Fresh tastes, fresh news

Because it would be unlike me to take anything easy

Jun 18, 2023

🥤 Still cloudy lemonade. In some parts of the world, I think this is just called ‘lemonade’ - but I love a cloudy lemonade that’s tart rather than sweet, and I really was glad to find it on the Black Sheep Coffee menu in the hot humidity of last weekend.

📚 Just My Type by Falon Ballard. This is a second-chance, forced-proximity, workplace romance (although as someone said to me recently, aren’t mostof the romance tropes just different ways of creating forced proximity?) involving competition, stubborn refusal to see the truth, and lots of fun shenanigans. I really enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it - and was influenced by the protagonist to switch my coffee order to iced hazelnut lattes. Yum. (Bookshop.org | Amazon - affiliate links)
🎶 TSNOTYAW Romance Bonus Episode. The Shit No-One Tells You About Writing is one of the writing and publishing podcasts I always cue up to listen to almost as soon as a new episode drops. Their May Bonus Episode was all about romance, so it was both a treat and ‘professional research’ to listen to Bianca, Carly, and Cece’s chats with Emily Henry, Carley Fortune, and bookseller guests, as they delved into all sorts of details about this genre that is my Happy Place (pun intended…).

I’ve alluded before to the fact that I’m moving house later this year, but I don’t think I’ve told you all the full extent of my exciting (… terrifying) news yet.

In less than two months (eek) I’m moving from beautiful Edinburgh, where I’ve lived since 2016, to Bristol in the South-West of England. I’m incredibly lucky that I don’t need to change jobs to do that (although, see more on that below), with my employers having a big presence in both Edinburgh and Bristol. People have asked why I’m making the move, and I’ve struggled to summarise it, but here goes.

It started with asking a simple question: How could I get out of the flat that I was locked down alone in? I love my flat, which I moved into at the start of 2019, but it has all the sense-memories of lockdown and fear embedded within it for me. On days where the road outside is especially quiet and the sunlight especially strong, I am transported back to the long, still, days of April and May 2020. That the pandemic to date has brought me loneliness rather than loss is, I know, a huge privilege. I have grieved what-might-have-beens and not people. But at the same time, I’ve realised how lucky I am to have people in my life I love - and how much I am missing in their lives by having moved 400 miles away from them. So once I’d decided to move flat, well, it was only a short step further to reconsider where I live on an altogether bigger basis.

I’m acutely aware (as much as one can be while being too afraid to really think about it) of how lucky I am to still have both my parents in good health, and conscious of the fact that that won’t be true forever. I’m doubly lucky to have a good relationship with them. And while I didn’t want to - and can’t - move back ‘home’ exactly, I would love to be close enough to pop home for a couple of days or spend the weekend sailing with my dad without it taking a full day of travel and planning weeks in advance to get reasonably-priced trains. That decision was further confirmed by last Christmas’s train strikes, and then by the strikes last month meaning I had to miss my dad’s graduation from a Master’s course he started during lockdown. I’m so ready to be closer to home.

On top of my family, there are my friends - my chosen family. I moved to Edinburgh assuming I would find my ‘person’ here, which I didn’t. But while I don’t have a partner, a helpmate, I do have the best friends a girl could ask for - and 90% of them are in the South of England. While I’ve been eating haggis and incorporating ‘outwith’ into my vocabulary, they’ve been getting engaged and married, moving into lovely flats and houses, and drinking cocktails without me - and I’m really looking forwards to being able to get back into their lives. I’m so grateful that my friends have been patient with me over the last seven years, and for the technology that’s allowed me to stay plugged into their news.

So the short reason I’ve been giving people - ‘to be closer to family and friends’ - is true, but it doesn’t cover it, not really.

And then the work news… while I didn’t need to change job roles in order to move locations, it’s happened anyway. I’ve worked at the same company since I graduated from uni, and opportunities to move around within it don’t come along all the time - so while it’s completely ridiculous of me to willingly change jobs and move house within a month, I’ll be starting a new job in just three weeks’ time.

I’m really excited about the new job - it’s all about climate and sustainability communication and engagement. That’s as much as I’ll say about it here for now - but you’ll hear about the highlights I can share, as and when they happen.

Pull Up A Chair

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