My Tent Obsession

This is an extract from our Studio Dispatch from 20th March 2026.

When I imagined what it would feel like to return properly to work after having Sasha, I assumed the dominant emotions would be guilt, or relief, or perhaps a complicated mix of the two. What I had not anticipated was the rather destabilising sensation of having time again.

Over the past few weeks, two things have shifted simultaneously. Sasha has started at nursery and, almost theatrically in her timing, she has been sleeping through the night. She has always been a good sleeper, but really since about January she has 90% of the time slept like a dream: asleep in the early evening and waking the following morning. The result is that for the first time in months, I am not operating in borrowed fragments of time. I have evenings again. I have long stretches of daylight hours in which I am not half-listening for her or calculating the likely duration of a nap.

Whilst that increase in time available had begun whilst I was away in Switzerland for January – namely thanks to the help of my parents – the rhythm of life was so different out there that it never quite felt like I had time or was fully engaged with work. The mountains have a way of softening urgency and January felt like the last hurrah with my little girl before nursery kicked in. Now we are back home, back in London, back into our own routines and into the studio, the transition is more concrete. This is not an in-between phase… this is the next shape of life.

What I am finding, however, is that the practical reality of returning to work looks very different from how it did before.