From a street photographer who once stitched strangers back together in the back of an ambulance, a rule-breaking memoir full of back-alley sermons, busted-knuckle jokes, and the kind of lessons you only learn by taking the long way home. I was raised above a nail salon on Rye Lane in Peckham, in a flat where the bathroom mirror was cracked down the middle and no one bothered to fix it; my mother said it kept us honest. I learned to make a life by looking around the fissure, not away from it. The first thing I bought with my first paycheck from The Planisphere (a windowless pub in Deptford that insisted daylight was bad for character) was an Olympus OM-1 and a blue notebook that could survive rain.
I've been alive forty-nine years, trying to name the weather inside my chest for thirty-seven, and keeping notebooks—shoeboxes, really—of clues for the last thirty-two. Notations on how to leave a town before it leaves you. How to work a double shift and still have the decency to laugh at your own bad luck. How to say sorry without turning it into a poem. How to give the last cigarette to someone who needs it more. How to stop watching yourself and start seeing other people. How to keep a friend when you start to tell the truth. How to be a woman with a mouth in rooms that prefer quiet furniture.
One November, the radiator in the flat coughed itself into retirement, and the cold drove me to the biscuit tin beneath my mother's sewing kit. Inside: receipts, Polaroids, letters from people who signed with the names the world never learned, and thirty-two coil-bound notebooks—grease-stained at the corners, ink spidered by rain. In those pages I found alleyway miracles and hospital corridors at 3 a.m.; a list of the streets I walked (Choumert Road, Gower Street, Laurieston Place); a timetable of trains that saved me (the 07:24 to King's Cross, the overnight to Inverness); a roll call of bad ideas with good endings (stealing back my own bike from a bloke in Brixton, hitching to Marseille in a Ford Transit called Hazel, saying yes to the roof of the Royal National Theatre because someone had to fix the letters). I found the names of people who taught me how to look—Sajid on the 253 bus who described the sky in hex codes; Mr. Sargent, the drama teacher who told me to take up space; my mother, Rosa, who believed in the virtue of stubborn tenderness; a paramedic called Dom who taught me that calm is contagious.
I became the sort of person who could get into rooms because I carried a toolbox: gaffer tape, a spare pen, a peppermint, a fact about the moon. I worked nights with the London Ambulance Service where the map in the cab was soft with fingerprints, and my boots were quietly brave; days I chased light that peered around corners—puddle light, window light, the light on the cheek of the woman in the Merriweather Diner in Pittsburgh who talked about the Ohio River like it was a cousin. I learned to drive a battered red Honda in Brixton, to thread film by feel in the dark, to hold pressure on a wound while telling a knock-knock joke, to miss people loudly, and to say yes to jobs no one else wanted: shooting the dawn shift at Billingsgate, cataloguing lost umbrellas on Charing Cross Road, hauling lighting rigs up stairwells that smelled like tenancies and damp.
When I realized that I was living like I owed everyone change for a tenner, I got on the Caledonian Sleeper with a rucksack, a Thermos with a dent, and an address scribbled on the back of a ticket: a cottage near Ullapool, no mirrors on the walls. I spent six weeks listening to the wind learn my name, emptying my notebooks onto the floor like spilled cutlery. What I found was not a straight line but a kaleidoscope: moments that only made sense sideways. This book is the box that holds those shards: stories of falling in love in a stairwell off Fleet Street; of eating oranges on the curb outside St. Bartholomew's while the moon pretended not to watch; of being wrong, loudly; of learning the soft parts of the body and the hard part of an apology; of losing and finding and getting on with it.
This is not a map that tells you where to go. It's the margin notes on the maps you're already carrying. It's a handful of aspirin instead of an operating theatre; a pocketful of beach glass; a ferry ride on the Bosphorus without needing to pronounce the station names; a Sunday service without the tithes; laughter that doesn't pretend it never cried first. There are recipes for surviving Tuesdays, prayers disguised as shopping lists, and a whole drawer of bumper stickers that never made it onto the back of a car.
It is a love letter. To the ambulance crews and the night-shift cleaners. To the woman on Dalston Lane who sold me a green marble and told me to keep something small and shining in my pocket. To the men who got softer with time. To my mother's cracked mirror, and the ways it taught me to see myself whole.
It's also a way through the slow traffic of a life: how the reds and ambers—missed chances, slammed doors, quiet griefs—are only colors on wet pavement. Wait long enough, learn when to move, and the road brightens. Call it catching clearings. Call it earning your luck. Call it crossing the city at dawn and realizing you are no longer lost.
