a man who would understand our particular brand of neurosis, fall hopelessly in love with it and probably meet us somewhere aesthetically pleasing while Harry Connick Jr played in the background.

I have been paying for this since approximately 1989.

I don’t want to watch a Nora Ephron heroine. I want to be one.

I want the apartment with too many books. I want the slightly impractical coat. I want to walk through New York in autumn carrying a coffee and having a deeply significant internal monologue. I want a man to realise, possibly after several acts of emotional incompetence, that he cannot imagine his life without me.

Unfortunately, I live in Newcastle and most romantic revelations arrive via WhatsApp.

This is not what Nora promised me.

And yet I keep believing.

Because When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail remain three of my favourite films ever made. When Harry Met Sally was written by Nora rather than directed by her, but it contains everything that feels unmistakably Ephron: women who are complicated without being punished for it, conversations that are clever enough to require your full attention, relationships built as much through language as physical attraction, and the astonishing idea that somebody might fall in love with you not despite all your peculiarities, but partly because of them.

That last part may have ruined me most of all.

Look at Sally Albright.

Sally has been presented for decades as “high maintenance”, largely because she knows exactly what she wants and insists on communicating it. She doesn’t merely order food. She provides instructions. She wants things on the side. She would rather not have something at all than have the wrong version of it.

Watching her now, in a world where we understand considerably more about neurodivergence than we did in 1989, I find her fascinating.

I am not diagnosing Sally Albright through a television screen. She is fictional, for a start, which would make the referral process difficult.

But I can absolutely read her as neurodivergent.

The specificity. The rules. The certainty that there is a correct way for something to arrive and that an unexpected variation may render the entire thing unacceptable. The intense conversations. The overthinking. The need to understand what something means.

I recognise that woman.

For years, women like Sally were written off as difficult, fussy, neurotic or demanding. And perhaps one of the reasons Ephron’s women have aged so beautifully is that she didn’t really ask them to apologise for it.

They are allowed to be particular.

They are allowed to talk too much.

They are allowed to want things.

They are allowed to get things wrong.

They are allowed to be slightly bonkers.

This was, and still is, surprisingly feminist.

They are not the immaculate Cool Girl who requires nothing and finds everything hilarious. They have jobs. Opinions. Preferences. Complicated emotional interiors. They can be selfish, obsessive, frightened, romantic and occasionally catastrophically misguided.

In other words, they feel like actual women.

Then there’s Annie Reed in Sleepless in Seattle, a woman who hears a man talking on the radio and essentially constructs an entire emotional relationship with him before they have meaningfully interacted.

Annie, babes.

I understand.

We would now have considerably more vocabulary for what is happening there. Projection. Parasocial attachment. Limerence. The creation of an imagined person who exists partly in reality and partly inside your own head.

Annie doesn’t know Sam.

She knows a story about Sam.

And that story becomes so powerful that she begins rearranging her actual life around the possibility of him.

This should be horrifying.

Instead, Nora makes it romantic.

Therein lies the problem.

Because once you grow up on films like this, there is always a tiny part of your brain whispering that perhaps an inexplicable emotional connection isn’t something you should rationally examine. Perhaps it is fate.

Perhaps you should get on the plane.

Perhaps you should go to the Empire State Building.

Perhaps you should absolutely not show this film to a therapist.

And then we arrive at You’ve Got Mail, which may be the most dangerous one of all for somebody like me.

Because this is a love story built almost entirely on words.

Kathleen Kelly falls for somebody through conversation before she properly understands who he is in the physical world.

Do you see my problem?

Of course you do.

I am demisexual. I need the brain first. I need language. I need somebody to say something that makes me stop what I’m doing and think, Oh. There you are.

Nora Ephron made an entire film telling me this was not only valid but potentially accompanied by Tom Hanks.

The internet has changed almost beyond recognition since You’ve Got Mail, but the emotional mechanism really hasn’t.

We still meet people as words first.

A dating profile. A message. A voice note. An exchange at midnight that unexpectedly becomes two hours of conversation. Somewhere in all those sentences, a person begins taking shape.

Sometimes the person we create in our heads is accurate.

Sometimes he turns out to be three red flags wearing a nice jumper.

The technology changes.

Human beings remain spectacularly human.

And perhaps that is why Ephron’s films still work.

They were never really about email or radio shows or New York bookshops.

They were about longing.

About the enormous emotional architecture we build around other people.

About friendship becoming love so gradually that nobody notices until it has already happened.

About wanting somebody to choose you, while simultaneously wanting to remain entirely yourself.

And about the terrifying possibility that another person might see all your weird little edges and say, essentially, yes, that. I want that one.

I think that’s the fantasy I’ve carried with me all these years.

Not marriage.

Not living together.

Not some enormous white wedding followed by matching bathrobes and a joint Tesco Clubcard.

God forbid.

What Nora Ephron sold me was something much more dangerous.

Recognition.

The idea that somewhere in the world there might be a person whose particular weirdness fits against mine.

Someone who understands why I need the cream on the side.

Someone who wants the long conversations.

Someone who hears one of my seventeen simultaneous trains of thought and climbs aboard instead of looking for the emergency exit.

Someone who finds me not tolerable, but delightful.

And yes, perhaps growing up with Nora Ephron has made me romantic to the point of occasional stupidity.

Perhaps she is partly responsible for the fact that I still want the grand gesture while simultaneously demanding excellent communication and healthy emotional regulation.

I contain multitudes.

I want somebody who will meet me at the top of the Empire State Building, but I also want them to text and confirm the time beforehand.

That seems reasonable.

And after twelve years of being single, I recently discovered something rather inconvenient.

I still believe in all of it.

Not necessarily the Hollywood version.

Life has taught me far too much for that.

People leave. Relationships end. Timing is terrible. Love does not magically solve incompatibility. Sometimes the person who gives you one of the happiest chapters of your life is not the person who gets to stay for the rest of the book.

Nora didn’t lie about that either, actually.

Her films are full of uncertainty. Divorce. Loneliness. Wrong choices. People who love badly before they learn how to love better.

Maybe that’s why I return to them.

They are romantic without pretending that human beings are simple.

And at 52, perhaps I don’t really want to be a Nora Ephron heroine anymore.

Perhaps I’ve realised I already am one.

Slightly neurotic.

Extremely specific.

Far too interested in language.

Occasionally prone to building an entire philosophical framework around a man’s forearms.

Living a full and complicated life while wondering whether somewhere, somehow, there might be somebody strange enough to fit into it.

I have the books.

I have the cats.

I have the internal monologue.

I even have the impractical coats.

All I’m missing is the New York apartment.

And frankly, given the rent, Nora can keep that bit.

Those Ridiculously Beautiful Forearms Ruined My Perfectly Good Single Life

Those forearms, those ridiculously beautiful forearms.

I blame them for all of this.

Before the forearms arrived, I had built a perfectly functional life in which men were largely theoretical. I had been single for twelve years and, despite the cultural assumption that a woman alone must be waiting for someone to arrive and complete the set, I was doing absolutely fine. Better than fine, actually. I worked, travelled, raised children, accumulated cats, went to the theatre, booked hotel rooms, ate alone in restaurants and developed the sort of self-sufficiency that becomes almost architectural. My life had structure. It had rhythm. It had very little romantic chaos in it.

Then came a man with absurdly beautiful forearms and, very inconveniently, reminded me that companionship can be lovely.

This was rude of him.

Because once you remember what it feels like to have someone woven into the banal little corners of your day, silence becomes much louder. The messages about nothing. The photograph from a train window. The ridiculous observation you know only one person will understand. The “did you get home okay?” and the “look at this” and the “you’ll never guess what just happened.” None of these things are grand enough to make it into a romantic film montage, but they are the things that create intimacy. They make life feel shared.

And that, I think, is the really irritating revelation.

I am happy alone. I also want someone.

Those two things are not contradictory, although people seem determined to pretend they are. There is a strange cultural binary where a woman must either be fiercely independent and need absolutely nobody, or she must be wandering around like Jane Austen’s least fortunate heroine hoping a man with land will notice her. I reject both options. I can assemble my own furniture and still want someone to send me a stupid meme at eleven o’clock at night.

I do not need rescuing. I do not need completing. I do not need choosing.

I would, however, quite like company.

Preferably intelligent company. Funny company. Emotionally literate company. Someone who will walk around a pumpkin farm with me, tolerate my extremely strong opinions about rom-coms, understand why The Holiday is clearly superior to Love Actually, and not behave as though replying to a message is an act of wartime heroism.

This is apparently where the modern dating landscape begins to deteriorate.

My return to dating has felt less like a Nora Ephron film and more like a poorly funded behavioural science study conducted by men with Wi-Fi.

There was Sweetpea.

Sweetpea appeared after a period of communication so erratic that I had begun to wonder whether the conversation itself had been a hallucination. Then, without warning, there it was. Sweetpea.

Sweetpea?

Sir.

You cannot vanish into the wilderness and then return with a term of endearment as though no administrative incident has occurred. There should be forms. There should be a debrief. At minimum, I require minutes from the meeting where you decided silence followed by “Sweetpea” constituted a communication strategy.

It was so audaciously casual that I almost admired it.

Almost.

And then we came to Doctor Who.

Now, I am a Doctor Who person. This is not obscure information. There is a TARDIS-shaped section of my personality that has been there for most of my life, so when I mentioned seeing the TARDIS at an exhibition years ago I assumed I was discussing something safely within the realm of normal human conversation.

I was then asked whether it had actually travelled through time.

There are moments in life when your brain simply refuses to process the information it has been given because accepting it would require too much structural rearrangement.

This was one of those moments.

I looked at my phone. I looked away from my phone. I looked back at my phone in case the words had somehow altered themselves while unsupervised.

They had not.

This man is educated. Not “once completed a pub quiz” educated. Properly educated. Degrees. Multiple postgraduate degrees. The sort of academic history that would ordinarily suggest at least a passing familiarity with the distinction between science fiction and the current capabilities of terrestrial engineering.

And yet there I was, contemplating the possibility that an adult human being genuinely believed the BBC had mastered time travel and quietly deployed it for exhibition purposes.

Imagine the meeting.

“Excellent news, everyone. We have finally broken the laws of physics.”

“Extraordinary. Shall we inform NASA?”

“No, put it next to a Cyberman in Cardiff.”

This is dating now.

Not candlelit dinners. Not meaningful glances across crowded rooms. Not Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks falling in love over dial-up internet.

No.

It is me staring at WhatsApp wondering whether I now need to explain that David Tennant cannot actually regenerate either.

The maddening thing is that none of this would bother me quite so much if I had not recently remembered what good communication feels like.

That is the legacy of the forearms.

For twelve years, there was no comparison. My life was quiet and self-contained and I did not particularly notice the absence of romantic intimacy because I had forgotten the texture of it. Then someone came along and, for a while, there were messages every day. There was anticipation. There was someone at the other end of the phone who knew the context, remembered the previous chapter and understood why the completely inconsequential thing I was telling him mattered to me.

And then it ended.

What surprised me afterwards was not simply that I missed him. Sometimes I did. Sometimes, in certain moments, I still do.

What I missed just as much was movement.

The sense that something might happen.

The tiny electrical current running beneath ordinary life.

There is a particular kind of excitement in knowing another person is thinking about you somewhere else. It changes the shape of the day. The world feels fractionally more cinematic. Train journeys become scenes. Songs acquire meaning they absolutely did not ask for. A perfume becomes so entangled with one particular person that you eventually have to retire it from service because otherwise you risk being emotionally ambushed in your own bedroom.

Romance is frankly very inefficient.

Dating apps offer a synthetic version of that excitement. There is always another profile, another possibility, another little burst of dopamine when someone matches with you. For approximately seven minutes you can imagine that perhaps this is the one who will turn out to be interesting, available, emotionally articulate and capable of answering a message without entering a fugue state.

Then he asks whether the TARDIS actually time travelled.

Hope is exhausting.

And yet, despite the evidence, I still seem to possess some.

This may be my most troubling personality trait.

Because I know what I want now, and irritatingly, it is not unreasonable.

I want consistency.

I want curiosity.

I want someone who is delighted by me rather than vaguely willing to tolerate my existence.

I want someone who can say, “I’m really busy today, but I’ll message you tomorrow,” and then, in an extraordinary demonstration of advanced civilisation, actually do it.

I do not want to conduct forensic analysis of punctuation.

I do not want to spend three days wondering whether a man is overwhelmed, avoidant, busy, dead or simply incapable of operating WhatsApp.

I do not want one message a day.

I do not want breadcrumbing dressed up as a personality trait.

I do not want “I’m just bad at texting” from someone who apparently manages to communicate successfully with colleagues, friends, family, Deliveroo and the tax office.

Most importantly, I do not want to be hidden.

I have done enough shrinking in my lifetime.

I do not want the sort of relationship that can only exist privately, carefully protected from parents or friends or colleagues or whatever imagined audience might disapprove. I do not want to become somebody’s secret adventure, exciting precisely because I am kept separate from the rest of their life.

If you want me, I want you to want all of me.

The woman with the children and the cats and the internet career and the loud laugh and the opinions and the toy empire and the complicated brain.

Not a sanitised version that fits neatly into whatever space you have decided I am allowed to occupy.

Maybe this is what happens when you reach your fifties.

You stop auditioning.

You stop thinking, “I hope he likes me,” and start thinking, “Do I actually like him?”

That change sounds small, but it is seismic.

I do not want to be chosen. I want to choose.

That means I can find someone attractive and still decide he is not right for me. I can enjoy someone’s attention without allowing it to become the organising principle of my emotional life. I can miss someone without believing that missing them means I should return to them.

I can even acknowledge, with great dignity, that a man possesses spectacular forearms without allowing those forearms to override every other available piece of evidence.

Growth.

The forearms remain extremely good, obviously.

I am not going to lie for the sake of personal development.

But beautiful forearms cannot sustain a relationship.

This has been a difficult day for the forearm community.

The bigger lesson, though, is not really about dating apps or WhatsApp or postgraduate men asking questions about fictional time machines.

It is about what happened when I let someone into a life that had been closed to romantic intimacy for twelve years.

I discovered that I had not stopped wanting love.

I had simply adapted to its absence.

There is something both comforting and devastating about that.

Human beings are extraordinarily good at adaptation. We build a life around whatever remains. We learn new routes. We rearrange the furniture. We stop reaching for things that are no longer there.

Eventually, the absence itself becomes ordinary.

Then someone arrives and suddenly you remember the room used to have another door.

That is what the forearms did.

They opened the door.

The bastard.

And now I have to live with the knowledge that I would quite like someone beside me sometimes.

Not every day. God, no. I have spent too many years sleeping diagonally and controlling my own thermostat to surrender civilisation completely.

Long term, not full time.

I want a person who has their own life and wants me in it. Someone who can be deeply committed without believing that love requires constant proximity. Someone who understands that independence is not rejection and intimacy is not ownership.

I want someone whose brain makes mine light up.

Someone capable of discussing absurd things seriously and serious things without becoming absurd.

Someone who will go to the theatre, take a train, wander around Edinburgh, sit in a hotel bar, argue about films and eventually understand why I own quite so many NeeDohs.

Someone who, when something wonderful happens, is the person I instinctively want to tell.

That is the bit I miss.

Not being rescued.

Being witnessed.

There is a difference.

So I remain here, somewhere between romantic optimism and “I genuinely cannot be bothered with this shit.”

I still have my life.

A very full, ridiculous, occasionally extraordinary life.

There are four cats. There are children I adore. There are books beside the bed and trains to catch and places I have not visited yet. There is work that frequently involves me sitting in my house surrounded by squishy toys while discussing them on the internet as though this is a perfectly normal profession.

There are films to watch and essays to write and entire days that belong only to me.

I am not waiting for someone to begin my life.

My life is already happening.

I would simply quite like someone lovely to wander into it and stay.

Someone consistent.

Someone curious.

Someone capable of communicating.

Someone who understands that Doctor Who is fictional.

The bar is, at this point, in a fascinating location.

And maybe that is why I am not entirely cynical yet.

Because those ridiculously beautiful forearms, irritating though their consequences have been, reminded me of something I had almost forgotten.

Love is not necessary for a life to be meaningful.

But wanting love does not make the life you already have insufficient.

You can be complete and still make room.

You can be independent and still want to reach for someone’s hand.

You can have built an entire universe by yourself and still think it might be rather lovely if someone occasionally came over to visit.

So yes, I blame the forearms.

Those forearms.

Those ridiculously beautiful forearms.

They opened Pandora’s box, reintroduced me to longing and sent me back into a dating ecosystem where grown men may or may not believe in functional TARDIS technology.

Honestly, they had better have been worth it.

Why adults are buying toys. The rise and rise of grown-up joy

 

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There is a doughnut with a face looking at me, and quite frankly, it is doing more for the atmosphere than another beige cushion ever could. It has no opinion on my life choices, requires no elaborate explanation of my feelings and appears delighted simply to exist. In an adulthood full of bills, disappointing news and people who mistake replying to a message for an Olympic endurance event, I find that rather refreshing.

I spend my working life talking about toys, reviewing toys and introducing people to things they did not realise they needed until they saw me enthusiastically squishing them on the internet. But my love of toys goes far beyond my job. At 52, with grown-up children and a home I get to make my own, I have given myself permission to be surrounded by cheerful things. Paddington Bear, Labubu, NeeDoh and small, inexplicably adorable objects have all found their way into my world. Joy, it turns out, does not have an upper age limit.

Why are more adults buying toys?

Adult toy collecting seems to have moved from something people sheepishly admitted to something we happily discuss, display and share. A collectible on a handbag, a plush on the sofa or a fidget toy beside the laptop barely raises an eyebrow now. Somewhere along the way, we appear to have stopped pretending that becoming a grown-up means losing every interest that cannot be filed under sensible home improvements.

There is evidence behind that shift. Circana reported that 43% of UK adults had bought a toy for themselves or another adult in 2025, based on data to July that year. That does not mean nearly half the country has a dedicated plush room, although I would support the architectural ambition. It does show that buying toys for adults is a substantial part of everyday shopping, rather than a tiny eccentric corner of it. Circana

The toy industry often calls us “kidults”, a word that sounds as though somebody in a marketing meeting needed a biscuit. I understand what it means, but I also think we can simply be adults who enjoy toys. We manage households, earn money, raise families and navigate complicated lives. We can do all of that while owning a bear in a duffle coat.

Finding pockets of joy in a grey world

My theory is that the toy renaissance has something to do with how relentlessly grey adulthood can feel. There is always something to organise, renew, pay for or worry about. Even our leisure time can become another self-improvement project, as though sitting down is only acceptable if we emerge with better posture and conversational Italian.

A cheerful toy asks very little of you. You can enjoy its colour, its expression, the way it feels in your hand or the ridiculousness of its existence. A smiling doughnut is not going to improve the economy, but it can improve the view from your chair. Some days, that is a perfectly respectable achievement.

Anyone who knows me knows that, even when I am at my saddest, I usually manage to find pockets of joy. I do not think being surrounded by toys is incidental to that. They give me small things to notice and enjoy when everything else feels heavy. Sadness and delight can occupy the same room, and sometimes delight is a very small creature with an exceptionally silly face.

You do not need children to enjoy toys

So many of us are single, child-free or living in a different chapter now that our children have grown up. There is no reason the cheerful things should leave the house just because the children have. My daughters are adults; my enthusiasm for Paddington has declined by precisely zero per cent.

There is a particular pleasure in choosing things entirely for yourself. You do not need to invent a niece, borrow a child or tell the cashier that the plush is a present. It can be yours. Your home can reflect the person who actually lives in it, including the part of you that still gets excited by a beautiful little toy.

I am increasingly fond of that freedom. If I want something colourful on a shelf because it makes me smile, that is enough of a reason. I have spent enough of adulthood being responsible. I would also like to be delighted.

NeeDoh and sensory toys for adults

NeeDoh has become a huge part of my working life, but it also belongs firmly in my personal collection. There is something deeply satisfying about picking up a squishy toy and giving your hands something to do. For me, that tactile experience can be a useful part of settling myself when I feel overwhelmed.

As an autistic person with ADHD, I notice how much the right sensory experience matters to me. Texture, resistance and the feel of a toy can all change whether I want to keep reaching for it. People have different preferences, which is why I would always choose a sensory toy for how it feels to you, rather than assuming the most viral one will automatically be your favourite.

Some days I want a satisfying squish; other days I simply enjoy looking at the colours. Neither experience needs to become a productivity strategy. Sometimes your hands want something pleasant to do while your brain has a moment.

Browse my NeeDoh and sensory toy picks on Amazon 

Paddington Bear and the comfort of childhood favourites

There are childhood characters who seem to carry a whole emotional world with them. For me, Paddington is one of those characters. That small bear, with his earnest face and enduring belief that people ought to be kind, feels like particularly good company in a world that occasionally needs reminding.

Revisiting a childhood favourite can bring a familiar pleasure into your current life. You might have a different home, a different family set-up and a considerably more intimate relationship with your electricity bill, but you can still recognise that little flicker of affection when you see a character you have loved for years.

Nostalgic toys make thoughtful gifts for adults because the connection can be so personal. The best choice is often the character someone already loves, rather than whatever happens to be at the top of a trending list. If their face lights up when they see it, you have probably understood the assignment.

Find Blind Box gifts and nostalgic favourites on Amazon 

Labubu and the pleasure of collecting

Labubu has a place in my collection because I enjoy it. That sounds almost suspiciously straightforward in a world where we are expected to justify every hobby, but I like the characters and the pleasure of having something I am excited to collect.

Collecting can create lovely little points of connection, too. You spot someone else’s favourite, compare collections or discover that another perfectly competent adult has strong feelings about a tiny face. There is something rather wonderful about finding people who understand your enthusiasm without asking you to make it more sensible first.

Of course, enjoying a collection does not mean you need every release. I want my toys to be pockets of joy, not another source of pressure. A small collection you love can be every bit as satisfying as an enormous one, and liking something is not an obligation to keep buying it.

Fugglers and Momiji: my Christmas 2026 toy predictions

If you are looking for Christmas gifts for adults who love toys, two names I am watching particularly closely are Fugglers and Momiji. These are my predictions from a life spent enthusiastically immersed in toys, rather than a guarantee that every Christmas stocking in Britain will contain one. Although I would enjoy seeing the photographs.

Fugglers have the sort of gloriously odd appeal that makes people stop scrolling. They are funny-looking plush monsters with human-like teeth, which sounds mildly alarming until you discover that mildly alarming might be exactly what you want on your sofa. I think they have plenty of potential for another wave of viral attention and a place on Christmas lists this year. fuggler.com

They also make sense as gifts for people whose taste runs towards the peculiar. Not everyone wants sweetness with a bow on it. Some of us would quite like a creature that looks as though it has opinions about the neighbours.

Momiji offers a different kind of charm. These collectible message dolls have space for a tiny handwritten message hidden in the base, which makes them feel wonderfully personal. A cheerful little figure is lovely enough; a cheerful little figure carrying a secret note from someone you love is a rather beautiful gift. Collectable Message Dolls

I think Momiji could have a big Christmas because that combination of collectibility and sentiment has so much appeal. You can choose a doll, write something that matters and give someone a small object with a much bigger feeling attached to it. I am very susceptible to that sort of thing. Put a tiny meaningful note inside something adorable and apparently I am yours.

NeeDoh is also firmly on my Christmas radar. Given the enthusiasm I see around it, I expect it to feature on plenty of wish lists. Whether your chosen version will be easy to find is another question, so I would keep an eye on reputable sellers and choose the toy you actually want, rather than paying a ridiculous price simply because everybody else is excited.

Shopping for adult toy gifts during Prime Big Deal Days

Amazon’s UK Prime Big Deal Days takes place on 6 and 7 October 2026, which makes this a useful moment to look through your Christmas gift ideas. If you are shopping for an adult collector, a sensory toy fan or someone who could use a cheerful little addition to their day, I have included places to browse my Amazon picks throughout this post. About Amazon UK

I would start with the person rather than the offer. Think about the characters they love, whether they enjoy soft toys or display pieces, and whether a squishy texture would be their idea of heaven or something they would hand straight back. A thoughtful toy gift does not have to be expensive to feel personal.

I cannot promise that the toys mentioned here will be discounted during the event, and prices and availability can change. My approach is to check the current listing, the seller and the price, then decide whether it is something I actually wanted in the first place. A sale is much more satisfying when it helps you buy something you love.

Browse my Amazon toy picks and adult gift ideas

Giving yourself permission to enjoy cheerful things

What I love most about this growing enthusiasm for toys is the permission people seem to be giving themselves. The permission to collect, to play, to revisit something familiar or to put a ridiculous little face on the shelf because seeing it makes the day feel better.

My life contains work, responsibilities and difficult feelings, just like everybody else’s. It also contains Paddington, Labubu, NeeDoh and the occasional doughnut with an expression of implausible optimism. I am glad there is room for all of them. When life feels heavy, I appreciate having small reminders that I am still capable of delight.

Perhaps that is why more adults are buying toys. We have realised that joy does not become less valuable because the thing bringing it happens to be small, colourful and available in several collectible varieties. I intend to keep finding those pockets of joy, and if one of them has a cuddly face and is currently staring at me from across the room, so much the better.

What Moving On Really Looks Like After a Relationship Ends

There are berries on the honeysuckle now, which sounds like the opening line to a very earnest novel written by a woman who owns several linen dresses and has recently moved to Provence. Unfortunately, it is just me, sitting in my garden in Newcastle eating lunch with two cats nearby and thinking far too deeply about a plant.

It is the first day of October and, rather inconveniently for the seasonal narrative, it is beautiful outside. Properly beautiful. Blue sky, sunshine, the sort of weather that makes you briefly forget that we are hurtling towards the bit of the year where it is dark at approximately 2.45pm and everyone starts talking about putting the big light on.

So I took my lunch outside.

The cats were doing their usual garden admin. Charlie was inspecting something near the fence, Angus was probably considering a crime, and Maggie was somewhere being Maggie. I sat down, looked across the garden, and noticed the honeysuckle.

And that was when my brain decided we were going to have "A Moment".

Back in spring, I spent a lot of time sitting in this garden waiting for the honeysuckle to flower. I noticed the buds appearing, then the first flowers, then more of them. At roughly the same time, something else in my life was beginning too. There were messages to wait for, plans being made, all that lovely early-stage possibility where absolutely everything feels significant because somebody has used punctuation in a way you find emotionally compelling.

Spring is very good at beginnings. Everything is showing off.

October is less bothered.

The flowers have gone now. In their place are berries. Some of the leaves are beginning to turn and the whole garden is quietly starting its annual decline into what I like to call “absolutely not my problem until March”.

And yet, sitting there today, I realised I did not feel sad.

That surprised me slightly because I have spent a frankly unreasonable amount of this year being capable of extracting emotional symbolism from almost anything. Songs. Perfume. Train stations. Scottish geography. Probably a receipt at some point. I have been one minor weather event away from writing a 2,000-word essay entitled What Drizzle Taught Me About Love.

But the honeysuckle did not make me sad.

It just made me think.

There is something odd about returning to the same place after your life has changed. The physical setting is familiar, but you are not quite the same person sitting in it. It is like visiting an old hotel room, except the hotel room is your garden and you are eating something from the fridge while a cat stares at you as though you personally invented disappointment.

I remembered sitting there months earlier, when everything felt new. And now here I was again, only the season had changed, the flowers had become berries and my life looked different.

Not worse. Just different.

I think we are terribly bad at that distinction.

We tend to treat endings as failures, particularly when it comes to relationships. If something does not last forever, there is an instinct to rewrite it. Perhaps it was wrong all along. Perhaps we should never have done it. Perhaps the entire thing was a terrible mistake and we must now burn the metaphorical photographs and emerge with a podcast.

I do not really believe that.

Some things can be good and still end.

Some people can be important and not be permanent.

Some versions of our lives can be completely real, even if we only get to inhabit them for a while.

The honeysuckle has not somehow betrayed me because it stopped flowering. I am not standing over it demanding to know why it could not maintain the same level of emotional availability it demonstrated in May. It did what honeysuckle does. It flowered. It changed. Now it has berries.

Nature is extremely relaxed about transition. Humans, meanwhile, are sending six-minute voice notes.

Maybe that is why I liked sitting there today.

Nothing needed fixing. Nothing needed explaining. There was no great revelation where I suddenly understood every decision I have ever made and became a spiritually evolved person who now owns matching ceramic bowls.

I simply noticed that something had changed and the beauty had not disappeared with it.

The garden was still lovely.

The sun was still warm.

The cats were still wandering around.

Lunch still tasted like lunch.

And my life was still here.

I think that is the bit we sometimes miss when we are trying very hard to “move on”. We imagine there is supposed to be a clean break between the person we were then and the person we are now. A point where we stop remembering. Stop caring. Stop associating things with a particular time. As though healing is some sort of emotional factory reset.

I do not want that.

I do not want to erase whole periods of my life simply because they ended.

I would rather let them become part of the landscape.

Something happened here. It mattered to me. It changed me in some ways. And now other things are happening.

That feels much healthier than pretending none of it existed.

It also feels much less exhausting.

There is only so long one woman can make everything about a relationship before even she starts thinking, Christ alive, can we discuss literally anything else?

Which is perhaps the real reason I liked the honeysuckle today.

It did not feel like a symbol of heartbreak.

It just felt like October.

A different season.

A different version of the garden.

A different version of me sitting in it.

There are berries on the honeysuckle now.

And honestly, they are rather beautiful.

Why we need more brilliant British TV shows like Sherlock and Doctor Who

 I have watched all four series of Sherlock in less than a week.

This sounds considerably less impressive when you remember there are only thirteen episodes, but those episodes are basically films, so I am going to claim it as an achievement anyway.

Sherlock recently appeared on Disney+, which was all the encouragement I needed to start again from A Study in Pink, and I had forgotten quite how extraordinarily good it is. Not good in the sense of “this is nice to have on while I scroll through my phone”. Good in the sense that I actually put my phone down.

For me, that is an accolade considerably more meaningful than a BAFTA.

I have ADHD. I work online. I have approximately nine thousand thoughts happening simultaneously at any given moment, one of my cats will inevitably require something and there is always another notification somewhere trying to persuade me that whatever is happening on my screen is more important than whatever I deliberately chose to watch.

It takes a lot to make me properly watch television.

Sherlock does.

There is something about television that demands your attention rather than politely requesting it. Television where missing thirty seconds because you opened Instagram genuinely matters. Television where the dialogue is doing something, the camera is doing something, the music is doing something and you actually want to know what happens next.

I miss that.

And perhaps more specifically, I miss this particular kind of ambitious British television.

Sherlock originally ran from 2010 to 2017, with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as John Watson, and watching it again now I am struck by how confident it was. It took one of the most adapted characters in literary history and somehow made him feel completely contemporary without making Arthur Conan Doyle disappear underneath him.

Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss created the series while also working on Doctor Who, which makes perfect sense when you watch the two programmes side by side. There is the same affection for huge ideas, impossible situations, clever dialogue, emotional punches and characters who are often several steps ahead of the audience.

And the performances in Sherlock are ridiculous.

Benedict Cumberbatch is brilliant. Martin Freeman is brilliant. Andrew Scott turns Moriarty into something genuinely unsettling and weirdly magnetic. Amanda Abbington is wonderful when Mary arrives and changes the chemistry completely. Una Stubbs somehow makes Mrs Hudson both comforting and absolutely not somebody you would want to underestimate.

Even when Sherlock is being completely bonkers, it commits to being completely bonkers with such confidence that you go along with it.

That, actually, might be what I miss most.

Confidence.

British television used to occasionally behave as though it had absolutely no interest in whether something travelled well internationally, could be turned into sixteen spin-offs or provided enough “content” to keep a streaming platform alive for eight consecutive fiscal quarters.

It would simply say: we have an idea. It is clever. Here are some exceptional actors and ninety minutes. Pay attention.

Obviously television has not stopped being good. There are still shows that can make me do exactly that.

Dexter: Resurrection managed it. I watched it every week rather than allowing six episodes to pile up while telling myself I would “get around to it”. A second series arrives on Paramount+ on 30 October, so apparently Dexter Morgan will once again be responsible for me having appointments with my television.

And then there is The Diplomat, which is one of the best examples of modern television remembering that intelligent people talking to one another can actually be thrilling.

Give me Keri Russell and Rufus Sewell arguing about geopolitics in a corridor and apparently I am unavailable for the next fifty minutes.

Season four arrives on Netflix on 15 October, which is excellent news for me and considerably worse news for anybody expecting me to answer messages that evening.

But there is still something particularly British about the television I am talking about.

And that inevitably brings me to Doctor Who.

Of course it does.

At the moment Doctor Who is in what I can only describe as television purgatory.

The BBC has put production of the next era out to tender, asking companies to pitch for a new multi-episode series and specials, with the next full series currently envisaged for transmission in 2028/29. The current TARDIS set has even been dismantled, which feels unnecessarily dramatic considering this is a programme where the entire central concept involves regenerating rather than dying.

Still, I am nervous.

Not because Doctor Who should remain exactly as it was. That would completely misunderstand Doctor Who.

It is supposed to change.

The lead actor changes. The companions change. The writers change. The TARDIS changes. The tone changes. Sometimes even the font changes and everybody on the internet has to spend three days having opinions about it.

That is the point.

But I desperately hope whoever gets their hands on it understands what makes it special.

For me, David Tennant's Tenth Doctor was the one I loved most for a very long time. There were Doctors afterwards who I liked, certainly, but there wasn't another incarnation who really grabbed me in quite the same way until Ncuti Gatwa.

And strangely, I think that worked precisely because Gatwa wasn't trying to be Tennant.

He felt different.

His Doctor could be joyful and vulnerable and theatrical and deeply emotional. He brought something of his own to it, which is exactly what regeneration is supposed to do.

You cannot preserve Doctor Who by embalming it.

You preserve it by understanding its DNA well enough to change it.

The same is true, perhaps, of British drama more generally.

I don't necessarily want somebody to make another Sherlock. In fact, please don't give us Sherlock: Origins, Young Mrs Hudson, The Moriarty Files and a six-part Lestrade cinematic universe because I have suffered enough.

What I want is television with the same ambition.

I want writers to be allowed to write something dense and strange and funny and emotional without somebody insisting that the audience needs everything explained three times.

I want actors being given dialogue worth performing.

I want ninety-minute episodes when a story needs ninety minutes and six episodes when a series needs six episodes.

I want programmes that assume I am watching them.

Because there is something wonderful about finding a television programme that shuts everything else up.

That is quite rare for me.

My brain usually has several tabs open even when no actual browser is involved. I can watch something while simultaneously wondering whether I replied to an email, whether I need to order cat food, whether that thing I saw earlier would make a good TikTok and why exactly I walked into the kitchen twenty minutes ago.

Then occasionally something like Sherlock comes along and my brain goes quiet.

Not empty. Quiet.

Focused.

For ninety minutes I am not half-watching while doing three other things.

I am in 221B Baker Street.

I am noticing the clues.

I am listening to the dialogue.

I am watching Martin Freeman do more acting with one tiny facial movement than most of us could manage with an entire monologue.

That is what great television can do.

Streaming has given us more television than we could possibly watch in a lifetime, and yet sometimes I wonder whether having everything available all the time has made truly unmissable television feel rarer.

There is a difference between having something to watch and wanting desperately to watch something.

I want more of the second one.

So yes, apparently my latest cultural demand is that Britain produces more ridiculously clever, beautifully acted, properly absorbing drama.

No pressure.

Until then, I have reached The Final Problem, which means I am about to run out of Sherlock again.

And frankly, that feels like a problem somebody considerably more intelligent than me ought to solve.