It was my friend that first alerted me to it, that there are people walking around like this. They are in our midst. We could pass them in the street, stand behind them in the Post Office, reach over them to lift something off a shelf, patiently wait for them…

I am not committed to anything much really. Not listening to sermons on Sunday evenings or any calorie-controlled diets or staying up past 10pm or rules or drinking more water and less negronis or good causes or novels with more than 350 pages or pelvic floor exercises or people whose…

I’ve been doing some work on my PR. I’m making myself consistent. I’ve updated my bios and removed any apologies about trying to call myself a writer. On LinkedIn, I’m no longer a million different people from one day to the next. I’ve got the kids involved. Ella has helped…

(You can find all my writing and monthly newsletter at https://deborahsloan.substack.com/. It’s nice because I will pop directly into your inbox if you subscribe there). “When I sleep, I dream of being at the office,” says Cory in The Morning Show¹ and I make a note of his workaholism on…

I’m not quite sure how it happened. It could have been that divine intervention thing again. It was a feeling that became a thought that became an intention that became an action. One day, I just started running in the opposite direction. As I popped in my AirPods, picked a…

On the same day my husband surprised me with a gift, he also mentioned that we had to deal with a backlog of television. Life had been getting in the way. Keeping abreast of the latest ‘must-watch’ was another full-time job. We’d finished all six parts of The Woman in…

Sometime during the night before Alice’s twentieth birthday, I dreamt I had given birth to a son. I’d named him Oliver because that was the name I’d always planned to give my son. In my dream, I was standing in a church hall balancing him on my hip and the…

There were four painters in my house this week. Or maybe five. They kept moving as I tried to count them. My laptop and I retreated to the back stairs because I happen to have back stairs and front stairs but that’s a story for another day¹. At one point…

Eileen is a good listener and she doesn’t judge. “You’d be amazed how few people have those skills,” says the supervisor. She’s passed the roleplays, she’s got over her thing about volunteering only being for losers. We’ve seen the helpline number on the posters in the bar, we recognise that…