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In my twenties, air travel became illogically affordable. It was easy to buy return flights to Spain or Poland or Italy for the cost of a new pair of jeans. I took one or two trips a year – short holidays in European cities like Turin, Bratislava and Paris with friends. But the glamour I thought wo…

I’ve just returned from a week in Tenerife, my first out-of-the-country trip since LA. It made me smile when one of the waitstaff at the hotel said to me, ‘hey I love your style – eating alone, with your bottle of wine and your book and your nice blue shoes.’ I had ordered a bottle of wine from her…

Each night the hotel staff would set up a table for two, with a small beach fire and hanging lanterns, at the apex of this view I first had. They advertised this as the ‘where the waves break’ table. I both wanted to eat at this table and knew I could not subject myself to the scrutiny of it. Is sh…

In my youth I believed that to go on holiday abroad was to acquire glamour. All it would take was one week in a sunny European resort, an immersion in strangers, and I would be granted access to it. Become liberated from my homeliness, small-town experiences, from the daily sense of making do with …

A fear I often return to is whether intimacy of the self counts. Does self-knowledge have to rebound from another, be in collaboration with someone, to give you the best look at yourself? Otherwise, might I only be hearing myself as echoes? I’m afraid that if I am not seen, heard and observed in th…