April in England has started behaving like April in England: confused, hopeful and completely unwilling to commit.

One morning the sun comes through the window strongly enough to convince me that spring has finally sorted itself out, and by afternoon I am looking at grey clouds wondering why I trusted it. The evenings are noticeably longer now. Trees that spent the winter looking half-dead have suddenly remembered their responsibilities. Daffodils have appeared along roadsides and in gardens, patches of pink and white blossom are beginning to interrupt all that green, and people are slowly emerging from their winter coats whenever the temperature becomes remotely respectable. I have even started looking at my own coats and wondering whether some of them can finally go back into hiding. I have not actually put them away, of course. I have lived in Britain long enough to know better.

It was while noticing all these small changes that I realised the year had changed quite a bit too. April. Already. We are almost four months into 2026, and I have not written a single monthly recap. Not January. Not February. Not March. This bothered me slightly because I am usually the person who photographs things, writes about them, gives them titles and occasionally turns an ordinary afternoon into several paragraphs because apparently experiencing something once is not enough; I must also analyse it afterwards. Yet here I was, nearly four months into the year, with plenty of photographs but very few words to accompany them.

My camera roll, on the other hand, has been doing an excellent job. It remembers dinners after work, cinema nights, Jan’s birthday, Valentine’s Day, Miyu recovering from her spay, Luna later having hers, random meals, tired faces, cats doing things they clearly considered important enough to photograph, and all the ordinary evidence that January, February and March did in fact happen. My work rota could probably provide an even more detailed account, although considerably less cheerful. There are long days, night shifts and enough disrupted sleeping hours to explain why some photographs were taken at times when normal people were either asleep or eating a meal whose name I could no longer identify.

Looking through all of it, I wondered why I had stopped writing the monthly reflections. I could blame work, and work would certainly deserve some of the responsibility. I could blame tiredness, the cats, my sleeping pattern, or the general inconvenience of adulthood constantly producing another thing that needs doing. But I think there is a simpler explanation. I was living faster than I was documenting. January became February before I had decided what January meant. February slipped into March. March became particularly busy and seemed mostly interested in testing how many things I could fit between shifts and sleep. Then April arrived with longer evenings and flowers, and suddenly I was standing almost four months away from New Year wondering where the beginning of the year had gone.

The funny thing is, nothing enormous happened. No photograph that could neatly explain an entire month. Most of what happened would probably look rather unimpressive written as a list: dinner, work, cinema, birthday, cats, Valentine’s Day, more work, sleep, wake up, repeat. But life has a habit of looking smaller when reduced to a list. A dinner does not record the conversation around the table. A photograph of a cat after surgery does not show the ridiculous amount of worrying that happened behind the camera. A work rota records twelve hours but says very little about what those twelve hours contained. Even photographs, for all the things they preserve, leave quite a lot outside the frame.

Perhaps that is why I like the title Life, Unposted. These months were not empty simply because I had not written about them. They had been full—just mostly elsewhere. They were happening in hospital corridors, restaurants, cinema seats, veterinary appointments, conversations, tired drives home, interrupted sleep and evenings when I did absolutely nothing worth photographing. Some memories made it onto my phone. Others did not. Some moments were shared. Most simply happened and moved on without asking whether I intended to make content out of them.

And maybe there is something rather nice about that. I spend so much time trying to preserve life that occasionally I forget life does not wait to be preserved. It keeps moving while I am deciding what to call it. The trees outside did not wait for me to notice before growing their leaves back. The daffodils did not require photographic evidence before appearing. January did not need its recap before becoming February, and February certainly did not wait politely for me before handing everything over to March.

January

January began steadily. I found myself saying yes to simple plans: dinners after work, spontaneous cinema nights and conversations that lasted longer than expected. After spending so much time with people inside a hospital, there is something mildly fascinating about seeing colleagues in normal clothes, sitting in restaurants and discussing things that have absolutely nothing to do with patients, referrals or whether somebody has completed a task. It reminds me that underneath job titles, uniforms and professional faces are people with lives that continue after the shift ends. I enjoyed that version of January, where nothing needed to be particularly impressive to be worth doing.

Then there was Jan’s birthday. Birthdays have become more meaningful to me as I have grown older, perhaps because time itself has. I used to think celebrations needed something special to justify them. Now I think having someone you love sitting across from you is already a fairly convincing reason. We ate, celebrated and spent time together. There was no need to manufacture significance. January did not begin my year with some grand resolution or reinvention. It gave me company, good food, familiar people and several ordinary evenings I was genuinely happy to have lived.

february

February seemed to move at a gentler pace. Valentine’s Day took us back to our favourite restaurant, which may not be particularly adventurous, but I have reached an age where familiarity has excellent marketing. There is something comforting about returning somewhere you already know you like with someone whose company no longer requires performance. No complicated expectations, no pressure to produce a cinematic version of romance, just dinner with Jan and the comfortable knowledge that we were exactly where we wanted to be.

Then Miyu had her spay, and romance was temporarily replaced by veterinary responsibility. Loving animals is very cute until somebody comes home from surgery and suddenly you are monitoring eating, drinking, wounds, behaviour and every suspicious movement as though you have been personally appointed head of feline recovery. Apparently my nursing instincts do not clock out when the patient has whiskers. Miyu, naturally, had her own opinion about the situation. Cats are excellent at making you feel simultaneously responsible for their entire existence and deeply inconvenient for attempting to help them.

Somewhere around then, work began taking more space again. The calendar filled and energy became something I had to distribute more carefully. February sat somewhere between dinners, home, work and checking on a recovering cat who had absolutely no interest in appreciating the extent of my concern. Looking back, I think that month reminded me how much of love is terribly repetitive. Feed someone. Check on them. Remember what they need. Turn up again tomorrow. The grand gestures photograph better, but most affection seems to spend its life doing ordinary jobs.

march

March had considerably less interest in being gentle. The hospital became busier, with an influx of patients that made some shifts feel like tests of endurance. Twelve hours developed that peculiar ability to pass incredibly quickly while simultaneously feeling approximately three working weeks long. Days blurred into nights. Nights interfered with days. Sleep became less of a routine and more of an event that happened whenever my body managed to negotiate favourable terms. I would wake at strange hours hungry for meals that no longer had identifiable names. Breakfast could happen in the afternoon. Dinner could happen in the morning. Coffee remained loyal throughout.

Then Luna had her spay, because apparently February had not provided enough feline postoperative experience. So while work was demanding more of me, home had another small patient requiring attention. There is something almost insulting about coming home from a long hospital shift only to discover that the household has its own clinical concerns. Luna recovered, thankfully, although I suspect she considered the entire experience a personal betrayal carried out by people she had previously trusted.

March left very little room for my usual routines. Things I normally kept organised began slipping. Sleep was disrupted. Small tasks accumulated. Some days I was productive; on others, I looked at things that needed doing and decided they could continue needing to be done. There is a particular stage of tiredness where folding laundry begins to resemble an unreasonable request from society. The clothes were clean. I felt that should count for something.

I used to interpret periods like that as evidence that I needed to try harder: become more organised, push through, catch up. Somewhere along the way, though, I have become slightly less interested in turning exhaustion into a personality test. Sometimes a person is not failing at routine. Sometimes she has simply worked several demanding shifts, slept badly and has two cats who apparently coordinate their medical needs with the NHS rota.

That does not mean March was miserable. Exhausting months are rarely made entirely of exhaustion. There were still conversations, meals, photographs, moments at home, ridiculous things the cats did, messages from people I cared about and those small pockets of normality that prevented work from swallowing everything else. I think that is what photographs sometimes fail to show. A picture captures the dinner, but not how tired you were before leaving the house. It captures the smiling faces, but not the difficult shift that happened earlier. It captures the cat looking adorable, but not you inspecting a surgical wound for the fifteenth time while the patient attempts to escape.

Looking back at January, February and March from here in April, I understand why I did not write about them while they were happening. I was inside them. I was working, going out, celebrating, worrying, sleeping at questionable hours, caring for Miyu and Luna, spending time with Jan, seeing friends and trying to keep the ordinary machinery of life running. None of it announced itself as something important enough to write down. It was simply Tuesday, then Wednesday, then another shift, another dinner, another week.

Yet those are exactly the days I find myself wanting to remember.

We become very good at remembering life through its landmarks: the birthday, the holiday, the achievement, the photograph where everybody happened to look particularly happy at the same time. But between those landmarks are enormous stretches of ordinary living, and increasingly I think that is where most of life actually happens. It happens over dinner after work. It happens while worrying about a cat. It happens when somebody beside you says something ridiculous and you laugh. It happens during a difficult month when your greatest achievement on a day off is finally dealing with the laundry. None of these things will necessarily become milestones. They are still ours.

So here I am in April, late to my own monthly recap, while spring carries on outside without waiting for me. The branches are filling again. The evenings are stretching. Flowers have appeared where, only weeks ago, there seemed to be nothing. January, February and March have already gone ahead too, leaving behind photographs, memories and small pieces of a life that never stopped simply because I forgot to write about it.

Perhaps that is what Life, Unposted means to me now. Not a life that went undocumented, and certainly not one where nothing happened, but a life that occasionally became too full to be immediately translated into captions and paragraphs. Some months are written while we live them. Others only make sense when we turn around and notice how far we have already travelled.

And maybe I do not need to feel guilty about the missing posts after all. The daffodils still came without an announcement. The trees grew their leaves without documenting the process. Spring arrived before I found the words for winter.

Perhaps life is allowed to do the same—to happen first, and become a story later.

Still living more than I’m posting,
Anj