Sun-dried grass wraps the porch like nature's incense. It mingles with the ouzo lingering on our breath—a remnant of an evening well spent. Stars power the crickets as they orchestrate summer's song, and the sultry air dances along, brushing our cheeks as it slips through the space left between us. You lace your wrinkled fingers with mine, and we look at each other knowingly: this could be our last time. You tighten your grip, and our wet eyes glisten with all that's unsaid.

I was admiring my bookshelves, as I often do, when I thought how devastating it would be for my collection, along with the paintings and sculptures among them, to burn down.

That evening, as I finished a late dinner, a blue light began flashing against my dining room wall. It was coming from outside. I climbed the stairs to the studio to trace it and noticed that the windows of a house in the alley behind my street were billowing with black smoke. Firefighters were rushing with hoses and torches, and the man who seemed to be the owner was watching with his hands on his head as his house was disembowelled. The neighbours in the round were out in their tracksuits and pyjamas, witnessing the demise of this man’s corner of the world—and offering him a flask of tea, because that’s what one does in England. I stood until the smoke dissipated, noticing how the floodlights grew the shadows of those crossing the path before his skeletal shell, making them freakishly big against the bricks, evoking Jim Kay’s cover for A Monster Calls. I deliberated going to him, but decided it would be too intrusive. He had his community; he didn’t need an audience. I imagined how guilty the crowd might feel, turning their backs to return to their blankets while his were reduced to cinders. I felt it too, without his gaze.

The next morning, having sifted through the haze of sleep, I remembered the man who’d lost his home. I thought how, when he eventually slept in a bed that wasn’t his, he might, for a few seconds on waking, have forgotten the night before. And how, following that, the recollection would hit him like a meteorite.

There’s no rest for the wind tonight. It flails between the trees and houses, making itself known with shrill, tortured screams, as if in a dramatic bid for the town’s attention. It thrusts rain at my window, a canvas for its craft, and the streetlights take on the role of supporting cast, illuminating the droplets that distort my view. Headlights from passing cars fan sixteen panes across the ceiling, casting the room with a glow that flickers from white to red as the taillights pick up the torch. I lie awake, shielded from the draft beneath a duvet, a bedspread, and a blanket, wondering if the single-glazed glass will survive the weather’s wrath.

I like my Greek rosé ημίγλυκα, semi-sweet. Unfortunately, my body rejects alcohol, so by the end of every Grecian road trip—days that mark a rare spell of caving to my vices—I’m doubled over in pain. But that’s fine; I can handle pain. When you tire of the womb and release yourself semi-formed into the wild despite being unable to breathe, a life of ailments is to be expected.

And so it is that, though spending much of my existence in the company of countless consultants, being frivolously misdiagnosed (oops, slap on the wrist! If only you bore balls, we’d have taken you seriously), I have been anointed with a wholly unmanaged chronic condition and am experiencing what the white coats are calling a flare—which, given the dire state of the NHS, means I’ve been buffeted by turbulence all year. Woe is Wednesday’s child.

Naturally, I grew weary of waiting for salvation and threw myself at the mercy of the gods—if I were to suffer, let it be in the holy land, Ελλάδα. Well, Asclepius eventually caught wind of my plan (we can’t keep secrets from the Anemoi) and sent an offering of medication to tame the so-called flare. I’d call it a gift, but the side effects deem it unworthy. The course ends just before I fly, and I am praying Dionysus greets me at the airport, for I cannot imagine a Greece without him.

At the weekend, I picked up The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter. Its previous owner had given up halfway—it was a clear trudge. I know this because their endpoint was signalled by a dog-eared page (how uncouth!), and the extent of creased corners preceding their abandonment bears witness to how slowly they moved through it. I also know this because that owner was me, roughly twenty years ago. I studied this relic of the past with disbelief. Who was this person I used to be? Besides the shedding of a grubby second-hand jacket, I would never, now, vandalise a book nor, to my detriment, would I desert one partway. I have struggled for nine months, wading through words I care not for, for no rational reason.

In discovering this historical testimony, so much came flooding back. The Bloody Chamber was scent and song, hurling me into old shoes. Younger Me was arguably saner, and certainly more nonchalant. She would never waste her time on anything, or—I remember now—anyone she didn’t like. She had purposely, actively shed her innate neatness, her need for perfection. I even recall the day she defied herself—it was survival instinct: those traits didn’t serve her. She was strong. I wondered: was she, maybe, a better version of me?

I reread the title story (it is a book of shorts), and that’s when the romanticising of Younger Me abruptly ceased. For, please. For the love of all that is holy, how on earth was she so wholly blind to the beauty in which Carter carves a sentence? Fair enough to not enjoy it—though I do—but to not, at the very least, see its merit? That’s disappointing. Embarrassing, even. The child must have struggled to digest anything too literary. An unrefined palate and an underdeveloped mind. Zero appreciation for the craft. A tacky tart in hotpants. “That was the fashion then”. Whatever. Go read Twilight and shut up.

So, you see, I’ve come full circle. Carter showed me my pitfalls and my progress. A sum of my parts to ponder. And, true to form, and as it has always been, I pummelled my personality to the ground and chinked my own glass in equal measure. As you were, Zoe.

Grief doesn’t recede; it waits. It comes in tempests and tsunamis, untethered by time, and lingering like the merciless heat of a searing summer. Uninvited, yet not wholly unwelcome—it’s a relief to feel: the pain means it was real. I’ve been a Tin Man, bereft of heart. Now, I’m split apart, red spray on golden hay, like it was yesterday.

I could barely sleep through my anxiety, thinking about what minus ten degrees with a real-feel of minus seventeen would do to my already blistered toes and fingers—chilblains brought on by living in a poorly insulated house (the price paid for Victorian character), the UK’s wind-stabbing winter, and my Raynaud’s disease deciding this was the year to take my circulation issues up a notch.

My rheumatologist wavered between bemusement and concern at my announcement of heading to Stockholm for Christmas, having just spent the last ten minutes analysing my ballooned, purple digits. He added thermal shoes and electrical gloves to my shopping list, wishing me “good luck” with immense gravity.

But here’s the thing: Sweden’s December, though colder and darker than England’s, didn’t shake my bones or chill my core, nor did it eat away at my extremities. Instead, its crisp air soothed like a eucalyptus rub against my weather-beaten body, and inside its every konditori, there waited a warm, marshmallow-soft hug (and a beckoning pastry). Somehow, under the white blanket of the Swedish capital, I healed.