Given that we're spread across so many countries, many of our guests will be meeting each other (and us!) for the first time in April. To make things easier, we've each written a little introduction about each other:

I first met Maya during one of her weekly tea parties at university. She’d invited everyone for 7pm, and like an idiot I turned up exactly on time. She initially greeted me with a bewildered stare, but the persona of the perfect hostess reasserted itself when she warmly welcomed me in. Half an hour later, a dozen people were crammed into her tiny College room, being served tea, cake, and expertly managed conversation. Maya’s tea parties reflected her personality: extremely social, to a competitive degree. With her 86 different boxes of loose-leaf tea stacked in full view, she was ready to out-tea anyone. Her walls covered with antique prints and expertly draped fairy lights seemed to scream: ‘I dare you to find a more atmospheric event than Maya’s tea parties!’

I’ve never met anyone with such a strong sense for the aesthetic, and such clear determination to add historical flair and fanciness to everything. Besides her self-sewn wardrobe and better-than-a-catalogue interior design, Maya’s determination to carefully curate her surroundings is also reflected in her obsession with houseplants. Though why every unfolding new leaf must be treated as an event is beyond me, it is incredibly cute to see just how passionate Maya gets about the things she cares about.

Whether applied intellectually or artistically, Maya has the strongest imagination of anyone I know. She does, at times, get a little carried away; especially when she convinced herself, quite earnestly, that I must be a vampire. (Me being Central European, nocturnal, and good at medieval languages didn’t help.) But because she is so good at constructing fantasies, she knows very well how artificial they are, and that gives us a lot of common ground in enjoying them just for their own sake.

The moment we became a couple in 2019 was also the moment we started to live in our personal little fantasy world of old-fashioned romance. But unlike me, Maya has no problem connecting to the modern world as well. Beneath her carefully coordinated aesthetic lie complicated depths. She will spend one weekend at home, curled up quietly like a tea-drinking cat, and the next partying in Amsterdam until dawn. She dreams of running a cosy family home, but also of making money in a high-powered government job.

And Maya is always ready to learn new things. Her ability to learn languages, seemingly at will, can be a little aggravating; after picking up Japanese for no particular reason, her German is now infinitely better than my Dutch. It’s more enjoyable when I can introduce her to new sights: I will never forget her childlike wonder at seeing her first snow-capped mountain, or her delighted expression when she first tasted Eierlikör.

Behind all of this lies Maya’s indomitable drive to make her fantasies a reality. She’s not just competitive. She will fight ruthlessly to make the world as she thinks it ought to be: a place of aesthetic beauty, where things work as they ought to and wild flights of fancy are made possible by an underlying logical stability. I know that whatever life she wants she will build – beginning with our little nest in Haarlem – and I am incredibly happy that she agreed to share that life with me.

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Before I met Michael, I was told by a university friend who sat next to him at dinner one time that, ‘his whole vibe was like Vienna in 1912’. The phrase conjured up violin waltzes, impressionist paintings, the smell of old books and intellectual chatter in wood-panelled cafes. When we met a few months later, I realised that ‘Vienna 1912’ was, indeed, a remarkably accurate descriptor.

Michael has an empathetic charm that makes whoever he speaks to feel truly heard. Though his hard work puts Aesop’s tortoise to shame, and though his ambitions to rule over Medievalist academia with an iron fist are frighteningly realistic, he somehow misses the overbearing and condescending nature that usually accompanies such dedicated careerists.

Though currently teaching at Oxford while pursuing a doctorate in English, Michael’s obsession with translation has him working with 900-year old manuscripts in eleven medieval languages. As if speaking four modern ones wasn’t enough. As a teenager, Michael taught himself to speak English by listening to audiobooks narrated by Stephen Fry. The result is that he sounds more native than most native speakers, and his accent is far more reminiscent of a British aristocrat than a country boy from Austria. Except when he’s tired – ‘zat’s wen ze tru aksent kams aut’…

Always dressing at least two levels above what the occasion calls for, and handwriting shopping lists in medieval letters us mortals could never decipher, Michael seems to drift vaguely outside of time. And yet he never comes across as pretentious, or as though he expects others around him to follow him into the past. Michael’s ‘Vienna 1912’ is a quiet one, a little world built for himself, and one I am honoured to have been invited into.

But perhaps my favourite quality in Michael is that he recognises the meaninglessness of the aesthetic. Beauty serves no practical purpose, and yet he chooses to pursue it just because he can. Why eat cake off a new plate when one from the antique shop costs the same? Isn’t a three-piece suit just as warm as jeans and a jumper? Far from being a dreamer, Michael is deeply grounded in reality – just a shinier, more polished version of it.

But beneath his old-world elegance, Michael behind closed doors has a different side to him: one obsessed with really bad urban fantasy novels; one who gets childishly excited about Korean BBQ and Indonesian food; one who bakes, draws, sings and, for whatever reason, likes to climb mountains. I love his curious habit of tracing words in the air with his finger while he’s thinking. Pacing around the room deep in thought, it looks as though he’s conducting an invisible orchestra in the corner of the room.

With Michael, I feel as though living in a bubble is possible. With him, beauty and fanciness aren’t reserved for special occasions – every day is aesthetic. In a world where everything only seems to be getting uglier, that’s exactly the kind of bubble I’m looking forward to sharing.