Fiona Sinclair’s new collection looks at some of the slow processes that shape and reshape our lives. In the first half she explores the slow burning fuse of love and desire in middle-age – new lovers and old habits, first dates and second chances, her ‘Canterbury amble’ alongside his ‘south London strut’, her ‘Guardian sensibilities’ against his ‘wind up’ opinions from the Sun. The second half of the book records the slow burning anxiety of living with the undiagnosed chronic balance disorder that eventually forced her to take early retirement – years of increasing disability, consultations, waiting-rooms and MRI scans, the ‘death row wait of weeks’ for the next test result, the ‘dark prognosis’ of her worst fears filling her head full of ‘ambulance sirens’.