Given that the logistics of living an adult life and child-rearing in the place I have always lived, with close friends and family moments away, were already almost more than I could manage, I quickly realised that no, I didnβt actually want to rent out the house, rehome the pets, find new jobs and schools and drag everyone across the world. Because I was pretty sure that if I did, Iβd arrive in London only to discover that it was actually my 20-year-old self I wanted to be in London, not the same harried mother I am in Sydney, only now with lonely children and no parents to babysit them.
That regret, I began to see, was more a general sadness about no longer having my whole life ahead of me. For I am now closer in age to having a child ready to head off on a gap year than I am to the version of me who sat too long waiting for the right moment, and who I have become is probably more or less who I am going to be in this life. Unless someone invents a machine that can actually turn back time, Iβll never be a person who lived in London in their 20s. All those potential other versions of me, are they who I am mourning?
I didnβt actually want to rent out the house, rehome the pets, find new jobs and schools and drag everyone across the world.
The answer to all this middle-aged angst was staring me in the face. Yes, of course I needed to go to London, but I absolutely didnβt need to drag my family along. Instead, I would sell it to them not as a midlife crisis but as βbook researchβ β after all, my job is creating characters and making them have adventures and learn things, and sometimes reinvent themselves. Itβs not me who needs reinventing! I can stay my own trepidatious, boring self, and my characters can lead all the lives I havenβt. Fiction, both the writing and the reading, is a miraculous cure for regret.
Between my husbandβs and my busy schedules of driving our children to sport and our parents to medical appointments, I managed to carve out nine days for the trip, which I spent walking the streets of London in the company of two made-up friends, Margot and Tess: one (fictionally) about my age, the other (fictionally) dead at 25 from ovarian cancer.
Tess is an English backpacker who meets Margot when they are working in a pub in inner-Sydneyβs Balmain in 2000. They plan to travel back to live in London together, but when Margot falls in love in Sydney and delays the trip, it throws a spanner in the works. Tess throws an even bigger spanner in the works by dying a couple of years later, leaving Margot forever wondering what might have been. Twenty years later, when the book is set, Margot learns that Tess, before dying, left a bequest. She is sent to London to open a series of letters containing tasks for her to carry out, and thus Margot is forced to examine where she is in her life, compared to where she and Tess had thought she would be by this stage.
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Through these characters and their story, I could examine all my feelings about the paths not taken, and they could lead the lives I didnβt. Through Margot, I explore how, while taking the sensible path in life can feel boring by comparison, thereβs a bravery in recognising who you are, what suits you, and not simply following the crowd.
In looking honestly at my regret for not taking that gap year all those years ago, I have come to accept that it wasnβt the right thing for me, at the time. Maybe I was never destined to spend a wild year in London in the 1990s, right in the ecstasy-soaked heyday of Cool Britannia, the city by many accounts being the most fun it had been since the swinging β60s.
Maybe my gap year was always meant to be nine days long, a melatonin-soaked trip taken when I was 44, post-global pandemic. Maybe it had to be, so I could write this book.