It was late. We were heading home after a concert, my daughter and I. She's nine. And I'll be honest with you when I'm tired, really tired, I'm nine too. The noise, the crowds, the speed of it, the unpredictability. Sometimes the tube does something to me that I can't entirely reason my way out of. My body just decides it doesn't like it, and that's that. So we got on, and the carriage was busy. And then I heard it... loud, heavy, angry music, filling the entire carriage. N

Someone asked me recently how I identified and I had to laugh because it brought me back and involves Jim Morrison. I was fifteen. I was completely, catastrophically obsessed with him and I genuinely couldn't tell you whether I wanted to love him or be him. A fifteen year old girl, certain that somehow this man, this particular chaos of poetry and leather and self-destruction, was speaking directly to her. Then came Prince. Same feeling. Something in him reached something in

There is a particular kind of humbling that comes with the school holidays. I know what is happening. I can name it, frame it, hold it in theoretical context. And still, still, I feel it. The slight unravelling that comes when my structure falls away, when my routine, that quiet scaffolding that holds my days in shape, is suddenly gone. I go from one version of myself to another. The working me, anchored in schedule, purpose, professional identity, gives way to something more