I was at the agency on maternity cover, the longest stretch of work I’d managed to find since leaving the oral history archive so abruptly. They were a young and growing consultancy, and if I played my cards right, or at least didn’t play them wrong, it might lead to a full-time position. That was the plan, or so I said to my mum. We created a sense of belonging for vibrant hospitality ventures, we captured confidence in change, we engaged people with actionable brand experiences. Making up stories; clouds of obscuring words. It was the opposite of the work at the archive, where we’d listen meticulously, transcribing and notating every hesitation, every pause, every stumble and even inaccuracy. It was the opposite of my master’s thesis too, which had been on certainties and uncertainties in the works of Szymborska and Miłosz, and for which, as I spoke no Polish, I’d combed through reams of translations, the myriad possibilities opened up by each choice of word.

I had never been able to explain, to my bemused parents, or even to my friends, why I’d chosen to write on poets whose language I didn’t speak, from a place I’d never been. Maybe I couldn’t have explained it even to myself. And then, for a while, it had all made a sort of sense. I’d clung to that, when things seemed impossible, when my friends told me I was stupid, then ran out of ways of telling me.

Oh, the slamming relief when a text or an email would flash up with his name.

Two years of my life. A job I’d loved.

Twenty-seven.

My best friend from uni, who was into tarot and astrological charts these days, said twenty-seven was the age of 25our Saturn Return. Your Saturn Return was when transiting Saturn was finally conjunct again with your natal chart. It meant your chickens came home to roost. You were a kid no longer. Apparently, how you dealt with it set the tone for the rest of your life. Or something. Maybe, I thought, I should just leave London. Move back home. But every time I thought of it, I thought of stepping off the plane under a grey and muffled sky, into the bowl of the hills; the particular smell of my parents’ house that never failed to set off an inexplicable ache inside me, as if I’d yet again come in from school to the smell of onions frying or potatoes on the boil, wet leaves and crushed beechnuts on the mat in the back porch and homework to do; and I thought of my school friends with their buggies in Belmont Park, their neat Corsas and Peugeots with Baby on Board! stickers, and it felt already all too late.