I tend to get a bit weird if I’ve spent too much time in the house by myself. Given that I work from home three days a week, in a job that is inherently solitary (writing about things), this may come as something of a surprise. But it’s probably the greatest trepidation I have about having the baby: days inside, no adult company, going slightly spare with the repetition of it all.

I have ways of making it better, which mostly involve going outside and talking to people. I’m fortunate that while I do much of my work alone, there’s a fair chunk of it that relies upon speaking with strangers and asking them questions about their lives, or going to new and unusual places to find things out. Nevertheless, casual co-working, or “sitting at the kitchen table with a friend while both of you do work”, can be a magic thing and I’m amazed, frankly, that I’ve not done more of it before.

On Wednesday my learned pal Jess spent a good 40 minutes on the Victoria line with a plastic bag of home-made (!) pastries so we could work side-by-side, in companionable silence. Every now and then we’d pause, pour some tea, have a little chat about what we were up to. I received a short and fascinating lecture on the only from-life drawing of Pocohontas. She got the skinny on the latest trashy dark academia novels. It was, I think, the most productive I’ve been in weeks.

Jess is an inherently chic art historian who makes beautiful quilts, has an innate sense of justice and the need to fight for it and worked in a bird sanctuary as a teenager. She’s also someone who fundamentally understands the little metronome inside some of us that ticks a little faster, pushes a little further and bites off a little more than it can chew because it makes us happy. She put this better in the generous caption of her Instagram post, below.

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A post shared by Public Library Quilts (@publiclibraryquilts)

So this week I have been savouring the permission and support to acknowledge that - as Jess puts it - everyone’s rest looks different. I hope you manage to find yours this weekend.

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