On Space, Timber, and Ever After

The day after I came back from Spain, one of Dad’s closest friends came to collect the books we embossed before I left.

Watching them go felt strangely right. Not like loss, more like continuation — his books setting off on their next chapter while, quietly, something else began shifting here too. For the first time in a long while, there is space in the barn. Not dramatic, sweeping loft-conversion television space. Just real space: shelf space, floor space, thinking space — the kind that doesn’t announce itself until you realise your shoulders have dropped half an inch.

Rich, our amazing friend and long-term master of anything carpentry that is required, has been here all week working his particular brand of practical magic. The wet room we built for Dad back in October 2023 — when time was short, money shorter, and urgency louder than design — has been transformed. That house, if I’m honest, is very titchy for the grown men who occupy it now, and a vast shower room is far down the list of must-haves. It served its purpose when it mattered, but it carried ghosts in the corners: the shape of a chair that wasn’t there anymore and yet somehow still was.

So the walls Rich built back then have now been clad in routed ply, made to look like tongue-and-groove panelling — warm, simple, calm — and in place of what was, there is now a boot room built exactly to measure: for plants, coats, dog food, muddy things, ordinary life. Not grand, just right. It is astonishing what order can do for a person’s nervous system.

It’s funny how physical space and breath seem to belong to the same language. I gave up smoking nearly four months ago, just before the Christmas Market, which any sensible person would agree is an entirely irrational time to do such a thing. It wasn’t out of heroics, and certainly not punishment. It was simply time. As my mother-in-law once said when she stopped, she didn’t give it up — it gave her up. That was exactly it.

What had to be sorted out for that decision to hold was the asthma I’d had since moving back from Nigeria — the kind that occasionally landed me in hospital as a child, the kind that made lying flat feel like the air itself had weight, but oddly the sort smoking seemed to suppress. Which is why, this time, I felt I needed a string of small repairs to support saying goodbye for good. So with people far wiser than me — osteopathy, acupuncture, reflexology — the quiet business of learning how a body actually holds its stories began, and it was then that someone gently suggested it might never have been asthma at all. Not in the way I’d always been led to believe.

Thinking back a very long while, I remembered falling from a bench in a playground and collapsing a lung. I can picture the fall clearly, but what I hadn’t remembered until I told the story as an adult was the sharp, urgent sensation of struggling to breathe. It turns out the body is very good at remembering things the mind has long since packed away, and now, with help, something has shifted. Not dramatically — just steadily. The tightness that used to arrive uninvited doesn’t visit much anymore, and the breath that once felt borrowed now feels like it belongs to me again.

For nearly seven years our own belongings have been tucked away while we built a business, cared for family, and lived in motion. Now Jonny is doing that same holding-everything-together life thing with his mum, and it seems life has quietly decided it might be time for us to come back into our own rooms a little — not all at once, just enough to find our socks, and possibly the rest of our wardrobe.

There’s something deeply reassuring about watching timber go up where uncertainty used to sit, structure where there was once only memory, function where there had been ache. Grief, it turns out, doesn’t always leave in a dramatic sweep; sometimes it rearranges the furniture and slips out the back door when you’re not looking.

Which is a long way of saying that lately I seem to be breathing properly, in more ways than one.