Want to know what you’re really like? Just ask the people who see you twice a year

Apparently, I’m the person who turns up soaking wet, sucking Haribos. Who needs lifelong friends who know you inside-out when acquaintances tell it like it is?

The worst kind of professional relationship is with the person you see twice a year, in a variety of different locations, because whatever they notice about you from that tiny observational sample, that’s what you’re like. So on the first rainy day in folk memory, the opening bars of Storm Austen, I turned up to a job with a photographer, soaked. I’d been on my bike and had tucked my trousers into my socks, so the accumulated water in the ankle area had seeped upwards, giving me a confusing wet leg-warmer effect, then a couple of dry inches, then an unbelievably wet rest of body. I was so wet that when I went to hug the studio’s labrador, he backed away from me like I was trying to give him a bath.

“You were really wet last time!” the photographer exclaimed, remembering our previous meeting back in March. “Well, it’s a wet country,” I replied, before the person we were there to shoot chipped in: “It’s actually in unprecedented drought, but fine.” Then the photographer asked, “Have you thought about getting some wet-weather clothes, if you’re going to cycle?” and I said, “Obviously this is the first time that’s occurred to me, otherwise it would have happened at some point between March and now,” except she didn’t hear me because I had my mouth full of Haribo chewy sours.

“You ate all the Haribos last time,” my colleague observed, and I’ll skip the denials because even though I can’t remember that, it sounds true. Something about getting soaked on a bike makes me powerfully hungry – I think the sense of grievance messes with my blood sugar. “Have you ever thought of having breakfast?” came the next bolt of blue-sky thinking. It’s a great ice-breaker, making such a fist of your life choices that you become a human suggestions box, everyone mucking in with some basic improvements. But this, I insist, was two freak days of 2026; all the others have panned out fine.

The Guardian’s year in review 2026 On Tuesday 1 December 2026, join your favourite Guardian writers for an evening of candid conversations, witty remarks and surprises as we look back on the year-defining stories of 2026. With Zoe Williams, John Crace, Pippa Crerar, Jonathan Liew and Lucy Mangan. Book tickets here or at guardian.live