Angels on Regent Street

A friendship remembered, and how I'd like to finish 2021.

My daughter is home for the holidays, so we did our traditional, whistlestop tour of the London Christmas lights on our way home across the city.

We made our way through Covent Garden, fuelled by flat whites (this great coffee shop on Neal Street has a back story that will warm your heart), into the heart of the West End.

I took the photo above on Lower Regent Street, which leads down to The Mall, just outside the opposite the office building where I did a teenage internship on ELLE.

My fellow intern and fast friend Fran and I did many a marmite toast and cappuccino run (for the editors) to Cafe Figaro, the small, Italian family-run coffee bar downstairs. At lunchtime, we’d hit the shops in search of the body con skirts and off-the-shoulder tops which were the height of late-80s fashion but felt (and kind of looked, honestly) like surgical support garments.

We weren’t great at answering the phones and setting up conference rooms (well, I speak for myself, Fran was better at all of that, I’m sure). But we were living our best 19 year old, magazine intern lives.

It wasn’t until two decades later that I learned, by catching a radio interview with Fran’s father, a former journalist and author, that she had passed away in her twenties.

We’d lost touch, and I’d never known.

Nicholas Luard wrote a book dedicated to his beautiful daughter, Field Of The Star, about a pilgrimage he took to Santiago de Compostela when she was very poorly. Long out of print, I’ve since got hold of a secondhand copy. Reading it was deeply moving, and, honestly, surreal.

Gazing up at the fourth floor office windows last week, some of the lights still on, I wondered about who was working behind them now. There’s a gym downstairs, and Café Figaro has been replaced by a coffee shop chain.

I stood still for a moment, below the glittering Christmas angels, remembering my friend.

And so, for a moment, did time.

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On Christmas expectations

When I wrote the blog post extracted below a year ago, many of you said that it resonated.

I told myself this year, of all years, would be different and that I would approach Advent calm, organised and prepared; devotionals laid out and a heart ready to focus on the waiting and the journey.

And yet I’m sitting here, having blown out the over-burned candle, feeling behind ALREADY.

And I’m fighting it.

I can see the irony in the fact that I’m feeling stressed about not keeping up with my Advent readings reflecting on why I need to pause and reflect on the waiting.

The expectations I’ve placed on myself with the best of intentions - to follow my new Advent guide, cue the assigned playlist track, bake the cookies and so on - has only raised my anxiety levels.

I’ve turned the opportunity to pause into a pressure.

I share all this to say that if, like me, you’re feeling the same:  you’re not alone. I’m taking a deep breath with you.

For me, this sense of “falling short” feels closely aligned with the message to “finish the year strong”—as if there is a finishing tape we must burst through, victorious, to “win” at 2021.

But when reaching a specific goal isn’t possible, or would come at too great a cost?

Then, perhaps, we need to see past that mirage of the end-of-year finishing tape, shimmering on the horizon.

Maybe we don’t have to limp or stagger over it, gasping.

Rather than finishing the year “strong” or “well”, I’d like to set an intention to finish the year differently: I simply want to finish it with love. Love over everything else, for those I’m privileged to care for. For friends, family and those I love with whom relationships have become strained through the stresses of this year.

I know I can’t do it my own strength, and that I don’t have to.

And I can’t think of a better way to “finish” this year.

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