Tom’s lasagne disappears with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious relics. The garlic bread lasts under four minutes. The pastries are moved to a separate plate with the seriousness of evidence preservation.
Someone asks about my latest piece, and for once the question does not make me think of breaking news, deadlines or who got there first.
It makes me think of Mrs Radcliffe, who runs the bereavement café in Penrith and told me grief is easier when someone makes soup.
It makes me think of the retired gamekeeper I interviewed about fell rescue paths and how maps never show the emotional geography of a place.
It makes me think of the series Marie Louise gave me after the fire service piece ran and did what none of us had quite expected.
It landed.
Successfully.
People wrote in. Firefighters from other stations shared it. A woman whose husband had died in a house fire sent a letter saying it helped her understand why the crew had moved the way they did. Josh forwarded that one to me with no message, which somehow made it worse.
Marie Louise called me into her office the next day and said, “This is what you should be doing.”
I assumed she meant more emergency service pieces.
She did not.
She meant people.
Human stories. Local lives. Work that mattered quietly. The personal angle I had spent years treating as secondary because it did not come with the same noise as breaking news.
“You’re good when you stop trying to sound fast,” she told me.
I should have been offended.
I was, for nearly six seconds.
Then I realised she was right.
Now I do a mixture. Some news, still. Some deadlines. Enough newsroom chaos to remind me why coffee was invented. But more features. More time with people. More listening. More work I can write from home two or three days a week, which has turned out to be less a professional compromise and more the first sensible decision I have made in years.
Home, however, has become a complicated word.
Because my flat in Carlisle is where my books are, and my laptop, and the neighbour who plays trumpet very badly on Sunday afternoons.
But Fellside is where Pippa is.
Fellside is where I drive now without needing the satnav. Where the bakery woman knows I panic-buy cherry tarts when Pippa is on nights. Where Josh has started saying, “Morning, AJ,” as if I am an unavoidable weather pattern. Where Amanda once waved at me across the square with such sisterly assessment that I nearly walked into a bollard.
Fellside is where a cottage came onto the market two weeks ago.
Small. Stone. Two bedrooms. A garden that is mostly moss and optimism. Five minutes’ walk from the station. Eight minutes from Pippa’s flat if she walks briskly, which she always does. Close enough to Amanda and Nour that Sunday lunches would not require military planning.
I have viewed it twice.
Once alone.
Once with an estate agent called Martin who described the kitchen as “compact” in a voice that meant tiny and the bathroom as “full of character” in a voice that meant the tiles are a problem.
I loved it immediately.
Which is alarming.
I have not told Pippa.
