The JULY Report | 2026

Five books, two countries, two concerts and one very big decision

July was a bit of a plot twist.

On paper, I had an incredible month. I sat on beaches in Albania and Lisbon, ate an unreasonable number of pastel de nata, saw Bruno Mars and The Kooks in the same week, read five books and spent a few glorious days pretending five-star hotels were simply the lifestyle I’d become accustomed to.

I also quit my job.

It’s strange how two versions of your life can exist at the same time. I can look through my camera roll and see a month that was sunny, busy and full of people I love, while knowing that behind a lot of it, I wasn’t doing particularly well. I think we sometimes expect the good things to cancel out the bad that a holiday, a concert or dinner with friends should be enough to make everything else feel okay when actually you can be incredibly grateful for your life and still know that something in it needs to change.

July gave me some of my favourite memories of the year and forced me to make one of its biggest decisions. Turns out a month can be both. Anyway, enough personal growth. I have extremely important thoughts about fictional hockey players.

READING

Last month was the first calendar month I can remember where I didn’t finish a single book. July apparently decided we wouldn’t be doing that again.

I read five books. FIVE. I have a gorgeous friend whose commute is nearly two hours each way and she somehow gets through a book a week, which I’ve always found both impressive and slightly unhinged. This month, I finally got it. I had a book in my bag constantly and, for once, reaching for it instead of my phone didn’t feel like an act of self-improvement. I actually wanted to read. On the Lizzy line, before bed, sitting in the garden, waiting for people who are incapable of arriving anywhere on time. Turns out I do have an attention span, it just apparently requires fictional hockey players.

I still maintain that I’m reading for me and not for a Goodreads goal because the second I give myself a target, reading will become admin and I’ll rebel against it on principle. However, seeing that little “ahead of schedule” banner does make me embarrassingly smug. I understand now why teenagers get excited about Snapchat streaks.

Heartstopper Volume 6 by Alice Oseman

At twenty-six, I am very aware that I am no longer the target audience for Heartstopper. I am considerably closer to worrying about council tax than A-level results. And yet, saying goodbye to Nick and Charlie after watching them go from nervously saying hi in form to preparing for university made me far more emotional than I’d like to admit.

I think what I’ve always loved about Heartstopper isn’t actually the romance. It’s the school around them. Alice Oseman writes the kind of teachers I wish every teenager had: adults who notice things, make space for people and understand that sometimes their job extends beyond whatever subject they’re supposed to be teaching.

I went to a fairly closed-minded school where sport was everything and most other subjects felt like optional extras, but the teachers I remember now aren’t necessarily the ones who taught me the most for an exam. They’re the ones whose classrooms I could sit in at lunch or who made me feel like they genuinely believed in me. I’m convinced I could email some of them tomorrow and we’d have the loveliest three-hour catch-up over a pint.

There’s a moment in this book where Charlie starts a Pride Club, isn’t given permission by the headteacher and Mr Farouk opens his classroom for it anyway. Later, a younger student appears at the door and quietly asks if this is the Pride Club.

That was the bit that got me. Schools teach you maths and English and, apparently in my school’s case, the importance of being very good at netball. But they’re also one of the first places you learn whether there’s room for you. Sometimes all it takes is one adult making sure there is.

The Off-Campus Series by Elle Kennedy

If you read my last newsletter, you’ll know that I went to Briar University for a term and made it my entire personality. Well, I apparently wasn’t ready to graduate.

July’s reading itinerary was The Mistake on a beach in Albania, The Score on the Lizzy line and during sunny lunch breaks, The Goal on a beach in Lisbon and The Legacy over a weekend in the garden. This isn’t me showing off my summer travel schedule, especially because I’m now back in the UK for the foreseeable future and seven days into August I can barely get through a chapter. Apparently my literacy is solar-powered.

The Mistake

I was so excited for Logan’s book after The Deal because he always seemed like the most emotionally chaotic of the Briar boys, and he absolutely delivered on that front. I just wanted him to suffer a little more.

Not in a sinister way. Grace literally gives Logan a list of grand gestures he has to complete to win her back, which I thought was going to be the best part of the book. And then we skip over nearly all of them. Excuse me? I was promised grovelling. I wanted to watch him work through every ridiculous task while Grace made him suffer just enough to deserve forgiveness. Instead, we seemed to fast-forward through the exact bit I’d been waiting for. Justice for the list.

Grace was actually my favourite part. I loved watching her grow in confidence and build a life that wasn’t entirely about Logan. Not my favourite of the series, but still very enjoyable.

The Score

I went into Dean’s book assuming he’d be every hockey romance cliché imaginable and came out willing to defend Dean Di Laurentis with my life. His character development is easily the best in the series and I completely believed his relationship with Allie, which is really all I ask from two fictional people whose relationship I have become far too invested in.

There was one storyline towards the end that felt slightly like Elle Kennedy remembered everyone had been happy for too many consecutive chapters and needed to ruin their day, but otherwise: no notes.

The Goal

If The Score didn’t exist, this would be my favourite.

Tucker is possibly the least dramatic man ever written in a romance novel and, at twenty-six, I found this incredibly attractive. He communicates, he turns up when he says he will and he supports Sabrina without making everything about himself. Apparently my standards for a fictional boyfriend have matured from “mysterious and emotionally unavailable” to “dependable and would probably remember when the bins go out.”

I also loved Sabrina far more than I expected to. She’s ambitious and difficult and absolutely exhausted, which I found deeply relatable despite having never been pregnant at university or attended Harvard Law School.

The Legacy

Did we need this book? No.

Was I going to read it anyway? Obviously

The relationship drama felt slightly manufactured and there were moments where I wanted to remind everyone that we’d already spent four books resolving these exact issues. But I didn’t really care because I wasn’t reading it for the plot. I wanted the Briar boys back together.

Those were easily my favourite parts, along with Alexander the porcelain doll, a storyline so stupid that it somehow became one of my favourite things in the entire series. It was basically the literary equivalent of staying at the pub for one more drink after everyone has already said goodbye. Nothing particularly important happens, you’re probably going to regret not leaving earlier, but you’re not quite ready to go home yet.

EXPLORING

I landed back from Albania around the 3rd of July and apparently ten days at home was quite enough, because my passport was back out again for a trip to Lisbon with my sister. Portugal and I have a complicated history, which is a story I normally save until about three drinks into the pub when I’m trying to convince a new friend that I’m interesting, but I am genuinely convinced the country had me hexed in 2024.

During my European summer of freedom, I was in Barcelona and due to fly to Lisbon when I BROKE MY FOOT. Not a dramatic little sprain that I could strap up and limp around on for attention; properly broke it. So instead of spending the week wandering around tiled streets eating pastel de nata, I spent a heatwave in bed feeling deeply sorry for myself while everyone else continued having functioning ankles. A few months later, Portugal and I tried again with the Algarve for the first family holiday we’d had in about fifteen years, only for it to rain every single day. I then left a few days early because I’d landed my dream job in Australia, which I appreciate isn’t exactly a hardship, but it does rather ruin the story if you concentrate on that bit, so please don’t.

Lisbon, therefore, felt like Portugal and I finally agreeing to put the past behind us. I arrived with two working feet, the sun came out and, for once, nobody offered me an international job that required me to leave immediately. Progress. The city was gorgeous: beautiful tiled streets, amazing restaurants, beaches with sand so soft they made the pebbles we call beaches at home feel like a personal attack, and more pastel de nata than any human being reasonably needs. I ate them at breakfast, as snacks and whenever I happened to walk past another bakery, because apparently seeing a custard tart completely wipes my short-term memory of the one I ate twenty minutes earlier.

As all three of my readers know, I am not an influencer and nobody should be looking to me for financial or travel advice. However, I am going to attempt to influence you on one thing: pick a hotel booking site and remain fiercely loyal to it. I’ve been using the same one for years without paying much attention to the points, until those points somehow got my sister and me into a five-star hotel for an amount of money that absolutely did not correspond with the lifestyle we were suddenly living.

There were robes, slippers, chocolates and wine waiting in the room, plus a rooftop pool that immediately altered my personality. Within about twenty minutes I was wandering around in a dressing gown feeling like a woman who says things like “we summer in Lisbon,” despite knowing full well there were probably several direct debits waiting for me at home. Nothing exposes how easily impressed I am quite like complimentary hotel slippers. Give me a tiny bottle of wine and a robe with the hotel’s initials embroidered on it and apparently I no longer remember where I came from.

PERFORMING

You know by now that I don’t really do things by half. I started 2026 with a new job, a new outlook on life and a slightly concerning commitment to saying YES to everything, which is how I ended up winning the Ticketmaster war for Bruno Mars and booking The Kooks in the same week. If anyone ever asks me to define my music taste, I think that sentence probably does the job.

Both were brilliant, but Bruno Mars is genuinely one of the best performers of our generation and I will accept no arguments at this time. The vocals, the dancing, the stage presence; he performs like someone put Michael Jackson and Elvis into a blender and then gave the result an extremely good silk shirt. I knew he’d be good, obviously, but there was something quite ridiculous about watching someone be that talented for two hours. Give that man every flower available.

The Kooks were a completely different kind of joy. Most of their music lives on a playlist I’ve genuinely named “the coming-of-age film I will one day write”, alongside every song I’ve ever heard and thought would work perfectly over a montage of a woman making a questionable but ultimately character-building decision. Inside In/Inside Out soundtracked so much of my teenage life that seeing its twentieth-anniversary show at my old university grounds felt like several versions of me colliding at once.

There I was, back where I’d spent some of the most formative years of my life, listening to songs I’d loved long before I had any idea who I’d become. I’m reluctant to call hearing Naive live life-changing because that feels like the sort of statement I should reserve for marriage or childbirth, but when that guitar started, seventeen-year-old me and twenty-six-year-old me were equally delighted to be there

On Repeat

I think this happened in July (31st I think), but everyone knows FX’s Adults is my favourite show of the last few years, so when they randomly dropped a prequel episode, it very quickly became my personality again.

I think what I love about Adults is that it doesn’t try to make its characters particularly admirable. They’re selfish, chaotic, occasionally terrible friends and somehow still completely lovable, which feels much closer to actually being in your twenties than watching five emotionally intelligent people calmly communicate their boundaries. The prequel takes us back six months before season one and shows how Paul first became part of the group, while bringing back all the weird dynamics and insecurities that made me love them in the first place. It also gives Paul Baker a bit more depth, which I will obviously take because he’s one of my favourites.

HOWEVER, I read beforehand that we were going to meet the “real” Paul Baker with his straight friends and I now feel slightly robbed. I desperately need an episode where the two friendship groups collide, his old mates exclusively call him Paul, he suddenly becomes about 40% more lad and everyone from Adults watches in horror. Basically the Always Sunny Abbott Elementary crossover, but for one bisexual man with two completely incompatible friendship groups.

Until FX accepts my pitch, the prequel was still a very welcome excuse to rewatch the whole thing, and I’m now even more impatient for season two; particularly whatever messy, questionable route they’re taking to get Paul Baker and Anton to finally admit they have feelings for each other. Consider me seated for the queer angst.

Reality Check

I wasn’t very well this month. There’s no particularly elegant way of writing that. My depression came back, and for a while I stopped feeling like I was properly participating in my own life.

A week has 168 hours. Work took at least 40 of them, sleep took roughly 56, which theoretically left me with about 70 hours to be a person. Seventy hours to see my friends, watch the enormous list of television I’ve been insisting I’ll “get round to”, go for dinner, read, call my family, sit in the garden, waste an afternoon doing absolutely nothing. All the little things that make up a life.

Except I wasn’t doing any of them. I woke up, went to work, came home and went to sleep. I wasn’t being the friend I wanted to be. I wasn’t looking after myself. I wasn’t even watching television, which is usually a fairly reliable indication that something has gone terribly wrong. I felt slightly outside of myself, watching this person complete the necessary tasks of being alive without really understanding where I’d gone.

Then I started crying. A lot. There were panic attacks. There were mornings where everything felt much harder than it reasonably should. And the sad thing about writing this now is that I’m not writing neatly from the other side of it. I’m still somewhere in it.

So I quit my job.

The strangest part was how guilty I felt afterwards. I’d expected relief, maybe even that dramatic sense of freedom you imagine comes with finally choosing yourself, but instead I immediately started worrying about everyone else. I felt guilty for leaving, for creating more work, for not staying longer, and wondered whether perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough or had given up just before things might have got better.

I think women become extraordinarily good at apologising for preserving themselves. We feel guilty for being burnt out, embarrassed by being overwhelmed and somehow convince ourselves that leaving something that’s making us unhappy is an inconvenience we’re inflicting on everyone around us. Even when we’ve reached our limit, there’s this instinct to make sure everyone else is comfortable with the decision before we’re allowed to feel comfortable with it ourselves.

I’m trying to unlearn that.

This month has been a reality check in the truest sense. I’m not suddenly fixed because I handed in my notice, and I don’t expect my life to transform the minute I leave. But for the first time in a very long time, I made a decision based entirely on what I needed rather than what would make life easiest for everybody else.

And I’m really proud of that.

TEN FOR THE MONTH

1. Albania mania: I would like to be back on a beach immediately, please and thank you.

2. Seafood risotto for every dinner: Apparently my holiday personality is just ordering the same meal in increasingly beautiful locations. No regrets.

3. Avenue Q: The reason I haven’t seen one of my best friends in nearly a month. Graphic puppet sex wasn’t something either of us thought we’d be enquiring about this summer, but here we are.

4. Lisbon walks and sights: A beautiful city made even better by the fact that walking 25,000 steps a day means you can justify approximately anything you eat afterwards.

5. Mario, our tuk-tuk guide: You took every penny of my tourist money and I hope your pillow is always cold. You were wonderful.

6. Toy Story 5: You made my inner child very happy and, somehow, also convinced my adult self to buy a brick designed to stop me using my phone. More on that another time.

7. Bruno Mars: THE MAN YOU ARE. That’s it. That’s the review.

8. The Kooks: The soundtrack to my teenage years, live in my university city. I briefly became seventeen again and honestly had a lovely time there.

9. Job hunting: Not technically a highlight, but it has to make the top ten purely on the basis that it occupied approximately 80% of my waking thoughts.

10. Umm… quitting my job: Quite a big one to casually leave until number ten. July had plot.

About Twenty Five Reset

The 25 Reset: A home for eldest daughters with a quarter-life crisis, part public diary, part pop culture chat. Expect lessons from turning 25, reflections on growing up online, and discussions on books, TV, films and everything in between.

• Dear Diary - My public diary that maybe shouldn’t be public

• Monthly Report - My monthly joys shared with you

• Friendfluenced - the friendships that raise us, change us, and stay with us long after they’ve shifted

• She Said Yes - ‘52 weeks’ of saying yes. Doing something … anything … every day just for fun.

• Consumed - Everything I’ve read, watched, listened to and loved lately

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