There are a lot of jokes about what it’s like to rent a home in London. None of them are funny if you’ve done it long enough. I have been a serial collector of postcodes.

Moving to a city like London from suburban Sydney, being from the generation that I am, the prospect of owning my own home is very different for me than it was for my parents and grandparents. As a millennial, I have read all the articles — the ones with headlines like ‘Are Millennials Finally Ready to Binge on Housing?’

A pandemic inevitably changes your perception…

During the lockdown, I recorded an episode of the podcast Author Not Present, dedicated to discussing and workshopping creative writing. In this particular episode, my co-host Peter asks: How is the writing going?

At that stage, we were months into some of the most severe restrictions placed on us in the UK. We’d been limited to our homes, to going out only for emergencies, medication or food. I had decided to go freelance in December 2019, and then immediately lost all my income when the pandemic hit hard in March 2020. It was an intense period. …

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I decided to go freelance in late 2019. I’d been a freelancer before, but transitioned back to full time work in 2016. For many years, I worked in the arts then big tech, whilst trying to write my novel and follow my creative dreams on the side. But after plenty of time obeying my corporate overlords, I was done with ‘normal’ working life. …

The phrase ‘Writer’s Block’ looms over all of us who dare to pick up a pen or tap out sentences on our computers. It suggests that we, the writer, have hit an impasse — we’ve strained too hard, or squeezed out every inch of creativity we had, with nothing left. Well, I have a confession to make…

I don’t think writer’s block exists.

Recently, I read the fantastic Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. In it, she talks about so-called ‘writer’s block’, and describes it like this —

“If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have…

Accepting the term ‘artist’ feels like a huge step in the life of anyone who aims to be creative. Whatever labels we attach to ourselves, this one feels particularly loaded. Who gets to call themselves an ‘artist’? What does this really mean?

These are big questions, and ones it takes time to answer. But when we do accept the term for what we are doing — be it going professional as a photographer, or dabbling in watercolours, or trying our hand at a novel for the first time ever — being an ‘artistic’ sort has its share of problems. …

There is so much passive aggression out there these days, and most people love to blame social media for it. In my view, that’s just one factor, and the bigger one is just good old fashioned human insecurity. So if you’re coming up against the ‘pass agg’, how do you respond in an effective way?

Living in the UK, and culturally speaking, it seems to me that there are contexts in which passive aggression is seen essentially as a natural extension of politeness. …

Warning: I’m going to discuss in some detail what I experienced during a panic attack. This might be helpful, or it might be triggering. I just wanted to let you know it’s coming.

Recently, I had my first panic attack in years.

Luckily for me, I haven’t had a lot of panic attacks in the last years, so when one comes, it stands out sharply on the calendar. The fact that I’d been panic attack-free for so long made this one particularly stark.

I had mistakenly thought that doing my time in therapy, learning the tools and techniques, would always…

Humans are not famously good decision-makers. Particularly when we are faced with too many options. The more choices we have, the more factors we try to consider, the ‘better informed’ we assume we are, to make the ‘right’ choice. Right?

Actually, we’re also less likely to make and follow through on a decision in this scenario. To quote psychologist Barry Schwartz:

Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice… We don’t inherit an identity; we get to invent it. And we get to reinvent ourselves as often as we like. …