Real life | 6 July 2017

Last night, I had dinner at the M25 services. I don’t mean I stopped for a break mid-journey. I mean I purposefully got into my car and drove from my house to a service station on the M25 because it was the only place to eat.

This is not quite what I envisaged when I left London for the countryside. I imagined cosy meals in welcoming pubs. But of course the reality is that everything in the sticks shuts at an unknowable hour that changes every evening, so no matter what time you turn up the staff are cleaning the counter down.

I don’t have a kitchen yet. The house is being gutted. The temporary power blew the microwave up. All we have where the kitchen should be is a room full of teabags and sugar that the builder boyfriend and his team of plumbers and plasterers inhale like air.

Every night, when the men have gone home, we either barbecue or eat out — if we can get there between 1905 and 2049.