Wonderment

The Millionaire Versions of Me
The Millionaire Versions of Me
I have a number in my head: £7.5 million. I’ve spent it countless times on houses, travel, family, friends and ideas. But the more imaginary millions I spend, the more... Read more...
Death Sticks
A stick of Nag Champa, a quiet house and the strange way one smell can carry whole versions of your life inside it. Read more...
Geoff
Geoff
My first proper job gave me freedom, friendship, a battered red car, and several lessons I didn’t understand until years later. Read more...
Burgundy coloured car parked outside a cottage with a green front door.
A Lesson in Chasing the Wrong Things
At twenty-eight, after years of driving bangers and fixing cars at the roadside, I finally bought myself a brand-new car. I thought it would feel like success. Then my Auntie... Read more...
The Custodian of the Harlick Family Tree
The Custodian of the Harlick Family Tree
I started researching my family tree to see whether I might be descended from witches. Instead, I inherited Auntie Mary’s research and became the custodian of generations of family history. Read more...
I Didn’t Need More Time
I Didn’t Need More Time
I spent years being given extra English lessons and extra time in exams. But I didn’t need more time. I needed another way to show people what I knew. Read more...
The Washing Line
The Washing Line
A blustery day, a tangled washing line and one of those ordinary domestic moments that suddenly becomes about much more than laundry. Read more...
The Tonic
The Tonic
For two days, perimenopause anxiety had left me overwhelmed by noise, light and my own body. Then an unplanned evening with an old friend, candles, tea, cards and twenty-five years... Read more...
The Friend Who Gets Chosen
The Friend Who Gets Chosen
I have good friends, but I have rarely felt like the friend people choose first. Lately I’ve been wondering whether all my trying has made it harder to see what... Read more...
The Version of Me They Kept
The Version of Me They Kept
When someone who knew the whole version of you dies, what happens to the relationships around them and which fragments of you do other people keep? Read more...
A couple on their wedding day looking out over the ocean on Skiathos island.
Before I Tell You Anything
What happens when you spend years rehearsing conversations before you have them? A personal essay about self-censorship, family dynamics, and the exhausting work of trying to be understood. Read more...
What Did I Do Then?
What Did I Do Then?
I had two C-sections fourteen months apart. I laboured, reacted badly to medication, underwent major surgery and was then expected to become somebody’s mother immediately. So when someone once told... Read more...
Image of a swimming pool. Sun loungers sunshine
Tattoo Gate
I got a Hamsa tattoo on my own body. My mum’s reaction changed the whole holiday. Years later, I realised those were never the same thing. Read more...
I Didn’t Start a Business to Miss My Life
I Didn’t Start a Business to Miss My Life
What if the business you built for freedom slowly started taking that freedom back? A reflection on attention, social media, slow growth and building a business that still leaves room... Read more...
The Faces They Made
The Faces They Made
Ten students spent eight weeks studying my face closely enough to sculpt it. Yet when the clay busts were finished, none of them looked like me. Strangely, they looked like... Read more...
The Things I Wish I Could Put in Their Backpacks
The Things I Wish I Could Put in Their Backpacks
Years ago, I went looking for fireflies along a river in Thailand and found absolutely none. Then one ordinary morning, a song brought the whole disappointing little adventure back. Read more...
Karen The Wallaby Lady
Karen The Wallaby Lady
I love it when you discover your friends have friends you had absolutely no reason to expect. Not just “oh they’re nice” friends. I mean the kind of friends who... Read more...
The Sink in Skiathos
The Sink in Skiathos
Before I ever went to Skiathos, I knew about a bathroom — two sinks overlooking the Aegean that would somehow become part of my family’s story. Read more...
The Garment as Witness
The Garment as Witness
There’s a worn-out Primark jumper I’ve been trying to give to charity for ten years. It doesn’t fit, has holes under the arms and I never wear it out. But... Read more...
The Relief of Being Recognised
The Relief of Being Recognised
Some clothes don’t express who we are. They simply hold who we are — familiar things that ask nothing from us and somehow make us feel more like ourselves. Read more...
The Clothes You Make Without Meaning To
The Clothes You Make Without Meaning To
We think clothes arrive finished. But wear changes them. Fabric softens, pockets stretch, repairs become handwriting — until something made by someone else becomes unmistakably yours. Read more...
Waiting for Rain
Waiting for Rain
An afternoon waiting for a storm brought back a memory I'd almost forgotten — standing in a Malaysian downpour with a stranger, thousands of miles and another lifetime away. Read more...
Decisions I didn't have to make
Decisions I Didn't Have to Make
Every morning, Steve Jobs reached into his wardrobe and found exactly the same thing. A black mock neck. Levi's 501 jeans. A pair of New Balance trainers. For years, people... Read more...
Waiting for Daddy
Waiting for Daddy
Every afternoon, long before Daddy’s car appears, Bob walks to the garden gate and waits. Nobody tells him to. Somehow, he just knows. I’ve often wondered how. Read more...
The Tea I Never Drank
The Tea I Never Drank
I travelled to the Cameron Highlands expecting tea plantations and the perfect cup. The tea rooms were closed. What happened instead became one of the stories I’ve carried with me... Read more...
Speckled frog sat in the glow of a fire pit
Fires That Stay With You
I’ve always loved fire. The warmth, the crackle, the conversations that somehow become easier beside it. Perhaps there’s a reason humans have been gathering around flames for thousands of years. Read more...
What My Business Is Asking Of Me
What My Business Is Asking Of Me
I started Wonderment hoping to build something that gave me more life, not less. But sitting down to create an Instagram account made me wonder: when does the business we... Read more...
The Truth About Getting Caught
The Truth About Getting Caught
I don't know why I did it. I pulled the heads off every one of my Barbies and Cindys — not out of anger, just curiosity, I think, about how... Read more...
Longer Gone Than I Knew Her
Longer Gone Than I Knew Her
I knew her for eighteen months. I've been missing her for longer than I ever knew her — a strange measure of friendship, grief and the time that keeps passing. Read more...
Can You Make Somebody Love You?
Can You Make Somebody Love You?
I was half-watching a video the other night — one of those late-scroll moments where you're not really paying attention until suddenly you are. It was a clip from Elise... Read more...
Room
Room
A cancelled visit, a simple request, and a conversation that goes sideways. Read more...
The Space Between Heaven and Earth
The Space Between Heaven and Earth
A silent retreat on Lake Titicaca, a house rising floor by floor, a storm in the night — and the one sentence that broke three days of silence. Read more...
What Mo Gave Me
What Mo Gave Me
There was a version of me in my twenties who never slept on sleep-in shifts at work. I was working at an all women’s homeless hostel locally to me at... Read more...
Toast, Wrapped in Tinfoil
Toast, Wrapped in Tinfoil
Every time I landed in hospital with another asthma attack, I'd be in there for days. Steroids, medication, the whole routine. And every day, before her shift, my Nanna would... Read more...
Not Today
Not Today
Sometimes the fear of dying has less to do with death, and more to do with how much we want to be here. Read more...
The Maintenance of Being A Woman
The Maintenance of Being A Woman
Being a woman comes with an extraordinary amount of maintenance. Somewhere along the way, I started wondering how much of it I actually chose. Read more...
I Think I Live My Life to Tell Stories
I Think I Live My Life to Tell Stories
From childhood stories and imaginary pirates to a life spent collecting moments worth retelling, Francine traces where her instinct for storytelling began. Read more...
I Bought the T-Shirt
I Bought the T-Shirt
In 2009, I travelled into Taman Negara with two Australians I had met over a bag of crisps. There were geckos, leeches, pancakes, caves, hundreds of bats — and a... Read more...