High as a Kite and Clear as a Bell.
A love letter to Kate and Sara.
Mar 31, 2025
I always meant to start a diary. I am paralysed by the fact that there is too much to catch up on. I wanted to write one during lock down, I knew the exact moment I would have started on, the zombie-apocalypse drive to my parents farm - the car full of our life including two small children. But alas, the weeks rolled by and I never started.
I’m starting one now though. Not from that day but from one just over a year later. It feels like an important beginning point and I want to share the metamorphosis that has followed, before too much time passes again.
OK. It’s August 25th, 2021. We are somewhere between two lockdowns, the opportunity to be together and to share experiences is momentarily back. Two of my dear friends and I book a weekend to London, an overdue and desperately needed adventure and rest. We are collectively wrung out and determined to put all our troubles aside for thirty six precious hours.
The train ride from Plymouth to London is a reliable highlight; we talk, we listen, we watch the sea roll by, we drink prosecco, we admire Sara’s new tattoo, we love each other so god damn much.
Queen Of Cups: represents emotional depth, nurturing intuition and compassion.
London is warm and, deep into our thirties now, we admire how fucking cool we are in colour and silk and fine lines. ‘London cool’ can keep it’s edges, we know where ours are better than ever and they feel good.
We get to our Holiday Inn and we take a motherfucking group nap, honestly, could this get any better?! We rise and the sun is still warm, the city still golden. We eat in a delicious Caribbean restaurant by the river that has fake sand on the floor - because, why the hell not, people are out here doing whatever they bloody want and we loved it.
We walk along the Thames to the National Theatre to watch Kae Tempest’s play, Paradise. We stand out on the balcony before the play began, watched red buses drive past whilst bubbles from below drifted over what was left of the sunset.
During the play, without being touched, Sara’s rape alarm went off inside her handbag. Somehow just by placing her hand on the bag, the alarm stopped. God knows what happened. It wasn’t our finest moment as theatre attendees but somehow it felt apt, sat watching an all female company perform a Greek tragedy.
After the play we find ourselves on a bench back by the river, making friends with a man called Tony, I think Tony was probably unhoused and he was definitely merry AF, but so were we by this point and so we spent half an hour or so listening to his stories and singing American Pie together. Either Kate or Sara luckily snapped back into reality for long enough to get us up off of the bench and bidding farewell to Tony and the riverside. The night could have taken a very different turn but no, we were back on our way.
We find a pub that is just ten minutes from our hotel, it’s coming up to last orders but they say that we can come in for one. One turns into two, two turns into Tarot, Tarot turns into dancing, dancing turns into locked doors, locked doors turn into 4am.
We sit around a table just us three again, we’ve filled this day to the brim. We are saturated with love and freedom. We talk possibility.. hopes.. dreams. My friends turn to me and ask me (almost in the words of Mary Oliver) - What would you do? If you could do anything? No husband or children to consider, no responsibilities, just your own dream - what would it be?
With no preconception or hesitation I say, I would move back to Plymouth and I would become a photographer. My dream was in there, deep down, a dream too big to dream. Covered in laundry loads and stacks of unpaid bills. A little flame being blown around by gusts of self-doubt, almost suffocated by a black vacuum of imposter-syndrome.
But it was a spoken dream now. The little flame was seen and known. Thanks to my darling friends and their endless curiosity and their loving invitations and acceptance.
We hit our hotel beds and the following day made the return journey home wearily with smiles on our faces. Back to the laundry loads and unpaid bills. Back to our loved ones.
By the end of that month I had an interview at Arts University Plymouth, six weeks later I was a student again.
I was going to become a photographer.
