Hello From 'In-Between'

I didn’t plan on being nomadic this summer. It wasn’t some Eat, Pray, Love moment of realisation. I wasn’t chasing a sunset or a dream. I was evicted.

Well — not evicted-evicted, more that my landlord wants his house back. After years of renting, he’s decided it’s his turn to live in it again. Fair enough. So now, I’m in that strange in-between: sale agreed on a place of my own, but nowhere to put my furniture in the meantime. Which means everything — my desk, my guitars, my cookbooks, my annoyingly ergonomic keyboard — is going into storage.

And yet, as much as I’ll miss my stuff, there’s something unexpectedly refreshing about the idea of not having it.

I’ll have a base of sorts. Somewhere post can land and the cat will be safe. But for the next few months, I’ll mostly be on the move. Visiting friends, haunting cafes, recharging in corners of the country I haven’t seen in years. A little bit of wandering, a little bit of wondering.

It’s a homecoming too, of sorts. I’ll be spending some of that time back where I grew up. There’s something oddly poetic about returning there now, in this temporary, transient way. It feels like a chance to revisit old ground, but not to get stuck in it.

And of course, I’ll be writing. I suspect a lot of it will be about this in-between-ness. This feeling of being untethered, but not lost. There’ll be stories from unfamiliar tables, thoughts scribbled in borrowed notebooks. Poetry, probably. That tends to bubble up when everything else is packed away.

It’s funny. When I went on my gap year, years ago before I went to university, I packed light without really noticing. I didn’t have much. A few (too many) years later, putting my life into boxes feels heavier. But also a little freeing. Maybe it’s good to let go of your stuff now and then. To remember that you’re still you without the matching saucepan set.

This isn’t just a logistical blip. It’s a kind of pause. A deep breath. A sorbet between courses. I don’t know exactly what this chapter of my life has in store for me, but I know I’ll write my way into it, and out the other side!

This is just the sorbet course. Grab a spoon!