This is my future life.

I’m in a coffee shop in Ilminster, a small Somerset town with lots of antique shops. And this particular coffee shop, No.57, which is maybe my favourite coffee shop in the world, is full of antiques, too.

It’s a house, with a little yard. There’s a small counter with homemade cakes and the most delicious cheese scones, which they heat up for you and serve with salted butter. You sit at antique tables, none of them matching, on chairs that also don’t match.

There’s an old hearth and when I stand looking at it, I imagine what it would have been like to cook here, as a mother, while children played with sweet wooden toys on the flagstone floor and didn’t know what an iPad was, or Roblox.

In another room, there are cabinets and a fire-guard, weighing scales, vintage tea-sets and pots and vases. Everything is for sale. Upstairs, in what would have been the bedrooms and a study, they have vintage clothes and hats on display, and dusty books.

Maybe people actually live upstairs, behind the small sign that says ‘private’. I haven’t asked because I like to make up my own stories in places like this. It is full of clues as to what life might have been like once upon a time, and I sink into the imagining.

In one of the bedrooms, there’s an old dressing table, laid out as it might have been about 70 years ago. “This is what my future looks like,” I say to my daughter. “Sitting at this dressing table, a handheld mirror just like this one.” I pick it up to show her.

“I can see that,” she says, knowing how much I love vintage and antiques and playing make-belief in terms of imagining different versions of the life I already live. What it would be like to live on a desert island, off-grid, or here: in 1960s Somerset.

“Do you think you would wear that down to dinner,” she says, nodding towards a white fur coat, glamorous silk gloves and a set of pearls. “Definitely, I say. And in my mind, I’m now getting ready at my dressing table, before descending in total glamour.

But how can I cook at the hearth, while also spending quite a long time getting ready in my fancy clothes and gloves, possibly curling my hair? Maybe it’s ok if this fantasy is inconsistent. Maybe my husband is cooking at the hearth. Who cares.

This is our dining room and below that, the tableware we’ll eat from.

Yesteryear (have you read it??) is a comment on, amongst many other things, the inconsistency between what we present online and how we really live. We know that Instagram only shows one small section of our much larger lives, we know it’s curated.

And yet…

We get sucked in. In the summer holidays, Instagram becomes full of holiday photos. Obviously everyone is deliriously happy, with perfect children in matching outfits and perfect smiles and perfect marriages and sex lives and they’re having so much fun.

Sometimes, people bother to say: by the way, just after this photo was taken, my kid had a massive meltdown.

But we still conjure our own fuller picture of that person, or family’s, life. Because we are imaginative. We like the full picture, not just a snapshot. So, in the absence of it, we create it. That’s what I’m doing here, in this coffee shop: imagining the full picture.

Maybe, in that life, I don’t invite everyone over and then panic. Maybe I have one glass of sherry and leave it there, rather than finding myself reaching for another glass of wine, and another. Maybe my kids have left school, and this has brought huge relief.

Whatever the life is like, it is of course perfect. There is no sadness, grief or anxiety. We gather, merrily, around the dining table. (Do I take off my gloves to eat?). I write by candlelight, the purest poetry, never informed by my mission to get a book deal.

It feels radical, now, to hold onto your creative integrity, rather than succumb to the pressure to share more than you actually want to, in order to earn a living as a writer. Or to somehow commodify your art. After all, we do all need to earn money.

But on this Substack, I’m being led to write truthfully and openly, within the boundaries I’ve created for myself. Maybe there will be less cliffhanger paywalls and more ‘please support my writing, if you can and would like to.’

You can do that here

Over on Instagram, I think about sharing photos of my family holiday (without any family members in them). I wonder why I’m doing it. I stop. I don’t do it. And then, I go back on and share one, of a beach that I went to yesterday in Cornwall.

I hope that we share photos because we are feeling moved or inspired by the scene in front of us, and that we hope it might move or inspire someone else. I worry that we share them because we need others to see that we are not failing, in life.

With my essays here, on Substack, I want to encourage imagination and playfulness. I would love you to read this and to decide to go to an antiques shop and to sink into a dream about living a totally different life, based on something you see there.

Maybe you will then write your own piece?

But now, I need to return to my own dream. The one where I live in a rambling Somerset cottage with flagstones and a hearth, where the bedrooms all lead into one another and no one has any privacy and somehow, it’s all just perfect.

Annie x

Ps. I also run The Creative Way Collective (a writers’ membership where I am a writing teacher and mentor, as well as part of the collective of writers) and it’s growing steadily. Beautiful connections are forming. Would you like to join us?

And I’m shifting We Hyperfocus, too. I have plans for regular coaching workshops via the Substack and I’m running courses like ‘What do I want to do with my work/life’ via the We Hyperfocus website. (It’s only £30 and runs through September).