It’s 9th December. It’s xxxmas in two-and-a-bit weeks. It’s my birthday on 21st. I’ll be 29. I know age is just a number and I still get carded buying alcohol, but 29…is almost 30. I shouldn’t care. I kind of don’t. I kind of do. I keep having these moments of realisation, like when I was tidying up the studio my brain went…

Hey, you’re 28 years old. You live in a country you weren’t born in. You’re cleaning YOUR studio. You have a studio. You have a big grown-up lease for the place where you work, where you run your own business. Your OWN business, for which you have an actual bank account specifically for that purpose. And now you’re going to get into the car you own and drive to the flat you live in with your husband and cats.

Married? Rental agreements? Pets than could potentially live for at least another decade? I’m happy and everything, but when the hell did this happen? Nine years ago, everything was so sensible. I had a ‘real job’, I earned real money, I went to bars where men wore shiny shirts and talked to strangers about work and the IT guys said would-you-like-another-drink-oh-go-one-more. I was living someone else’s life. I had other people’s ambitions.

It’s not that I didn’t have epic experiences in the years before now, just that I’d never thought beyond this point before. When I was younger, I would think about what I could be doing when I was 20, 25, 30…but after that was something I’d never really considered. I am thinking about this way too much.