cheerio, millennial ambition

is this giving up?

A few weeks ago we had friends for dinner outside. It was a Friday night, I’d been with the kids all day, and so it was simple: radishes, butter, salt. Pasta with sea bass and citrus. Field mustard from the garden. Supermarket cherry pie (thank you, Ella Risbridger). M made martinis. No ceremony.

We sat there in the fading light on wonky Ikea chairs that we’d been passed down six years earlier and I told my friend, who I’ve known for nearly twenty years, that my main motivation these days was the dream of working four hours a day, max.

She made some joke about asking who I was and what had I done with Alice Vincent; she met me as a 19-year-old intern at Vice magazine (side note: that Leonard Street office was important - her future husband worked there; so did the woman who gave a speech at his wedding, who looked after me, the intern, who gave a speech about the bride. None of us would realise this for 15 years. Funny how life works out). Since then she’s watched me edit student newspapers and hustle for freelance bylines and opportunities, move to New York without a job or an address, move back to London and set up journalism communities, launch newsletters, launch podcasts, pull long days in newsrooms, write books, tour them, write more.

And now? Well. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d stop everything bar the occasional book.