I never realised how much freedom and comfort softness could bring

It’s easy enough to get lured into adopting a brittle persona, but there are other ways to live your life

My work used to land in the form of harsh clacking on a titanium-reinforced MacBook, but these days I prefer to write in a pale blue suedette notebook that was given to me by a relative a few Christmases ago. It is an object that until recently I had kept at the back of a drawer, fearing it would seem too sappy a thing for a serious writer to own.

It forms part of a new tendency in my life towards softness – the quality of being gentle to the touch, sensual and pliable, but also receptive, yielding and adaptive. As an antidote to our digitally enhanced lives, which can appear to be cold and hyper-real, softness seems to be on the rise. There is the “girlhood aesthetic”, which is the nostalgic use of bows, frills and smock dresses. In literature, Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key chronicles the author’s journey to creating a soft and cosseting home environment, while the hugely popular Milk Fed by Melissa Broder is a love letter to fleshiness and abundance.