I have no advice to give my younger self

apart from obvious: spend less time dieting and more time leveraging yourself

There’s this thing on Instagram at the moment where people (by which I mean middle-aged women) post pictures of their much-younger selves and offer “her” advice. It’s a perfect Insta-type thing since it combines vanity, sentiment and half-baked feminist cliches of the “you’ve got this, babe” kind.

Having said that, scrolling through the photos and captions I found myself unexpectedly moved. In spite of my prickly ambivalence, I do think it’s sweet and intriguing — the idea of going back and having a little conversation with your former younger self.

The season is turning in London. The long dark is closing in and with it, what my friend Phoebe calls “the Big Sad.” I’ve been taking a lot of hot baths to shake off the autumnal gloom, biding my time before the spangle of Christmas arrives.

Even in gloomy periods, I rarely go back to bed during the day. Once I’m up I’m up, thank god — I work at home after all. But sometimes I do worry I might get into the bath and never get out. One rather nightmarish daydream is that I might become an amphibious version of one of those Irish mammies in plays who, after birthing and raising twenty seven children, climbs upstairs with a bottle of whiskey and never comes down. (Except for me it’s rooibos tea, the bath and my phone.)

Oh Mum? My grown-up boys will say, She’s upstairs in the bath. Been there for a few years now, drinking tea and reading her phone. She’ll be down soon.

Anyway, last night while I was in the bath (possibly for the rest of my life) an old friend send me a forgotten black and white contact sheet from a roll of film he’d taken of me larking about in an all night diner in Toronto at the impossible age of twenty-two.