SELF-ISOLATING

‘I was thinking,’ you say, ‘when all this is over we should get away for a few days. Far off. North. Where hills are frozen with the kind of frost you don’t find in towns anymore. Away from this heatstroke weather, to hard hoar-crusted summits and meadows with glinting sprays of reeds, where mist steams off olive-green lakes.

To small woods chanced upon in the pleats of fells. Let’s wake in a tent rimed with ice on the third morning, alone, returning to our senses warming soup on last night’s fire, breath and woodsmoke mingling in the trees. Let’s hurry back tired and longing for this bed, the warmth of these four walls, the shape of these rooms. Not craving their escape.’