If you’re here because you read my piece in the Daily Mail today, hello! Thanks for coming to visit. If you’re here because you’ve been following and got notified that there was a new post, welcome back.

I hope you’ve all been having lovely summers. I have. I’ve mostly been living my life as if I weren’t concerned about my fertility. Which has entailed quite a bit of boozing (although not as much as it once might have: I’ve curiously developed a taste for alcohol-free beer, and Seedlip-based cocktails, and once you’ve lived life without hangovers, and realised that you can actually date sober, go clubbing in Ibiza sober and go to your best mate’s wedding sober, it kind of makes getting shitfaced less of a priority), the odd caffeinated drink (although I don’t miss caffeine at all), enjoying the glorious sunshine that London’s been basking in (sorry heat-haters, I bloody love it) and various jaunts around the globe with friends and that lovely man I met so unexpectedly.

So there’s not really any news, but I just thought it made sense to check in because of the Daily Mail piece. About which, one small word: I was really reluctant to include any mention of the unexpected man. It felt like a cop out. It felt like I was tying ends up nicely with a bow. (I mean let’s be very clear, there is no bow — yet, and there are a lot of loose ends — still. I’m not pregnant, and I still don’t know if I will ever have my own biological child, but I’m trying to be OK with the uncertainty of all that, and just enjoy what I do have right now.)

But I can totally see how it might look from the outside. It feels a bit like how I remember my friend K said she felt whenever she talked about her experience of IVF with anyone — she had IVF to have her first child and then after several failed rounds to have her second, completely unexpectedly got pregnant naturally.

“I don’t really tell people that, especially if they’re going through IVF. It just feels too ‘and it happened just like that’ — I just feel like if anyone had told me that story when I was trying to get pregnant I’d have wanted to punch them.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you’re a single woman freezing your eggs or thinking about it, or trying to get pregnant on your own, and you’re thinking “smug bitch, it’s alright for her” or “this must be bollocks that the Daily Mail made up so there was a ‘happy ever after'” or similar. I get you. I’d have thought the same. But the thing is, a) they wanted to know what the situation was right now b) it did actually happen the way I wrote that it did, and I knew that anyone who came to the blog would see that. So that’s why it’s in there.

That doesn’t make this a Hollywood rom com starring Jennifer Aniston / Lopez — much as I’d love to be producing an “after all that, I accidentally (on purpose) got pregnant with my amazing new man” baby, like a magician pulling a white rabbit from a top hat. This isn’t Hollywood, this is my real life, and although I’ve written before that I don’t think if I’d be in this relationship if it hadn’t been for the egg freezing and the IVF, I’d never presume to trot out all the clichés that drove me mad (still do) when I was single. The only advice I would ever give anyone (single, or otherwise) is to create the best life for yourself that you can with the cards you’ve been dealt. What else can you do?

Anyway, that’s really all the news that’s fit to print. As ever, thank you for reading. And if you’re new to the blog, I hope you won’t be too disappointed to find that it’s on a bit of a hiatus at the moment — but do feel free to get stuck into the last four years of posts, and of course, drop me a line if you want to chat about any of it.