I think I need a haircut. It may be more serious than that.

22 August 2026

Every so often I develop an urgent need to change something: cut my hair, book a flight, empty half the house into a skip or move furniture with the conviction that the sofa has been personally responsible for my dissatisfaction.Usually, this happens when I'm tired, which suggests the sensible response would be to rest. My brain tends to have more ambitious plans.The haircut theory isn't entirely without evidence. Until a couple of years ago, my hair was very long. Then I cut it, properly cut it, and something about seeing myself differently really did seem to unlock a different version of me. Obviously the hair hadn't been holding her hostage, but there was something surprisingly powerful about looking in the mirror and no longer seeing myself quite the way I always had.Maybe that's why I've been thinking about the idea that we have to kill off versions of ourselves throughout our lives to become who we're meant to be. I understand the appeal of that language; it's dramatic, there is fire and rebirth and apparently, in my case, a haircut. I'm just not sure becoming is quite that clean.There are versions of me I have absolutely outgrown: things I wanted because I thought I was supposed to want them, ways of being that worked until they didn't, lives that fitted perfectly well until one day they started feeling a little tight around the shoulders. They aren't dead, though. They're still in here somewhere: the girl who wanted to see everything, the woman who became very good at being responsible, the friend who has loved people she can't keep, the version of me who wants stability and the one who occasionally wants to sell everything and see what happens.Perhaps becoming is less about destroying an old self and more about making room for whoever is emerging next. Sometimes you realise you've changed before you've quite worked out what changed, and the urge to do something about it can feel surprisingly physical. Cut the hair. Clear the house. Go somewhere. Not because any of those things will transform you on their own, but because occasionally the outside needs to catch up with what's already happening underneath.I'm still not sure I believe there's one person I was always destined to become. That would suggest there's a finished version somewhere ahead, when my experience so far has been almost the opposite: every new version has arrived carrying pieces of all the others, changed again by people I hadn't met, places I hadn't been and things I couldn't possibly have planned for.I don't know what the next version looks like yet, which might be exactly what I like about her. And when the urge reaches my hair, I suspect she's already on her way.

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My completely biased guide to Paris

21 August 2026

It took me three trips to Paris to understand why people love it.The first time, I was broke. Proper backpacker broke with an equally wide-eyed friend, staying in hostels, keeping track of every euro and eating crusty day-old baguettes beside the Seine because they were cheap and we were in Paris, so somehow this still felt excellent.The second time was my honeymoon. I was older, had more money and was travelling with my husband, who had lived in France and actually knew what he was doing. By any reasonable measure, I was better equipped to fall in love with Paris.I still didn't.I liked it. Of course I liked it. The Eiffel Tower sparkled, the Seine was the Seine, and Paris remained almost offensively beautiful in places. I just never quite understood the particular devotion people had to it.Then I went back a third time and, somewhere between having nothing left to prove to Paris and no particular need for it to impress me, I finally got it.I walked.Not in the purposeful Louvre to Notre-Dame to somewhere with a croissant way, but through neighbourhoods where I didn't particularly know what I was going to find. I stayed around Caulaincourt in Montmartre, close enough to walk to Sacré-Cœur but far enough from its busiest streets that Paris quickly became a neighbourhood again.There is something about Paris at street level that photographs of its landmarks don't quite capture. The beautiful buildings aren't sitting politely in some preserved historic centre; they're part of ordinary life. Apartment windows are thrown open above little shops, café tables spill onto pavements and someone walks home carrying a baguette with absolutely no concern for how aggressively French the whole scene looks.Paris has momentum, but there is a strange reverence to it too. Beauty isn't confined to the places you've been told to look for it; it's in the curve of a street, the light on an old building, a table set for two on the footpath, the glimpse through a doorway as you walk past. The city feels lived in without ever becoming entirely ordinary.

I think that's the Paris I had missed the first two times.It's also why I'd stay around Caulaincourt again. It hits the balance I now look for almost everywhere I travel: close enough to walk to something genuinely worth seeing, while being somewhere I'd happily spend those twenty minutes walking through anyway. Around Caulaincourt, Lamarck and Abbesses, steep streets wind between little shops, cafés and apartment buildings, making wandering feel like part of the reason you're there.Go to Sacré-Coeur. I’m not going to tell you to skip something spectacular just because everyone else knows about it. Then keep walking. Tucked behind the basilica is Square Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, where on my last visit a children’s birthday party was happening in the garden. Families gathered, kids played and ordinary life carried on beneath one of Paris’s most famous landmarks.That's the Paris I came back for.I'd give the 5th arrondissement the same treatment. See the Panthéon, then wander without much purpose through the streets around it and down towards Rue Mouffetard, buying something to eat when the bakeries and food shops inevitably make that decision for you.Go to the Luxembourg Gardens and allow them to take up more time than seems reasonable. Do the same at Place des Vosges before wandering into the Marais, where the garden sits enclosed by those beautiful red-brick façades and arcades. Paris is full of places that make sitting down feel like you've chosen an activity rather than stopped doing one.For something completely different, lose a few hours at Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, rummaging through vintage clothes, furniture, art, antiques and assorted things you didn't know you needed. Then find the grand Paris again: the rooftop of Galeries Lafayette for the sweep of rooftops and monuments, or the Trocadéro when you want the Eiffel Tower to look exactly as magnificent as you hoped it would. The Galeries Lafayette terrace does overlook the monuments of Paris, while Trocadéro gives you that uninterrupted Eiffel Tower view.Because the obvious things are worth doing too.Walk beside the Seine. See the Eiffel Tower sparkle. Go to the Louvre if you actually want to go to the Louvre. Paris has enough beauty that you don't need to prove you're an interesting traveller by avoiding the bits everyone came to see.Just leave some space between them.Choose a neighbourhood and start walking. Turn down the street that looks prettier. Find a bakery near where you're staying and become temporarily loyal to it. Sit at a tiny café table facing the pavement and watch Paris continue around you. This is sightseeing too.My completely biased advice? See the Paris you've come all that way to see. Then leave enough room to find the one you didn't know you were looking for.

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An ode to unexpected souvenirs

16 August 2026

Sometimes when I wash my hair, I'm in Bali.Not in any useful sense. I'm standing in my own shower, probably thinking about whether I remembered to put the washing on. But something about water running through freshly washed hair takes me straight back to an outdoor shower in Bali, warm air around me and absolutely no need for a bathroom ceiling.A properly cold shower takes me somewhere else. Nicaragua. Hot, dusty and grateful for water that felt almost offensively cold for the first three seconds, then pure perfection.Travel has done this to all sorts of ordinary things.Hey Ya! by Outkast takes me back to my first overseas trip in Fiji, where it played while I cheered on my crab in a race. Of all the moments available to preserve from my first experience of another country, my brain apparently chose Outkast and a group of racing crabs.Getting on a bike can put me back in a village in Tanzania. Wasabi peas take me to a Korean Air flight with friends, where we'd decided the loser of a card game had to eat an entire packet. I don't remember why this seemed like an appropriate punishment, but I remember the wasabi peas.None of these are the things I travelled to see. Nobody books a flight for the shower, the in-flight snack or the possibility of a particularly memorable crab.And yet these are the bits that turn up years later.The big things are there too, of course. But I love that somewhere along the way my brain was also collecting the completely ordinary moments without telling me. A song. Cold water. Riding a bike. Something unexpectedly spicy at 30,000 feet.Now they're mixed into ordinary life at home. I can be getting ready for work, riding somewhere or hearing the first few seconds of a song and suddenly find myself in a place I haven't thought about in years.Maybe that's one of the unexpected gifts of travelling. You don't just collect memories of places. You give ordinary things more places to take you.And I quite like not knowing when one is going to turn up.

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The holiday has been in the group chat since 2019

10 August 2026

Someone suggested it years ago and everyone immediately agreed. There were enthusiastic capitals, screenshots of hotels and possibly a declaration that you were actually doing it this time. Then someone couldn't do June. Someone else could do June, but not that June. One person needed to check with work. Another was renovating a bathroom.You're still not in Europe.Travelling with friends gets strangely difficult as you get older. Not because we've lost interest, but because we've acquired lives that are remarkably resistant to being scheduled at the same time. Which is why I think we've been asking the wrong question. Instead of “Who can I travel with?”, start with “Where do I want to go?”Work out what you can realistically afford and when you could go. Choose the place. Then put it in the group chat. "I'm thinking about Italy next September. Anyone keen?" Hopefully someone is. But start getting comfortable with the possibility that nobody will be.Maybe you really could travel solo. Maybe you know you could, but don't particularly want to. There are plenty of ways to travel that sit somewhere between convincing a friend to come and doing the whole thing alone. If you're thinking, “I could probably do it, I just don't really want to do it all by myself,” I get it. That's exactly the space Wanderlight sits in.Your friends are still invited, their availability just doesn't have to decide whether you go.Put it in the group chat. Hope someone says yes. Start planning as though you might go anyway. Because future you and Wanderlight are both cheering you on.

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I pack like I’m competing in The Amazing Race

4 August 2026

I am a light packer. Not in a morally superior you really only need three linen shirts kind of way. Take the big suitcase. Pack seven pairs of shoes. I support you.I just can't do it.Because somewhere deep inside me lives a woman who believes she could be called to compete on The Amazing Race at any moment. She needs to be mobile. She cannot be standing at baggage claim while the other teams are already in a taxi. She cannot discover that the hotel is up four flights of stairs and requires assistance from a Belgian man named Pieter. And she certainly cannot be defeated by cobblestones.So I pack accordingly. Carry-on whenever humanly possible. Clothes that can perform multiple duties. Shoes selected through a rigorous process involving comfort, versatility and whether I could unexpectedly run for a train in them.I don't actually run for many trains. That's not the point. The point is that I could.But I also like looking good when I travel. I'm not interested in spending two weeks dressed as though I'm midway through a very practical hike. I learned years ago to pack what makes me feel good, that I can hang up in my hotel closet and look forward to dressing each day. Holiday 'me' loves this, She has time to choose earrings. She's lighter, more spontaneous and temporarily unavailable for most of the things that require something from her at home.So my packing philosophy is actually pretty basic: take the things that make you feel like your favourite self. Be suspicious of the maybes. The dress you love? Pack it. The fourth top you've added for reasons you can't quite explain? Probably not.We carry enough at home. I don't particularly want to drag a metaphorical load through Europe as well as an actual one with a broken wheel.Pack for the woman you are on holiday. And make sure she can handle the cobblestones.

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I hope I never become too cool to be excited

1 August 2026

I get excited about very small things. Seeing the moon when I take the bins out on a Sunday night. Remembering there's chocolate in the fridge. Fresh sheets. Finding something excellent in an op shop that nobody else seems to have noticed. None of these things materially change my life, but they can improve my mood considerably.I hope this never leaves me.I'm equally good at getting excited about things that haven't happened yet. A dinner next weekend. A parcel that's coming. The first properly warm day. Give me a flight six months from now and I've already imagined the first morning, where I'll wander and quite possibly a version of myself who lives there. I can extract an unreasonable amount of pleasure from anticipation, which feels like excellent value considering the thing still happens at the end of it.Possibility is a lovely place to spend some time. A trip you haven’t taken yet, plans that are still taking shape, something on the calendar you’re already looking forward to; before any of it actually happens, you get to enjoy what it could be. I’m particularly good at this, which occasionally gives reality a fairly ambitious brief. If something turns out to be disappointing, I’ll find that out when I get there. Possibility usually wins anyway. There’s bound to be something better around the corner, and I’m very easily distracted by it.Of course, this isn't particularly profound when the thing you're excited about is finding chocolate you'd forgotten you had. But I think that's partly the point. Life supplies enough serious things without much effort from us. People get sick. Plans derail. Weeks fill up with repetition. Some years contain things you would never have chosen. None of that makes the small good things less important. If anything, I'm increasingly happy to take the win wherever it appears.And it appears in surprisingly ordinary places. A beautiful moon is still a beautiful moon, even if you're standing next to the recycling bin. Finding $8 jeans that fit perfectly is a legitimate win. Fresh sheets deserve their reputation. Having something you're excited about on the calendar can make an ordinary week feel different, whether it's another country in six months or the pub with the girls on Friday.I'm not endlessly optimistic. Sometimes things are objectively rubbish and I'm perfectly capable of noticing. I just don't think the good things need to be extraordinary before we're allowed to get excited about them.

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I’ll know what day it is. You don’t have to.

17 July 2026

One of the best things about being properly on holiday is losing track of what day it is. Tuesday becomes the day we went snorkelling. Wednesday might be the afternoon we found that bar. You stop measuring life in work weeks, appointments and things that need doing, and start measuring it by what happened.Getting to that point takes a little more planning than it used to. I love loose travel. I like changing my mind, staying somewhere longer than expected and finding something I didn't know existed until someone told me about it over breakfast. As an Enneagram 7 with a Sagittarius moon and rising, spontaneity was never really the part I needed help with.What has changed as I've got older is how much time I'm willing to lose to boring logistics. If I've carved eight days out of a full life and flown halfway around the world, I'd rather not spend one of them discovering that the ferry I need only leaves on Mondays. So I research the good neighbourhood, work out the transfers, book the thing that sells out and know roughly how the pieces fit together.Then, ideally, I forget what day it is.I've realised that's also what I want for women travelling with Wanderlight. I'll know what day it is. You don't have to. I'll know when the boat leaves, where we're meeting the driver and what needs to happen next. You get to swim a little longer, order another drink, wander back to the shop you liked yesterday or decide you've done quite enough for one day and disappear by the pool.Good planning and spontaneity aren't opposites. The plan takes care of what needs to happen while leaving plenty of room for what might. You get to lean into what is happening.And if, somewhere around day four, you have to ask whether it's Tuesday or Wednesday, I'd say the plan is working.

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The hotel is only half of where you’re staying

10 June 2026

I can lose a disturbing amount of time to Google Maps. When I book accommodation, I rarely start with the hotel. I start by dropping pins, checking walking routes, investigating neighbourhoods and occasionally placing myself at an imaginary intersection to decide whether I’d enjoy walking home from dinner there.Over years of travelling, I’ve worked out what I’m looking for: close to the action, but not necessarily in it. In a town or city, I usually want to be within about a 20-minute walk of the things I’m there to see, eat and do. But where I land on that radius matters just as much.I want the good neighbourhood. Safe, walkable, interesting, nice to look at and worth exploring in its own right. Somewhere I can walk out for coffee, find dinner nearby when choosing a restaurant has somehow become the hardest decision of the day, and happily wander for an hour without needing a destination.Because one of my favourite parts of travel is that wonderfully ridiculous feeling that, for a few days, you live there too. You recognise the woman at the bakery. You know which way to turn when you leave the hotel. You pass the same café enough times that it becomes your café, despite having visited twice and contributed almost nothing to its ongoing success.That’s why this has become an essential part of how I plan Wanderlight trips too. Of course the accommodation matters. I want it comfortable, beautiful and somewhere I’m genuinely happy to stay. But I’m also choosing the little world outside its front door. Somewhere you can head out alone, recognise your way home and enjoy the bits of the day that happen between the things we planned.There are exceptions. I’ll travel further for an extraordinary beach, forgive an inconvenient location for a rainforest bungalow and have absolutely been seduced by a swimming pool. But underneath all the pins, tabs and slightly excessive research is one question:What will it actually feel like to be here?Because the hotel is only half of where you’re staying.

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Somehow, it's 2026

10 June 2026

I don't think millennials were adequately prepared for 2026. Not technologically: we're arguably the most adaptable, having transitioned from dial-up internet to asking AI questions in full sentences without ever really discussing what happened in between.I mean psychologically.The 90s still feel about ten years ago. People born in 2000 are inexplicably adults. The songs we danced to at parties are playing in supermarkets, and at some point staying home on a Friday night stopped being a punishment. But lately I've been thinking about something stranger than getting older: we might be the last generation to remember what it was like to be unreachable.We made plans before leaving the house and then just... went. If someone was late, we waited. If we didn't know something, sometimes we continued not knowing it. We took photos and had no idea whether they were good. We were bored. Properly bored.I'm not suggesting life was better. I enjoy Google Maps far too much to start romanticising printed directions, and nobody needs to return to calling a friend's house and having their dad answer. What we have, though, is the memory of both worlds: here we are in 2026, carrying almost everything we could ever need in our pockets while becoming increasingly protective of the moments when we forget we need it.Maybe that's part of why travel still feels different. You wake up somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly your attention has somewhere else to go: finding the train station, trying something you can't pronounce, swimming in water you've never swum in before or sitting across from someone you've only just met. For a while, you're not trying to optimise your life or keep up with everything happening elsewhere. You're actually in it.I don't want to go back in time, although I understand the nostalgia more than I used to. Maybe what we miss isn't life before smartphones at all; it's how much easier it was to be fully in the life happening right in front of us.We can't go back to being unreachable, and I wouldn't really want to.I just want to keep going places that make me forget I have a phone.

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