I know there’s a spider somewhere in my flat. I spotted him when I came in late the other night, perched brazenly on the ceiling coving – too high up for me to do anything but acknowledge his existence and accept that we would be living together for the foreseeable future. The next morning, he was nowhere to be seen, and now I am imagining him tucked away in obscure places around my living room, waiting to reveal himself at the worst possible moment. Georgia said he’s just looking for a girlfriend. I think he’s just looking for trouble.

At the end of August I moved out of my apartment in Notting Hill. I left the home I had shared with my best friends in the entire world, and moved in with a (wonderful, but) complete stranger in Islington; uncertain about each decision I was making, but making them anyway. It’s peculiar to experience two such opposing emotions at once: the ache to stay put, the overwhelming need to move on. I spent the entirety of the 3 years I lived in West London proudly proclaiming that I would never leave; but nothing ever really goes to plan, and it’s ironic that this so often takes me by surprise.

In living together for so long, my friends and I became extensions of one another: it was us and the flat, and everything else just followed. We lived on top of each other – sometimes it was perfect, sometimes it drove us mad. I never really pictured a time that it would come to an end, but it did, as all things do. Saying goodbye to the home that had seen us through some of the most formative years of our lives was no easy feat. (Though trying to pack everything from said apartment into a singular Zipcar van was even harder.) I’ve never laughed and cried and dreamed so much in one place. I leave a piece of myself in that tiny three-bed with the beautiful windows.

Being 20-something can make you feel both invincible and incredibly vulnerable at the same time. Just when you think you’ve maybe got it all sussed out, your life can turn completely on its axis, and suddenly everything you thought you knew has been entirely rearranged. This year has perhaps been one of the most challenging of my life, but in the same breath I have never felt more like myself. Everything that happens to us, everything that forces us to confront the furthest corners of ourselves, can only serve to teach us more about who we are. Or, better yet, it teaches us that there are infinite versions of who we’re capable of becoming.

The truth is, I spend so much time thinking about what might happen, where I might go, when reality always kicks in to remind me that it’s entirely unpredictable. I learned that your best summer can also be your worst summer, that your crappy week always has the potential to become your most memorable weekend. There’s no formula or pattern to the way things go, they just are. I love my friends for convincing me to go to Glastonbury this year, and for all the ways they unpick my imagined limitations. I love them for reassuring me that I would be safe, and happy, and that, despite my elaborate anxieties of everything that might go wrong, we would have so much fun together. They were right of course, but I already trusted them inherently.

It’s funny when you realise that your notion of ‘some day‘ has become your Sunday, and the things you thought you were supposed to worry about have become the least important on your list. But there’s a comfort in the not knowing – in the acceptance that it’s all going to happen anyway, so you might as well let it. Sometimes you’re waiting to see if one decision will mean your entire life is going to change, and sometimes you’re just waiting for the spider in your living room to come out of his hiding place.

When I moved to London at the end of 2022, I was incredibly homesick. It wasn’t like the homesickness I’d felt at university – this time I loved the city and the people more than I knew what to do with, but instead it was a sort of longing for something that didn’t exist anymore. I knew that this move was the big one. This was the decision to take my life in a certain direction, and it was fuelled by both excitement and fear. I felt so ready to shed the limitations of living in my childhood town, but I was also acutely aware that once I crossed the threshold, I would never find myself back there in quite the same way again.

On the day I left – for a change so big that I almost refused to acknowledge it at the time – I did the rounds to say goodbye to my family. Dotted all over my hometown were the houses that had raised me; my cousins who lived next door (a portal between our two gardens in the way of a missing fence panel), my cousins who lived on the other side of town (no more than a 6 minute drive away), my grandparents’ house down the road (the site of every Christmas and every birthday), and the homes that belonged to the parents of all of my best friends. This was what I was saying goodbye to, twenty three years of home.

It was in the new year, about four months after we moved, that my sense of ‘home’ change. I gradually felt able to straddle both parts of my life – the one that would always be waiting for me at the end of a train ride, and this new, exciting one that I had carved out for myself. I didn’t ever think it was possible to feel that way about two places at once; I always assumed I’d feel like I was missing something. But I had love waiting for me on both sides of the fence, and I knew that I’d be safe in either.

There is a silence I notice now when I go back to Surrey. Even in the busiest parts of town, there is a slowness that is absent in London. It is the gentle ticking of a place full of people who have already done that part of their life, and now find themselves in the suburbs with a past behind them and a family around them. It’s hard to believe now that so much of who I am and who I will always be was derived from growing up there.

My family home is the picture of my mother, and so much of her is woven throughout it: the colours on the walls, the furniture in the front room, the perfectly disorganised filing cabinet. There is no part of that house that she didn’t touch, and when I’m there I can feel her all around me. It is the most comforting feeling, and also one of the most difficult.

The past 16 months that I’ve spent living in London have been formative in a way that I never could have predicted. I have learnt so much about myself being here, I have made friends I will keep for life, and I have rediscovered parts of myself that I considered lost to anxiety and grief; if only I could go back and tell myself that things would be OK.

I started to write this blog post a while ago, and I left these notes for myself so I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to say. They are as follows:

1. something about bus rides home
2. something about walking through a shopping centre feeling calm and not anxious
3. something about sitting in my room and watching the canal

I’ll go from the bottom up. I spent my first year of university at Queen Mary in east London, before transferring to Exeter in my second year. As a 19-year-old, I found London a vast and lonely place – and I really only made it through that year because of the small group of friends I’d made and my ability to go back home most weekends. My halls sat alongside Regent’s Canal, and I can’t count the hours I spent watching the gentle life on the water from my window. I was so jealous of the people who could moor up their boats and then move further upstream whenever they wanted to – as though they had a freedom that I didn’t yet have access to. There were swans that would float up and down during the night time, and a cat that lived on one of the canal boats who would gracefully hop from boat to bank and back again. It was sometimes the only thing that would pace my heartbeat – and I remember wondering if I would ever feel at home there.

Number 2 is about the most mundane activity you could imagine doing on a Sunday afternoon. And it’s one I can do easily 80% of the time now, but there were so many years where that 80% looked more like 25%, and my ability to feel like a ‘normal’ person felt so far from reach. I wondered if I would ever be able to leave the house without having to hype myself up for a good half an hour, or if I would be able to stop noticing the smaller details of my surroundings that went unnoticed by most. And now I find myself at 24 about as normal as I’ll ever be and happier than I ever was – all it took was time.

Finally, and perhaps a good way to end this blog post, my favourite bus route: the 52 to Victoria. The bus I take to the station when it’s time to go home home. It runs down through Kensington High Street and along the bottom of Hyde Park, and I always feel so tiny when I’m on it, because London feels so big. I often wonder what it would be like to be a first-time tourist in London, and experience the city in this way – from the bus window. An expansive stretch of history that looks different each corner you turn. I spoke to my uncle about this once, after I told him that being on the 52 almost made me melancholy, because London seemed so untouchable to me in those moments – the undeniable fact that I’ll never get to experience all of it. There will always be a street I haven’t walked down, or a restaurant I haven’t tried, and how is it possible that I exist here too, amongst all of this? But it was in recognising that I, too, was part of it all, that London became home to me in the way I had wished for at 19.

A whimsical title, I’ll admit, but I’m in a whimsical mood. It’s no discovery that friends play a pivotal role in our development as human beings, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes sit back and think: how did I get so lucky with mine?

This train of thought started a few weeks ago; I was on holiday with my friends and we were sat around the al fresco dinner table drinking cheap Italian wine. My friend and I were trying to pinpoint the exact moment our relationship transcended the label of mere acquaintance. It took me a while to figure it out – I named three or four memories that I thought marked the start of our friendship, before finally settling on a particular day that stuck out in my mind. It was in having this conversation, however, that I realised what was so wonderful about the way we make friends. The memories that I had thought were the inception of our friendship were more like ticks on an invisible checklist – one we unknowingly keep as we get to know someone. It is only when those criteria are marked off that suddenly this person becomes a larger character in your life – a person you call your friend.

There are periods in life that revolve around mass friend-making – joining secondary school, starting university – and other periods where the new friends seem few and far between. For me, it is the friendships I form in those quieter moments that always surprise me. In describing the way she met one of her now-best-friends, my aunt told me ‘I met her when I thought the friend-making part of my life had long passed’, and it is this sentiment that captures the beauty of new friendships. There is always room in your life for one more person, and there’s never any telling which direction they may appear from.

The friends we keep enrich us in all sorts of ways. It could even be considered self-serving to an extent: we have different friends for different conversations, turning to each one for a different reason. But we repay this service they provide us with by providing them with the same. There is even a place, I believe, for the insignificant-later but significant-at-the-time arguments we have with the people we care about. These are usually the spats after which the friendships become stronger – because we learn and change, and neither of us want to repeat the action that hurt the other.

I think there is little that I love more than the nights I get to sit and talk – and I mean really talk – with my friends. These are the moments where life slows right down – in the way an animal’s heartbeat does when it’s hibernating. On these evenings, we can spend hours dissecting and speculating, offering advice, receiving advice, rewriting our futures, and it feels like time is on our side. I come away from a conversation like that and feel like I am capable of anything I set my mind to, and that’s because I have friends who already believe I am.

Of course, friendships are not always linear – sometimes we drift apart from people who reappear in a way that just makes more sense the second time around. Sometimes the friendships end altogether, but their mark on your life remains anyway. I think what I’m getting at – as I try to formulate my thoughts on this page – is that I feel so grateful that my life is guided and supported by such a range of wonderful people and, though I don’t always feel deserving of them, how fun it is to do life with them by my side.

This week marked 7 years since my mum was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and June will mark 6 years since she died. If you’ve known me since then, or before then, those numbers are probably just as shocking to you as they are to me.

I read a lot about grief. I don’t often go searching for it – unless I’m craving the comfort of a shared experience – it’s more that commentary on grief is just a channel my brain is tuned in to. There is nothing I can say about loss that hasn’t already been said before, and in a way that’s nice. At the centre of our grief, in the place where it hurts the most, we all feel the same. There is no feeling too outrageous, too complex, that at least one other person doesn’t already share with you. One of my favourite songs by Bleachers is Everybody Lost Somebody, which Jack Antonoff wrote about life after the death of his younger sister. The title speaks for itself, but the song references the fact that almost everyone is carrying around a grief that we can’t see, even as they move forward with their lives.

If you’ve ever had your heart broken, regardless of how long ago it was, you’ll know that you can still take yourself back to the very second that it felt like the greatest pain you would ever feel; even if only for a fleeting moment. It’s the same concept with loss. Despite the seven whole years that have passed since that horrendous weekend, I can still remember the feeling in my chest as soon as I think about it. It is then incomprehensible to me that I have lived seven more years of my life past that moment. My youngest cousin is the age now that I was then, and it breaks my heart because I can see so clearly now how young I was, even though I felt so old already.

If you’ve lost somebody to cancer, or any kind of long illness, you’ll know that grief really begins months before they actually die. You begin to mourn the version of the future that they were once written into, and you already miss the person they were before everything happened. I think the saddest part of all is feeling completely and utterly helpless, and so angry that they don’t get to stay here with you. Grief – the word itself being an umbrella term – is a cloak you wear forever, woven out of love and loss.

I remember I couldn’t understand how everyone else was just walking and talking as if nothing had changed, and there I was feeling like the world had stood still on its axis. It was then that I realised how blissfully unaware of the harshness of life I had been until that moment. All those people that were going through something like this every single day – and I had just continued getting up, brushing my teeth, going to school, laughing with my friends, and eating dinner with my family. Doing the most mundane things with no heavy weight behind my heart. All that hurt that consumed the lives of others, and there I was just living my life.

Of course, that’s the point. We can’t know what it’s like until it happens to us; we can’t expect others to know what it’s like until it happens to them. But somewhere in the middle of all that are the ones of us who do – those of us in that very unfortunate club – and I find comfort knowing that they’re out there too: just getting on with it.

I’ve been thinking about my mum a lot this week. It’s hard to explain because really I’m always thinking of her. In every tiny decision to every major life change, she is the voice in my head. But on the title of this blog post – time and loss – I can’t quite comprehend how 6 years of life, life that she missed, have passed me by. All the conversations, the cups of coffee, the bad haircuts, the fashion trends, the films, the music, all of it, and she never got to see it. How unfair that I get to continue appreciating all the things she loved about life, while she doesn’t get to do it herself. Time often feels like I’m on a train, speeding away from someone I don’t want to leave behind. I worry about forgetting the smaller details of my life with her, and I still daydream about a future with her in it.

Nothing about coping with loss is linear, but it doesn’t mean that life beyond that point is hopeless. I think that’s the most important part of this blog post. I am happy, and my life is filled with fun and love and excitement, on top of all the other shit. Because that’s how life goes, really. I used to fear the future and suddenly I realise I’m living in it.

I wanted to write about this today because I hope it can provide solace to anyone else who has lost a parent or someone close to them. If you have lost someone recently and you can’t imagine a time that you might be happy again, I promise that you will, and that doesn’t take anything away from the piece that will always be missing. In the past 7 years I have had days, or weeks, where I’ve been so sad I could hardly bear it, but I’ve also had days where I’ve laughed so hard that my stomach hurt. Grief and everything else go hand in hand. Time is both our worst enemy and our best friend – and we just have to find a way to exist somewhere in the middle of it all.

2022 has found me halfway through my 22nd year, still on the post-uni job hunt, and generally excited for whatever comes next. I would argue that the New Year shouldn’t really hold as much potency as it does – it’s a commercialised holiday that makes us feel bad about the year before and leaves us desperate to change our ways over the next calendar year (which always seems more promising than the last). If only we could remember that this same sense of ‘new beginnings’ was fed to us just 12 months ago, it would be more obvious that there is no magical realm we enter between 23:59 on December 31st and 00:00 on January 1st. Having said all that, for me, considering January 1st as a slate wiped clean is quite a comforting feeling. I like the idea of visualising the future, without the pressure of whether I will actually achieve all of the things I’m setting out to do. In my opinion, a half-completed to do list is still better than no list at all. I think what makes the most sense is: If the New Year is a positive thing for you – great, if the New Year fills you with dread – remember that it just means the earth completed an orbital period around the sun.

As I mentioned before, January lands me smack bang in the middle of my previous birthday and my next birthday. I’m halfway to 23, and just starting to realise that the notion of age we have as a child is so different to the reality of it. It strikes me that, existing within a generation of people who are now in their early 20s, the general chronology of where we should be in life is pretty skewed. As a 15 year old I would have probably scoffed at someone still living at home at 22, but now that I (and almost all of my friends) are doing just that – it makes perfect sense. Growing up is about understanding the unseen pressures of ‘adult life’, and appreciating the generosity of our parents more than we could ever imagine. My sister is 20, in her second year of university, and I’m able to make direct comparisons between her and myself at that age. We are similar in a lot of ways, although she is far more independent, but I like the fact that I can remind her of the things I felt and thought on the brim of my 20s. It works the other way round too, she was 17 when I turned 20, and so she remembers the changes I went through in the same moment that she is going through them.

Where does the mythical New Year place me? Right now it feels like I’m thinking about what to write far more than actually writing it. Over the past few months, since my post about Edinburgh, I’ve stopped and started a dozen different blog posts. I have a slight fear of oversharing (perhaps I’m doing it now), but I also find that honesty is my favourite lens with which to express myself. One of the answers I often give when asked what I like writing about, is that I always aim to write something that in turn helps others to understand more about themselves. In the second term of my final year at Exeter, I spent the majority of my time completing a very personal creative writing dissertation. I put so much of my energy into curating this perfect collection of prose and poetry, that for a while I felt a little burnt out. It was like anything I could have turned into a poem had already been done, and so I stopped writing any. It’s only recently that I’ve been turning to my notes app again to jot down lines or stanzas before they escape my head. I’ve come to realise that I must accept I will go through periods where I detest anything and everything I write, but that eventually I will regain my rhythm.

In terms of new skills, last month I decided to make the upgrade from ukulele to guitar. I played the piano for years when I was younger, but I never took the time to practice and as a result I progressed extremely slowly before eventually giving up. The reason I wanted to learn the ukulele in the first place was because I loved the idea of being able to sing along as I played, and I was so surprised at how much I learnt in such a short period of time. Since April, picking up my ukulele has been just about my favourite thing to do – it makes me feel both calm and creative, whilst obviously being very healthy for my brain. My cousin, whom picked up a guitar for the first time a couple of months ago, started suggesting that I needed to move on to the guitar because there was so much more scope for playing. Although I wasn’t keen at first (the jump from 4 strings to 6 seemed a little unnerving), I eventually gave in and received my first ever guitar on Christmas Day. It’s so satisfying to apply all that my ukulele has taught me, despite the entirely different chord patterns, and hear such a resonating tone coming from an instrument that I’m learning to play. It’s fascinating coming back to my guitar every day and realising that my agility is improving each time – my chord shapes form a little quicker, and there’s less of a hesitation between each change. If anything, learning a new instrument at 22 is a great example of how you’re never too old to do something that you’re genuinely interested in.

My love for film is ever-present, if not snowballing, and the recent surge in new cinema releases has not been kind to my bank account. I’m lucky to have friends who enjoy obsessing over the same films that I do; revelling in the experience of going to the cinema, getting an overpriced drink brought directly to our seats, and dissecting the film on the car ride home. Notable favourites from the past year include In The Heights, No Time To Die, The French Dispatch, and House of Gucci, with many still on my to-watch list. For a little while last year I hyper-fixated on music biopics and managed to watch Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman, Judy, and Walk the Line within a 2 week period. December saw me rewatch some of my favourites, with Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation always leaving a warm and fuzzy feeling in my tummy. I’m going to stop this paragraph here before this whole post is overwhelmed with the many minutes of film I consumed in 2021, but I would like to say that I’m very excited for the Oscars in 2022.

Having not previously expected to, I find myself every now and then missing being at university. When I finished in April, I kind of felt like I was done with that part of my life, and I was itching to get on with the next part. But, honestly, I miss living with my friends and the fact that getting my essay in on time was one of the only things I worried about. Of course, I’m romanticising it – we spent a lot of time stuck in our student houses last year, and I was definitely consumed with more than just academic pressures, but I think I’m nostalgic for the proper third year that we never really got to have. What I do feel extremely grateful for, however, is the friends that I have acquired over the past few years, each one enriching my life with new experiences and wonderful conversation.

Essentially, the previous ramblings were just a few of the things that have been on my mind as we begin 2022. In true January fashion, these first 9 days have dragged, and I can’t quite believe there’s 21 more before February. Patience is at the forefront of my mind as I continue to tread the path of being a university graduate, reminding myself that without the lows in life, we would not be able to recognise the highs. My love and admiration for each of my friends and family members seems to grow with every year that I have the pleasure of spending with them, and this constant is one of the things that keeps me grounded when I begin to feel overwhelmed. Here’s to 2022 – learning new skills, meeting new people, watching more films, reading more books, being kind to one another, and doing whatever it is that makes you happy (instead of trying to please everybody else!).

On the last Monday of July, the only thing that stood between me and Scotland was a six-hour train journey. I love travelling by train – it’s relaxing, usually comes with a pretty view from the window, and I don’t have to worry about the train falling out of the sky. I was meeting my best friend, Alex, in Edinburgh (on account of her travelling from Leeds) and I was rather envious of the fact that her journey was only about three hours long. As I lugged my suitcase up the stairs of my local station, I realised I’d made the same mistake that I’d made so many times before – I had overpacked. Nonetheless, I boarded my train and sped up to St Pancras, where I would grab a Pret (obviously) and make the novel one-minute walk to Kings Cross.

It was a beautiful day in London. Sometimes it feels like London has its own weather patterns – I’d left Surrey with grey skies and walked out into a warm and busy city, both me and the crowd bustling with anticipation. I wanted to stop and soak it in, my train wasn’t for another half hour, but instead I dragged myself into Kings Cross to wait in front of the plethora of announcement boards. When the platform was finally announced, the crowd surged forward as we raced to our already-assigned seats. I’d made it onto the train and when I got off, I’d be in a different country.

The journey itself was pretty uneventful, and aside from some obnoxious and arguably unhygienic passengers, I remained relaxed and rather bored. The furthest I’d ever been in the UK was Yorkshire, so by the time I was passing through Newcastle everything felt very alien to me. I passed field upon field, noticing tiny figures – some on bicycles – weaving their way through the countryside, just as I was. I often wish I could stop the train and get off in the middle of nowhere – it always looks so peaceful.

When I finally pulled in to Edinburgh station, I watched out the window in the hopes that Alex was waiting on the platform for me. I spotted her pretty quickly – tiny, fashionable, and her head buried in a book. I knew in that moment that the time we’d spend here would weave into the tapestry of our friendship.

In hindsight, walking to the airbnb with heavy suitcases in a hill-clad city probably wasn’t the brightest idea, but we’d made it to Edinburgh and nothing could dampen our spirits. Our apartment was on the ground floor of a listed building and it felt like something out of a coming-of-age film – it was cute, stylish, and we even had our own secret garden off the bedroom.

After a well needed sofa crash and a mooch around the local corner shop, we cracked open a £7 bottle of vino and started getting ready for dinner. Alex and I have been friends for nearly eight years, but we haven’t actually lived in the same county for the last six of them. We really only get to spend quality time with eachother roughly twice a year, and so it always feels so special when we’re together. We’re the queens of mini holidays – squeezing 2 or 3 night stays wherever we can, and it’s something we’ve managed to do most summers without fail. It’s fascinating watching each other grow up – being 22-years-old and laughing about the fact that we thought we had it all figured out at 16. The weather was warmer than we’d expected and so we optioned many outfits as my Edinburgh playlist floated through the apartment.

Dinner that night was the 5 course vegetarian ‘taste of Scotland’ tasting menu at this sweet little restaurant called The Cellar Door, approximately two minutes walk from our place. We were staying in the Old Town, so the streets were cobbled and the buildings had stood the test of time – it was like stepping into a fairytale. The restaurant was in an old wine cellar, and so we entered at street level and continued downstairs until we sat underneath the hum of Edinburgh, alive with the evening crowd. I was completely enamoured by the food, the atmosphere and the lovely staff. Afterwards, we were that happy kind of tired where we could sit and talk forever, but also knew that we’d be asleep as soon as our heads hit the pillow.

I knew that our short stay in Edinburgh meant we really had to make the most of the time we had – I’m talking a thought out plan for the morning, afternoon and evening – which required an early wake-up. By early, I mean about 8.30am, which is second nature to Alex but something I struggle with a little more. I can’t even count the mornings i’ve woken up to find that Alex has been awake since 6.30am, already back from a run, and on her second bowl of cereal (which she stated recently is her absolute favourite meal, ever). Nonetheless, I arose, I ate, I showered, and we were out the door by about 10.30.

It was our first full day, and the fresh air felt good as it washed over my weary eyes. Edinburgh Castle stands at the top of the Royal Mile, and so we figured we’d head up that way to take a look. Foolishly, we’d not thought about booking ahead, and tickets to go inside the castle were completely booked up for our entire trip, so staring longingly at the castle walls would have to do. I suppose I thought that Edinburgh would be relatively quiet, given the state of travel at the moment, but I was very wrong. It wasn’t even 11am and the Mile was absolutely filled with people – I can’t imagine what it’s like in normal times. There was something so lovely about it, though, to be amongst a whole crowd of excited people, likening Edinburgh to a mythical town set far back in the past. St Giles’ Cathedral sat quietly overlooking the street, and Alex and I – both partial to a cathedral – had a look inside. We were used to escaping holiday heat by ducking inside a church or cathedral, usually so much cooler than outside, but St Giles’ was the opposite. It was a little too warm (which makes sense because Edinburgh gets very cold) but beautiful all the same. I’ve always admired the silence inside such grand structures – a hundred heads walking around, acknowledging, thinking, and not talking.

Refreshed from the peace of the cathedral, we powered up to the top of the Mile, noting a cafe on the way that we would return to for lunch. Edinburgh Castle was impressive, and we gazed at it for quite some time, realising that a ticket inside really would show you a whole lot of stuff. The city sprawled out around us as the castle, embedded into the hill, stood proudly over it. It was quite a sight. As were the hordes of people with selfie sticks.

After a delicious lunch (we quite quickly realised food would be a huge part of this trip), a lovely iced coffee and too long deciding which celtic ring to buy – we headed home for a quick rest stop before our afternoon activity: The National Museum of Scotland.

Never have I ever set foot inside a museum with such an eclectic mixture of exhibits. Set over 3 floors with rooms coming off of a beautiful atrium with a glass roof, you could literally spend hours in there. One minute Alex and I were marvelling at viking treasure and the next we were arguing about whether the giant snakes were real and stuffed, or replicas made of plastic. I’m pretty sure they were real, though Alex will disagree. Going to a museum really reminds me of being a child – a school trip or a day out with my mum – there’s something so enchanting about spending a few hours learning about parts of history you would have otherwise never come across. Having had uni work hanging over me for so long, I was suddenly aware of how nice it was to be able to do this with my best friend – walking around a museum in Scotland at snails pace, laughing and chatting about nothing and everything all at once.

Dinner that evening was a place called Ting Thai Caravan – delicious and fast, with ridiculously large portions. When I say the food was fast, I’m not exaggerating. I think we were in and out of there in about 35 minutes, and so it felt a little weird to head home at the ripe hour of 7.30pm – thus we had to improvise another evening activity. Because of the restrictions in Edinburgh in July, our dream of finding a tiny pub with live music was unfulfillable – so instead we hunted for a cool bar with a good vibe. It was a pleasantly warm evening once again, so despite walking around in circles for quite a while, we had a good time exploring. Having found what we considered a ‘cool’ bar with a ‘good’ vibe, we sat down, ordered an overpriced drink & instantly regretted our decision when EastEnders started playing on the large TV screen hanging above the tables. We concluded it was going to be an early night after all.

Our second and final full day came with a rainy morning and a slight chill, but it didn’t matter because brunch was on the cards. Venturing out of our Old Town bubble, we braved the walk to the New Town, which momentarily snapped us out of our cobbled-street-fairytale. We awkwardly arrived at the little cafe – Fortuna – slightly too soon after breakfast and slightly too early for lunch, but it was cute and warm, so we sat down anyway.

We let the morning float by as we sat there talking in the window booth, watching as a woman – who had knowingly ordered a bowl of fruit – complain that she didn’t like bananas after they brought the food over to her. I felt too embarrassed to ask for ketchup with my scrambled eggs and smoked salmon toast, so I fetched an emergency ketchup sachet from my bag instead, delighted that I actually had one, but much to Alex’s dismay.

Having never really considered Edinburgh’s location on the map, other than it being very high up, I was surprised to read that it was actually home to a beach. We had Scottish National Portrait museum tickets for the afternoon, but a few hours to kill before then and so we decided: beach we must. We worked out that there was a bus that would take us right to the beach front, and the bus stop was seemingly a 15 minute walk from the cafe. We set off at a relaxed pace, each with an AirPod in one ear, listening to Gaslighter by The Chicks and pretending that the people around us were walking to the beat of the song.

It was all a little too late when we realised the bus stop was further than we thought, and our bus was in leaving in about 5 minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever speed-walked for so long in one go. Nonetheless, we made ir just in time, too full from brunch and slightly sweaty.

A gloomy sky, with patches of blue, hung above the beach as we arrived. We passed the time at a cafe, sipping hot coffee and trying our best to avoid the puddle around our table. The vast stretch of damp sand was mostly empty, apart from a few people battling against the wind with their dogs, but everyone seemed happy. We were happy too.

We met the most delightful lady in a gift shop on a road behind the beach, and spoke to her for about ten minutes. She asked me where I was from and I said “Surrey”, and then she repeated “Where are you from?” and I said “Oh, sorry, I said ‘Surrey’ but it sounds like ‘sorry'” and she said “Oh sorry, Surrey! I see!”. I ended up buying a tiny tartan hip flask on a keyring for my brother.

By the time we were on the bus back to the city, we were beginning to hit a bit of a wall. The bus was making a peculiar noise – though I can’t actually recall what the noise was anymore – and we knew we had two activities left to conquer that day. The first was the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and the second was the climb to the top of Arthur’s seat. The latter arguably a much bigger activity than the former. Hopping off the bus near the gallery, we sat in Princes Street Gardens and mustered up our energy for a few minutes. The sky was beginning to clear and a beautiful day was breaking through – we let the sun fall over our bodies and recharge us from the ground up.

The gallery was peaceful, just as the museum had been, and was home to hundreds of portraits and landscapes, mounted on deep red walls. Alex seemed to prefer the grittier paintings – the ones that told stories of struggle and misfortune, whilst I was more taken by the dream-like landscapes that imagined grand and vast places. I wonder if our different degrees, History and English respectively, had anything to do with it.

When we eventually arrived back at our apartment, muttering vague plans about what we should do for dinner, fatigue had finally taken a grasp of us. Alex fell asleep on the sofa while I sat there, wishing I could fall asleep on the sofa. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to nap, it doesn’t seem to be a skill that I possess. Instead I just sat there in a dreamy lull, letting the minutes roll by. After some time had passed, the thought of climbing to the tallest point in Edinburgh felt like an unachievable dream. The problem was, you can’t exactly come back from visiting Edinburgh and say ‘we couldn’t really be bothered to do Arthur’s seat’. Luckily, we had leftovers in the fridge from our Thai food the night before, so I woke Alex, we fuelled up, got a grip, and headed out the door for our final adventure.

I’d like to pretend that the walk up to Arthur’s seat was as breezy for me as it was for Alex. Wearing thick denim jeans and sporting my tote bag with a full chilly’s bottle inside, I followed Alex as she wove easily through the hills. I always feel clumsy when I’m climbing up something, as though my feet don’t want to cooperate with me, making me wish, as ever, that I exercised a bit more. Holyrood Park – where Arthur’s Seat is located – was so vast and beautiful that I was almost overwhelmed with it. I knew that no picture could capture the depth of what I was seeing and feeling, and I tried desperately to note every detail as it passed me by. From above, Alex and I would have been minuscule figures, snaking our way through the decorated landscape.

When it got really steep, I told Alex I was probably going to die. For some reason she didn’t believe me, and kept me moving until we reached the top. Despite the clear and calm evening down below us, the top of Arthur’s Seat was surprisingly windy, and I genuinely considered whether it was possible for us to be blown clear away. It’s suffice to say that we held our ground, but I wasn’t convinced that we would.

Looking out across Edinburgh, I knew we’d really only seen a fraction of the city. There were cobbled alleyways that we hadn’t walked down, tiny churches we’d probably never visit, shops that had been in the hands of the same families for decades, and people, people, people. I think it’s quite normal to feel nostalgia for something in the same breath that you’re experiencing it, knowing that it will slip away slowly, regardless of what you do. I felt a bit like that, standing at Arthur’s Seat with my best friend by my side. I considered that we might never find ourselves up here together again, or if we did we’d be older and changed, but I liked the fact that part of our friendship, the girls we were at 22, would remain there, etched into the hillside.

One of the greatest joys in life (or at least in my life) is discovering a cult film that you’ve somehow never come across before. If you’ve seen Almost Famous (2000), then you can imagine what I’m about to say. If you haven’t – stay with me and I’ll convince you to watch it, I promise.

I’m ashamed to admit that I have a vast list in my phone of films that I haven’t-but-really-should-have seen, and for the last few months I’ve been making my way through them. Having never really heard of it, Almost Famous was suddenly presented to me by the universe multiple times in the same week. It started showing up on my Sky box, and then I watched an Anya Taylor-Joy interview in which she confesses a particular scene from the film is one of her favourites. It was like the film itself was begging me to add it to my list, and so I did. I coerced my brother into watching it with me that same weekend, and we spent the full two-hours-and-forty-two-minutes totally hooked on the screen.

Written and directed by Cameron Crowe, mastermind behind Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), this film is an experience from beginning to end. If you like a slow burn, this plot really spent its time laying the foundations. Set in the 1970s, we follow 15-year-old William Miller, a budding-journalist writing a piece for Rolling Stone Magazine, as he is swept along with the US tour of complicated rock band Stillwater. Arguably the star of the show, and cover girl of the film poster, is 19-year-old Kate Hudson in the role of Penny Lane – a groupie of the band (though she denies it). The sweet friendship between William and Penny Lane is contrasted with the fact that Penny Lane is in love with the lead singer of the band, Russell Hammond.

If you’re like me, then you probably spend your life romanticising every situation because of the films you’ve seen. Watching Almost Famous has left me with an overwhelming desire to travel around the states in a crowded tour bus, and wondering how I can possibly achieve this. There’s a word I love – Anemoia – which means to experience nostalgia for a time you’ve never known. The clothes, the music, and the non-bound freedom of this films paints the 70s with such vibrant colours that it’s hard not to envy the kids of that time. Of course, I know that’s exactly what Crowe aimed to replicate, but all I can say is he very much managed to do so.

There’s no doubt that the cast played a pivotal part in my enjoyment of Almost Famous, given that a young Billy Crudup is surprisingly attractive, and young Kate Hudson is an angel. It’s always impressive when a film can have a large cast and still have time to make you emotionally attached to all of them – even if some of their traits were unbearable. I laughed and cried, I ooh’d and ahh’d, and I rooted for them all. Jimmy Fallon manages to make an appearance, and Francis McDormand even stars as William’s mother!

I think what struck me most about this film was that it focuses on the sense of being in the moment. The characters are not distracted by social media or mobile phones, they’re distracted by each other and the music around them. The narratives in this film are complicated, heartbreaking, and funny, but they also feel real (or as real as a cinematic world can be). We watch as the characters live in this messy fantasy, and then we watch as this fantasy collapses around them. It’s somewhat the very literal meaning of ‘sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll’, but its also a coming-of-age story about who we think we are when we’re young.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, this is my final attempt: If you like watching films that will make you feel inherently different afterwards (even if only for a day), watch Almost Famous and you won’t be disappointed.