The Good Life

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, Many years ago, not long after Ben and I got together, I had a moment of realisation that felt both comforting and terrible. For the first time in my life, I knew we would be together until one of us died. And that meant one day one of us would have to live without the other. This is, of course, the deal. As Dr Lucy Hone writes, loss is the price we pay for love and attachment. But death isn’t...

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, Next month will mark 20 years since I stopped drinking alcohol. I don't miss it. By the time I stopped, it was causing more pain than pleasure. But before that, I loved to party. So did my then-husband. It would not be uncommon for us to go to the infamous China Inn for karaoke, and stay until the final song of the night was sung. One particular evening, we did not take this as an invitation to...

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, At the beginning of the year, I had a habit that I just could not shake. Despite having a designated office space upstairs, with a perfectly good desk area, drawers full of stationery and aesthetically arranged bookshelves, I would invariably find myself draped in a half-reclining twist on the couch, positioned so that Winston could lie in my lap, where I would work for the next eight hours or so...

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, At the beginning of a coaching session, we always set the agreement. This is a fancy way of working out what you want to leave with by the end of the session. Last week, one of my clients said that she wanted to focus on self-care. She had recently been away from home and couldn’t help noticing that, during this time, she had found it much easier to look after herself. Now that she was home...

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, Many years ago, I dreamed of being a published romance writer. For about ten years, I wrote a lot and read even more in the romance genre. One thing that always struck me was the emotional weight the hero and heroine would put on the word home. The hero would say something about going home, except the home he was talking about was the heroine’s place, and inside she'd be losing it with...

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, Since we bought our house in January 2022, we’ve been slowly renovating and decorating it. And I do mean slowly. There’s been no dramatic before-and-after reveal, no six-week transformation. Instead, we’ve been working our way through it room by room, making changes as we’ve had the time, money and vision to do them. One of the rooms we’ve recently finished is a spare bedroom. When we moved in,...

The Good Life Where life feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside Hey there Reader, Earlier this week, my husband and I went to see The Invite. When it comes to seeing movies on the big screen, I’m all about the blockbuster. But with the school holidays underway, blockbusters were in short supply. Having recently watched Seth Rogen in The Studio, we thought we could at least count on a few laughs, and that felt like the next best thing. And laughs we got. But the film also...