Stories for women who’ve lived a little. Love, dating, relationships, parenting and life.
Light. Space. Ideas.
A work in progress.
This is where ideas are pinned up, pulled apart and made into something. Sketches, samples, unfinished thoughts and works in progress all belong here.
MEET THE ARTIST →She sees things I don’t. Which is rather irritating, considering we have the same eyes.
She notices the light, the shadows, the small things I might otherwise walk straight past.
Her studio is full of photographs, fabric, notebooks and unfinished ideas. She can make something out of almost anything — including a question I thought I already knew the answer to.
I've been asking her questions. I'm beginning to suspect she's been asking me a few of her own.
The Artist has been here all along.
READ THE ARTIST’S STORY →Words. Questions. Truth.
A thought refuses to stay quiet.
This is where she works out what needs saying, what can wait, and what might look different in the morning. Thoughts are questioned, arguments turned over and words chosen carefully. Not everything written here needs to be sent.
MEET THE REBEL →She was never difficult. She just knew the choice was mine.
She believes in freedom and choice. Who I love. Where I go. When I stay and when I leave.
She steps forward when something or someone I love needs protecting. And she also knows when to hold back, when to take cover and when walking away is the braver option.
She has attitude, certainly. She can be impulsive and she isn’t always right. But she sees the bigger picture, keeps me honest and is always on my side.
She knows when to step forward and when to hold back.
READ THE REBEL’S STORY →Pleasure. Permission. A little excess.
Comfort without apology.
Down here, everything softens a little. The sofa is deep, the light is low and there is usually something good within reach. It is warm, glamorous and ridiculously comfortable.
The irony is that The Indulgent is hardly ever here.
Everyone else is upstairs.
MEET THE INDULGENT →Life is short. She sees no reason to behave as though it isn’t.
You usually hear her before you see her. Heels on the floor, far too much fabric coming round the corner, and something beautiful in her hands.
She uses the best cups on ordinary Tuesdays and has never understood why pleasure should be saved for later.
Things don’t always go to plan around her. She tends to enjoy them anyway.
Something good can still happen today.
READ THE INDULGENT’S STORY →Stories from the house — and the women who live within it.
The woman behind the stories—and why I finally began sharing them.
I have always been creative.
I notice things. People, details, contradictions, beautiful things, ridiculous things and the moments that probably shouldn’t be funny but somehow are. I remember how things felt, sometimes long after I have forgotten exactly what was said.
For years, I was the one who kept everything moving: the organiser, the mother, the capable one. Then illness slowed me down, my marriage ended and the life I recognised began to change.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I began looking differently at the life I had already lived—and at the woman I was becoming. Eventually, some of it began finding its way into stories.
They help me make sense of the grief, the absurdity, the questionable decisions and the very good shoes. Sometimes I understand something differently once I have told it. Sometimes I simply find the part that makes me laugh—and that helps too.
The Story House grew from something else I began to recognise: there wasn’t just one version of me.
There was the one who protects, the one who rebels, the one who creates, the one who dreams and the one who remembers how to live.
They aren’t characters I invented or women I used to be. They are all still me. They contradict one another, rescue one another, occasionally create absolute chaos together—and, in their different ways, they are all trying to look after the same woman.
I don’t write from the other side of a life already figured out. I’m still in the middle of it.
There is illness and loss here, but there is also love, humour, desire, beautiful things, bad judgement, starting again and the occasional decision that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.
If something I tell makes another woman recognise a little of herself—or feel less alone in the contradictions of being one—then telling it has become about more than me.
