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.

If We Grieve the Ending, We Miss the Middle | There She Is

There She Is | Essays on love, life and everything in between

The first time I watched Moulin Rouge was in 2003. I was 29 years old, and I fell completely, spectacularly in love with a film that tells you how it ends before the story has even properly begun.

In the opening moments, Christian, played by Ewan McGregor, sits at his typewriter and tells us that the woman he loves is dead.

There it is. No ambiguity. No opportunity to negotiate with the screenwriter. Satine is going to die, and we're going to have to watch it happen.

And yet, every single time I watch that film, I root for them.

I root for Christian and Satine as though I haven't spent the last 23 years knowing exactly how this ends. I want them to escape the Moulin Rouge. I want their ridiculous, beautiful, bohemian love story to triumph over circumstance. I want a happy ending that Baz Luhrmann has absolutely no intention of giving me.

I know she's going to die.

I fall in love with their story anyway.

And I think there's something rather extraordinary in that.

Because somewhere along the way, in real life, we've developed this peculiar habit of judging our experiences almost exclusively by their endings.

A relationship ends, and suddenly we start questioning whether it was ever what we thought it was. We revisit conversations, examine memories, look for evidence that the inevitable was always inevitable.

We ask ourselves whether we wasted our time.

But I have a question.

Why does the ending get to rewrite the middle?

The peculiar business of impermanence

The ancient Stoics had quite a lot to say about impermanence, principally because they understood something that we seem determined to forget: very little in life is ours to keep.

People change. Circumstances change. Everything we love exists within a world that is constantly moving.

Marcus Aurelius wrote extensively about the transient nature of existence. Not because he thought we shouldn't care about anything, but because understanding that things cannot last forever might encourage us to appreciate them while they're here.

And intellectually, I understand this.

Emotionally, however, I would occasionally like to have a word with Marcus Aurelius in a car park.

It's one thing to accept that everything is transitional when you're sitting with a cup of coffee reading philosophy. It's quite another when the transition involves losing something you desperately wanted to keep.

There's a wonderful cruelty to being human.

We understand that nothing is guaranteed, but we love as though it might be.

Perhaps we have to.

Don't look back

In Greek mythology, Orpheus travels into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, the woman he loves.

He's given one condition. He can lead her back to the world of the living, but he mustn't look behind him until they've both completed the journey.

And of course, almost at the very end, he looks back.

He loses her.

I've been thinking about that story differently lately.

Not simply as a warning about doubt, but as a metaphor for what we do when something beautiful ends.

We keep looking backwards.

We examine the past so intensely that we risk losing sight of everything still happening around us.

We become so preoccupied with the moment something was taken away that we forget all the moments in which it was ours.

And I don't think that's because we're foolish.

I think it's because we desperately want the story to have made sense.

We want an explanation. A reason. A satisfying narrative arc.

Unfortunately, life is not particularly interested in providing one.

Sometimes people love each other and it isn't enough.

Sometimes something extraordinary happens and then stops happening.

Sometimes you find yourself standing in a railway station wondering how on earth you became a woman who cries on trains.

Hypothetically, obviously.

The woman who got on the train

This year, at 52, I fell in love.

I'm not going to turn this into an account of another person's life, because it isn't entirely my story to tell. But it is my experience to write about.

Before it happened, I had a perfectly functional existence.

I'd been single for years. I had my independence, my home, my work, my children, my cats. I had built a life that belonged entirely to me.

And I liked that life.

Then, quite unexpectedly, somebody arrived, and suddenly there were train journeys, hotel rooms, ridiculously long conversations and the astonishing experience of looking forward to seeing another human being quite as much as I did.

There were places I might never otherwise have visited. There were songs that acquired entirely new meanings. There was the wonderful absurdity of discovering that, after all these years, I could still experience that completely unreasonable, all-consuming excitement of falling in love.

I felt extraordinarily alive.

And then, as sometimes happens, the relationship ended.

Now, I could tell you that I immediately accepted the philosophical inevitability of impermanence, thanked the universe for the experience and returned serenely to my independent life.

But I would be lying.

There was grief. There was confusion. There was an impressive amount of thinking. There were occasions when I would quite happily have returned my entire emotional operating system to its factory settings.

And for a while, the ending threatened to become the only thing I could see.

Until I realised something.

The woman who got on those trains was real.

The happiness was real.

The love was real.

The version of myself that existed during those months wasn't a mistake simply because the circumstances that brought her into being had changed.

Grief does not have time-travel privileges.

It cannot go back and make a beautiful Tuesday afternoon less beautiful.

It cannot reach into a hotel room and erase the laughter.

It cannot tell me that I wasn't happy when I know perfectly well that I was.

The ending is entitled to its place in the story.

It is not entitled to every chapter.

Would you do it all again?

Nietzsche introduced the idea of amor fati, the love of one's fate.

It's a concept I find simultaneously beautiful and deeply irritating.

The challenge isn't simply to tolerate what happens to us, but to embrace our lives so completely that we would be willing to live them again, including the difficult parts.

Not just the extraordinary moments, but everything that came with them.

Would I choose to experience something beautiful if I knew beforehand that it would eventually hurt?

I think I would.

And I don't say that because I've developed some remarkable immunity to heartbreak. I absolutely haven't.

I say it because the alternative troubles me more.

What would happen if we only participated in experiences that came with a guarantee of permanence?

Would we ever fall in love?

Would we adopt animals knowing we'd almost certainly outlive them? Would we make friends, travel, try new things, change careers or pursue dreams that might not materialise?

Would we do anything at all?

We'd be safe, certainly.

But there's an enormous difference between a life in which nothing bad happens and a life in which something wonderful happens.

I've become increasingly suspicious of the idea that emotional safety should mean avoiding vulnerability altogether.

Perhaps the goal isn't to construct a life in which we can never be hurt.

Perhaps it's to build one in which the possibility of pain doesn't prevent us from experiencing joy.

Love is not ownership

Simone de Beauvoir wrote about love in the context of freedom, rejecting the idea that a successful relationship requires one person to surrender themselves to another.

It's a philosophy I've found particularly useful as I've got older.

I don't want a relationship in which two people become one person. That sounds logistically exhausting, for a start.

I want two complete individuals who choose each other.

Not because they need rescuing, not because their lives are somehow incomplete without the other, but because being together brings something wonderful into both their worlds.

And I don't necessarily think that has to look like the traditional version of a relationship.

I've spent enough years living independently to know that I quite like my own space. My ideal romance probably involves extraordinary adventures, beautiful conversations, a few perfect days together every month and then returning to our respective homes.

Long term, not full time.

But there's something else I've come to understand.

Love being impermanent doesn't mean we should accept anything less than we deserve while it's happening.

We can appreciate the beauty of a relationship that ended without romanticising the circumstances that made it unsustainable.

We can recognise what somebody brought into our lives while also acknowledging what we needed and didn't receive.

Gratitude and disappointment are perfectly capable of occupying the same emotional space.

I know. Inconvenient.

Humans are terribly complicated.

The bit after the credits

Something I've noticed about romantic films is that they very rarely concern themselves with the practical business of continuing to exist after the big emotional conclusion.

The music swells. Somebody delivers a devastating line. The camera pulls away.

Credits.

But real life has absolutely no respect for cinematic structure.

The following morning, the bins still need putting out. The electricity bill arrives. A cat vomits somewhere deeply inconvenient. You have work to do.

And eventually, rather unexpectedly, you find yourself laughing again.

Not because what happened has become insignificant, but because your life is considerably larger than any one experience.

This is perhaps the most important thing I've learned.

I don't have to diminish a previous happiness to make room for a future one.

I don't have to decide that something wasn't extraordinary simply because it wasn't permanent.

And I don't have to remain emotionally stationed at the ending of a story to prove that the middle mattered.

It did matter.

It still matters.

But there are other chapters.

At 52, I have no idea what the rest of my life is going to look like. I've never been 52 before, so I'm largely making this up as I go along.

I know I want more adventures. I know I want companionship. I know there are places I want to visit, experiences I want to share, and quite possibly another love story somewhere in the future.

I also know that none of it comes with guarantees.

But I'm not particularly interested in returning to an emotional flatline simply because it's predictable.

I'd rather have a life worth writing about.

Even if some of the chapters make me cry.

Truth, beauty, freedom and love

I still watch Moulin Rouge.

I still know Satine is going to die.

I still find myself hoping that, perhaps this time, Christian will find a way to save her.

But I've realised that the reason I return to that film isn't because I expect a different ending.

It's because I want to experience the middle again.

I want the music. The absurdity. The joy. The impossible romance. The spectacular collision of two people who find something extraordinary in each other, even if only for a while.

Because the tragedy isn't that Christian loved Satine and lost her.

The tragedy would have been if he'd never loved her at all.

And perhaps that's what I want to remember the next time life gives me something beautiful without promising I can keep it.

I can grieve its ending.

I can be disappointed. Angry, even. I can wish the circumstances had been different.

But I don't want to become so consumed by what I lost that I forget what I was fortunate enough to experience.

Or worse, become too frightened to experience something wonderful again.

There is still so much life to be lived.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, there's a woman I'm rather looking forward to getting to know.

There she is.

The Great NeeDoh Shortage of 2026: Where to Buy Genuine NeeDoh in the UK and What's Coming Next

Trying to find NeeDoh in stock in the UK? You're not alone. Between supply shortages, resellers, automated stock alerts and increasingly frantic collectors, buying a £6.99 squishy toy has somehow become an Olympic sport.

If you've found yourself refreshing websites, stalking TikTok Shop or wondering why a Nice Cube is being advertised for three times its retail price, welcome. I think we need to have a little chat.

For anyone new here, I'm Mandy, otherwise known in certain corners of TikTok as Mother NeeDoh. I'm a UK toy content creator who works with toy retailers and brands, including Bigjigs Toys, and spends a frankly ridiculous amount of time surrounded by squishy things.

I love NeeDoh. I love the collectors, the community and the sheer joy these little sensory toys bring people.

What I don't love is what's currently happening around stock availability.

So let's talk about it, where you can actually buy genuine NeeDoh at sensible prices, and what we can look forward to as Christmas approaches.

Affiliate disclosure: This article contains affiliate and collaboration links. If you purchase through some of my links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend retailers and products I genuinely work with or trust.

Why is NeeDoh so difficult to find in the UK?

Firstly, demand has been extraordinary.

NeeDoh, manufactured by American toy company Schylling and distributed in the UK by Bigjigs Toys, has become one of the most sought-after sensory toy brands of 2026.

The Nice Cube, Dream Drop, Gumdrop, Niceberg and increasingly collectable Teenie ranges have developed enormous followings across social media.

We're not simply talking about children wanting the latest playground craze, either. Adults, sensory seekers and dedicated collectors are all part of the NeeDoh community.

Unfortunately, demand has created a perfect storm.

When a retailer receives a delivery, particularly of a highly sought-after product, stock can disappear within minutes.

For genuine customers, that can be incredibly frustrating. For small independent toy shops trying to manage demand fairly, it's becoming an increasingly difficult situation.

The problem with resellers and automated stock alerts

Here's where things get particularly interesting.

There are now third-party stock-monitoring services which track NeeDoh availability across multiple retailers and send automated alerts when products become available.

Some operate through services such as Telegram, allowing subscribers to receive notifications when monitored websites change their stock status.

Automated monitoring is not necessarily the same thing as automated purchasing, and not everybody using a stock alert is a reseller.

However, these systems create a real problem for retailers trying to distribute limited stock fairly.

One approach some independent shops have adopted is what we call a ghost drop.

Rather than announcing that 200 Nice Cubes will be available at 6pm on Friday, a retailer quietly adds stock without warning, hoping genuine customers browsing the website will have a reasonable opportunity to purchase.

Unfortunately, automated monitoring can detect those changes, removing much of the advantage of keeping a restock unannounced.

Then there's the secondary market.

I'm personally opposed to buying up limited stock purely to resell it at inflated prices, particularly when ordinary families and collectors are struggling to purchase products at their recommended retail price.

My advice? Please don't feed the scalpers.

There will be more NeeDoh.

Where can I buy genuine NeeDoh in the UK?

This is probably the question I get asked most frequently, so here are the places I recommend checking.

Please remember that stock changes constantly. A link being included here doesn't guarantee that products will be available when you visit.

Bigjigs Toys

SHOP NEEDOH AT BIGJIGS 

Bigjigs is the official UK distributor of NeeDoh, and I have a fantastic working relationship with Sam and the team.

They're genuinely passionate about the products and about getting them into the hands of customers.

Bigjigs has introduced purchasing restrictions during periods of exceptional demand, currently limiting orders to four units per item and one order per customer every 12 hours.

These measures are designed to give more people an opportunity to purchase.

If you're looking for genuine Schylling products, this is an excellent place to begin.

Toys Toys Toys

I recently travelled to Liverpool to work with the team at Toys Toys Toys, where I hosted several live shopping sessions.

Jane and the team are absolutely lovely, and it's wonderful to see independent retailers receiving so much support from the toy community.

Keep an eye on their TikTok Shop and live shopping events for new arrivals and available stock.

Funky Fidget Shop

Another independent retailer based in the Darlington in the northeast of England worth keeping on your radar, particularly if you enjoy sensory toys and fidgets beyond the traditional NeeDoh ranges.

SoRealistic

SHOP NEEDOH AT SOREALISTIC 

SoRealistic is another of the lovely independent UK retailers I work with, and they're definitely worth adding to your NeeDoh shopping list.

They're an authorised stockist of genuine NeeDoh products and have a dedicated collection on their website featuring everything from Nice Cubes and Dream Drops to seasonal releases and harder-to-find sensory toys.

They've also been stocking sensory products since 2024, so their range goes well beyond NeeDoh, with brands including Crazy Aaron's and SPEKS.

As with every retailer at the moment, availability can change incredibly quickly, but they're another trusted place to check when you're hunting for your next squishy addition.

My TikTok Shop

SHOP MY SHOWCASE 

This is probably the easiest way to find products I'm currently featuring.

I regularly work with toy retailers and will continue sharing NeeDoh availability, new products and restock information whenever I can.

You can also find me on my dedicated toy account, @thendtoyreviewer, where I demonstrate products so you can see what they actually look and feel like before purchasing.

One thing worth remembering is that TikTok Shop listings are provided by individual sellers. Always check who you're purchasing from rather than assuming every listing comes from the same retailer.

How to avoid fake NeeDoh

Unfortunately, counterfeit products and misleading websites are another consequence of the extraordinary demand.

Schylling has issued its own warning about websites claiming to be official NeeDoh sellers.

My advice is straightforward:

• Purchase from retailers you recognise and trust.

• Be particularly cautious with unfamiliar websites claiming to be the official NeeDoh store.

• Check the seller, not just the photograph.

• Compare prices with established UK retailers.

• Be wary of supposed rare editions that seem suspiciously easy to obtain.

You can also visit the actual manufacturer's website at schylling.com to explore genuine products.

Remember, just because a website includes the word NeeDoh in its domain doesn't automatically mean it's affiliated with Schylling.

What's coming next for NeeDoh in the UK?

Now for the exciting bit.

As we head into October, there's plenty for NeeDoh fans to look forward to, particularly with Christmas approaching.

I'm fortunate enough to work closely with people in the toy industry, so I occasionally get an early look at products before they reach UK shelves.

I will always respect confidential information and release dates, but there are already some lovely seasonal products we can talk about.

Christmas NeeDoh is coming!

The festive range includes some rather fabulous additions.

NeeDoh Cool Cane

A gloriously festive candy-cane-inspired squish, perfect for anyone who wants something a little different in their collection.

NeeDoh Polar Glow Penguin

A winter-themed penguin with a crunchy snow-like filling and glow-in-the-dark features.

NeeDoh Ginger Glowman

A gingerbread-inspired squishy with a crunchy texture and glow-in-the-dark design.

NeeDoh Advent Calendar

Perhaps one of the most anticipated NeeDoh products this Christmas, featuring 24 miniature sensory surprises.

The official calendar has already attracted considerable attention, and I would expect it to remain a particularly sought-after seasonal product.

I'm also expecting further UK arrivals throughout October, including some lovely new variations including the Nice Icicle, Nice Cream and the Peace of Cake with the Pizza, namely the Needoh Squeeza arriving in November along with some much needed restocks of common Needoh items. (I say common, at the moment even the common Needoh are rare.)

As always, expected arrival dates can change, so I'll share confirmed information when retailers make it available.

And yes, I may have had a little sneak preview of things further down the line.

That's all I'm saying for now.

Mother NeeDoh has learned the importance of keeping a secret. Occasionally.

Should you pay resale prices or wait for NeeDoh to restock?

Personally, I'd wait.

I completely understand the frustration of trying to find a particular colour, limited edition or seasonal product, especially when you're purchasing a birthday or Christmas present.

But paying significantly inflated prices encourages the very behaviour that's making these products harder to obtain.

Support independent toy retailers. Check authorised suppliers. Follow the shops you trust.

And remember that a sold-out product doesn't automatically mean it's been discontinued.

I'll keep this NeeDoh UK stock guide updated

I'll continue updating this article with useful retailer links, publicly confirmed upcoming releases and general NeeDoh news as we move through the autumn and Christmas season.

You can also follow me on TikTok for product demonstrations, new arrivals and the occasional entirely reasonable reaction to receiving a box full of squishy toys.

Because ultimately, NeeDoh should be fun.

It should be about finding a texture you love, discovering something that makes your brain happy, or simply enjoying the increasingly ridiculous number of things Schylling has managed to make squishable.

It shouldn't require a computer science degree, a stock-monitoring bot and a second mortgage to buy a Nice Cube.

Happy squishing!

Read More...

There is a small but significant difference between talking to someone on Instagram and talking to them on WhatsApp.

Instagram is still public-adjacent. It is the foyer. You are wearing shoes. There are other people milling around. At any moment either of you can wander off to look at a Reel about an unusually large cat.

WhatsApp is different.

WhatsApp is giving someone a key.

Not to the house, obviously. I’m not completely unhinged.

Just to your actual phone.

Suddenly they are there between your children, your closest friends, the group chat and the person you’ve been meaning to reply to since February.

They have crossed the digital border.

And, somehow, he crossed it.

I don’t remember there being a grand ceremony. No fanfare. No declaration that we were now Moving This Relationship To The Next Level.

We were simply talking too much.

Instagram could no longer contain us.

And then came the words:

Read more.

If you have never received a WhatsApp message so long that the application itself politely folds it away and asks whether you really want to continue, I can only assume you have never flirted with a man who has multiple degrees and opinions about almost everything.

The emotional support Scotsman had a lot of opinions.

Fortunately, so did I.

This was not a courtship conducted through “morning beautiful x” and photographs of dinner.

We talked about philosophy and feminism. Law and sexuality. Identity. Politics. Doctor Who. Films. Relationships. Books. Cats.

Sometimes all before breakfast.

There was very little small talk because neither of us appeared to understand what small talk was for.

I have always said that I flirt by downloading every fact I have ever learned directly into another person’s brain.

Apparently I had finally found someone whose response was not:

Please stop.

It was:

Interesting. Here are seventeen paragraphs in return.

My people.

Or, more specifically, my person.

At one point we discussed why he liked older women.

His answer was that they had more depth.

Which, obviously, was an excellent answer because I was an older woman and therefore perfectly willing to accept this extremely scientific conclusion.

There were less intellectual discussions too.

He once dyed his moustache because, somewhere in his mind, there existed the possibility that this might make him look like Tom Selleck.

Reader, it did not make him look like Tom Selleck.

It did, however, tell me something important.

He was ridiculous.

I like ridiculous.

Not performatively ridiculous. Not the exhausting sort of man who needs to be the funniest person at every table.

Just quietly, unexpectedly silly.

A man could be discussing jurisprudence one minute and conducting experimental moustache-based masculinity the next.

This, frankly, is catnip to me.

The messages got longer.

Then came the voice notes.

The first few times his name appeared on my screen attached to several minutes of audio, I would put my headphones in and wander around the house listening.

Sometimes I would answer immediately.

Sometimes I would have to sit with something he had said.

Sometimes I would realise halfway through my own reply that I had been talking for four minutes and had somehow moved from the original subject to Simone de Beauvoir, capitalism and whether a hot dog qualifies as a sandwich.

This is what flirting looks like when two people are slightly over-equipped in the brain department.

There was disagreement too.

That mattered.

I didn’t want someone who simply echoed me back to myself. I already have mirrors.

We could disagree about films, ideas, interpretations. We could go away, think about something and come back to it.

There was a pleasure in being challenged by him.

Not diminished.

Not patronised.

Challenged.

There is a difference.

I was beginning to learn the architecture of his mind.

He was beginning to learn mine.

I could sometimes predict where his argument was going before he got there.

I suspect he could do the same with me.

And perhaps that is one of the strangest forms of intimacy.

Not knowing everything about another person.

Knowing how they think.

Somewhere in those conversations Simone de Beauvoir appeared, because of course she did.

I had always loved her idea that the best kind of love is not two incomplete people desperately trying to become one whole thing.

It is two complete people.

Two freedoms.

Two people going out into the world, discovering things separately and then returning to one another bearing gifts.

Look what I found.

Look what I thought.

Look what I learned.

That made sense to me.

I didn’t want someone to complete me.

I was already complete.

Complicated, occasionally held together by caffeine and misplaced optimism, but complete.

I wanted someone who would go away and notice something peculiar on a train and immediately think:

Mandy needs to know about this.

And increasingly, that was what was happening.

A film would become a conversation.

A conversation would become an essay.

An essay would become an in-joke.

An in-joke would turn up three days later in an entirely unrelated discussion and make me laugh in the middle of Tesco.

There was a rhythm forming.

Without either of us announcing it, he had begun to occupy parts of my day.

I would see something and think of him.

A philosophical quote.

A terrible take on the internet.

A ridiculous product.

A man with an ill-advised moustache.

I would reach for my phone.

That is how these things happen, I think.

Not with violins.

With accumulation.

One more message.

One more joke.

One more you have to see this.

One more Read more.

And beneath all the intellectual showing off and ridiculousness, something else was happening.

I felt safe.

That word would become important later.

But even then, before hotel rooms and train tickets and photographs and everything that came afterwards, there was a softness underneath it all.

I didn’t feel as though I had to make myself smaller.

I didn’t have to pretend I was less intense, less interested, less opinionated.

He did not seem frightened by the amount of me.

If anything, he appeared to be wandering around opening cupboards.

What else have you got in here?

This was extremely inconvenient.

I had spent years constructing an excellent emotional fortress.

There were walls.

There was a drawbridge.

There were probably crocodiles.

I had become very good at being on my own.

And now some Scottish lunatic with a questionable moustache was standing outside lighting up my synapses and asking what I thought about existentialism.

Rude, frankly.

The drawbridge did not crash dramatically to the ground.

That would make a better story.

It lowered by inches.

A joke.

A voice note.

A conversation at an hour when sensible people were asleep.

A message long enough to require its own user interface.

Read more.

So I did.

Again.

And again.

And again.

We ran out of characters

 The first proper messages arrived while I was out.

I was having one of those extremely rare nights where I had left the house and was attempting to behave like a normal sociable adult.

I was out with my daughter. There was karaoke.

There was also, for reasons I still cannot adequately explain, more than one round of Jägerbombs.

This is not particularly on brand for me.

I am a woman whose usual idea of excess is ordering both a starter and a pudding, but somewhere during the evening I apparently decided that extending our karaoke room booking and drinking shots was an excellent life choice.

It was not.

When I eventually saw his messages the following day, I was less Main Character Mandy™ and more Victorian woman recovering from a mysterious fever.

He had told me I looked nice. He hoped I had a good night.

And then, when he discovered exactly how good a night I had apparently attempted to have, he found the whole thing very funny.

That was important.

He found me funny.

Not performative TikTok me. Not the woman holding a squishy object into a camera trying to sell twelve of them before teatime.

Me.

And so we started talking.

At first it was about the obvious things. TikTok. Toys. Needoh. The strange little online world in which we had met.

Then we became private investigators.

There was a company selling what appeared to be Needoh on TikTok, except something about it didn’t look right.

Naturally, instead of behaving like sensible adults and simply thinking, “Hmm, that seems suspicious,” we decided we were now an unofficial multinational fraud investigation unit.

His contribution to the investigation was particularly subtle.

He attempted to place an order for such an enormous quantity of Needoh that he could only reasonably have been either opening a warehouse or planning to become Britain’s largest private collector of stress balls.

There was absolutely nothing inconspicuous about it.

I cannot remember whether the company blocked him, rejected the order or simply realised that nobody with innocent intentions requires that much Needoh, but our investigation did eventually establish that something was very wrong.

The company turned out not to be legitimate.

There were consequences.

So, technically, Mandy and the Emotional Support Scotsman solved a crime.

This may be overstating our contribution.

I am comfortable with that.

Somewhere in amongst fake Needoh, ridiculous orders and laughing at each other, the conversations got longer.

And longer.

We talked about work. Life. Philosophy. People. Relationships. Things we believed. Things we worried about. Things we found funny.

We would start with one subject and somehow end up six subjects away.

Instagram became increasingly unsuitable for the amount we had to say to each other.

We kept running out of characters.

That should probably have been my first clue.

Some people flirt by sending heart emojis.

Apparently we flirted by exceeding platform limits.

Eventually there was only one reasonable solution.

We moved to WhatsApp.

And looking back now, that feels like the moment something shifted.

Until then, he was still a man who had wandered into my corner of the internet.

Once we moved somewhere quieter, somewhere that belonged less to the audience and more to us, the story changed.

Instagram had introduced us.

WhatsApp was where we began to know each other.

Landed here first? start here

This is Where It Started

It was an entirely ordinary weekday afternoon.

Or at least, it was ordinary until it wasn’t.

This was during what I can only describe as the great squishy renaissance of 2026.

NeeDoh was difficult to get hold of, I was somehow doing a remarkably good job of selling squishy things on the internet, and for a while my TikTok Lives had become slightly ridiculous. On a good day there could be two, three, sometimes four hundred people watching concurrently while I squeezed brightly coloured objects, talked absolute nonsense and periodically delivered one of my recurring lectures on why men are, broadly speaking, the worst.

It was a niche.

But it was my niche.

Weekday afternoons tended to be quieter, though. The strange little pause between lunch and whatever happened next. I’d recently got some squishy brains in and I was sitting there doing what I did every day: talking to strangers, reviewing toys ostensibly designed for children and adults with anxiety, and somehow making a living out of being extremely, relentlessly myself on the internet.

And then a young Scottish man appeared in the chat.

For the purposes of this story, we’re going to call him the Emotional Support Scotsman.

Because some parts of this story belong to me, and some parts still belong to him.

He asked whether I had anything that might help with anxiety.

I did.

Obviously.

I was practically running an online emotional-support-object emporium at this point.

So I started showing him squishies.

There is something quite funny about knowing now what I didn’t know then.

Because much later, he told me that the entire purpose of coming into my live had been to find something that might calm his anxiety.

Instead, apparently, he saw me and his heart started beating faster.

Which feels, in retrospect, like a fairly significant design flaw in the anxiety-management plan.

He told me later that he had never seen anyone who looked quite so alive.

Colourful. Animated. Completely myself.

He would eventually describe me as “chaotic as fuck, but in the very best way”, which might be one of the more accurate descriptions anyone has ever given me.

But I didn’t know any of that yet.

At that moment he was simply another username moving through a very busy chat.

Except somehow he wasn’t.

I followed him back.

I still don’t really know why.

I don’t routinely follow people who come into my Lives. If I did, I’d be following approximately half of Britain and several enthusiastic American women who collect stress balls.

But something made me press the button.

Maybe he mentioned Scotland. I have, as subsequent events have rather conclusively demonstrated, a weakness in that geographical area.

But then he said he’d just finished university for the year.

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Philosophy.”

And that was it.

My brain stopped.

Because underneath the woman waving a squishy brain around on TikTok, underneath the brightly coloured dresses and the jokes and the constant chatter, is somebody who can happily disappear for three hours into a conversation about existentialism, ethics, Sartre, Beauvoir and why human beings behave the way they do.

Suddenly I desperately wanted to have an actual conversation with this stranger.

I remember saying something along the lines of:

“God, I would love to talk to you about philosophy right now, but unfortunately I’m trying to sell squishies on the internet.”

And perhaps that should have been my first clue.

Not that anything dramatic was going to happen.

Not that I was about to fall in love.

Certainly not that, months later, I would be sitting at my desk crying while trying to work out how to write the story of us.

Just that something had shifted.

Very slightly.

Almost imperceptibly.

A man had walked into my TikTok Live looking for something to calm his anxiety.

I was karate chopping a squishy brain.

And somehow, amongst hundreds of usernames appearing and disappearing from a screen, we noticed each other.

That was all.

For now.

If you're arriving here start here

chapter 3 We ran out of characters