I would be staying in the Netherlands for a long weekend. My friend Pete and I had organised two days of sightseeing and lavish meals in the city of Utrecht. He was flying into Amsterdam after work on Friday, and so I decided to arrive a day early and visit The Hague.

I had no idea what it would be like as a city, and my purpose in going there was primarily to see Vermeer’s View of Delft, a painting that features in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

A chap called John in my group classes lives in The Hague, and he offered to let me stay in his beautiful Dutch house. He had given me detailed instructions on how to journey from the station to where he lived, in a quiet suburb between the city and the sea. Bikes were the most effective means of getting around The Hague, and John recommended a hire app called Donkey Republic. At the station, I picked up one of their steeds - a sleek orange number with a curling metal frame, wide handlebars, and a storage space at the front where I could place my bag and secure it with an elastic cord that I pulled over and secured on a metal hook. My duffel was heavily loaded, and I strained like one of Penelope’s suitors stringing the bow, as I pulled the cord over the top of my bag, wheezing like a madman as I at last fixed it under the metal hook.

This was the first time I had cycled around a city since 2024, when I lived in Saint-Malo in France. I had an internship working for a proud Breton company called Famileo. The office was a tall, cube-like structure with windows tinted in bronze. When I arrived there, I was offered a bike to help me get around. It belonged to a former employee who had taken a sabbatical to go travelling, and I could use it for the six months whilst he was away. This bike became my greatest possession, my dearest friend. It would sit beside me on the weekends when I would head to the old lighthouse to read by the water, and we would dance together, free-wheeling gently and carving along the empty boardwalk in the morning sun before work.

No drug could compare to how it felt at that moment, in The Hague, as I exited the station and began to glide across the concrete, over a path that led through the woods. I relaxed into the seat and felt my chest open with air. My lips stretched into a grin, my eyes sparkled as the grass and trees moved quickly past me, and I wafted among other cyclists in the wide lanes. Across the woods, I returned to a more residential area. Clean, orderly terraced houses gave way to larger properties hidden among the trees.

Whenever I meet someone for the first time or head to a new event, country or city, I try to have a judgement-free, adventurous attitude. “What possible surprises could be in store?” I ask myself, sitting by the window on a train, smiling at the reflection which hovers, flashing on the sides of buildings and trees. The world may contain bad people doing evil deeds, but why choose to see it that way? Jean Paul Sartre once wrote that l’homme est condamné à être libre, and thus, with that freedom, I stand to be positive, and I adopt a mask of naivety, grinning as I walk beside my fellow humans.

When I started my old job as a salesman for a gallery in Paris, I thought to myself that these faces - the hundred floating orbs with twitching mouths and combed hair - were probably just like me, wanting to do their best, aiming to be kind, loving and honest in their actions. During my first months, I smiled and laughed with them and said good morning. Ask not what your fellow people can do for you, but what you can do for your fellow people. Such was my noble attitude when I arrived in The Hague.

For some reason, I always imagined that it would be a dark, gloomy industrial town. Perhaps it was something related to its name, as it sounds similar to Le Havre in France, which brings associations of a town destroyed in WWII and the modern rebuilding of a city centre. Notably, I remember photos of Le Havre’s tall stone church, which seems to blend the gravity of a war memorial with the Art Deco whisper of the Empire State, as well as a steeple au Cyberman, with its grey, grilled, angular structure. I admit that I have never been to Le Havre. Instead, I have only heard from others that it feels less romantic than other cities that were rebuilt after World War II- Saint-Malo, Reims, etc. A month or so ago, I swam at a beach near Honfleur, and could see bulky ships at the end of the Seine’s mouth and Le Havre standing on the other side of the water, cast slightly grey as a dark cloud moved over from the Atlantic.

Maybe it was giddy joy I felt being back on a bike with the wind in my hair and tears in my eyes, but on my first cycle from the station to John’s house, I started to fall in love with The Hague. It had a utopian beauty with the mixture of woods, large green fields, and stylish, well-built houses with not a speck of rubbish on the road.

Later on, John and I cycled back into the centre. We had a blast, with him pointing out different spots to me as we cycled - there was the seat of parliament, and here, a house which the Dutch Nazis used to occupy during the war. We visited the Mauritshuis, where View of Delft stands displayed on the upper floor: a medium-sized, rectangular canvas with buildings textured in broad strokes of warm colour. The view of the city from the harbour seemed clear and photographic from afar, but the closer one moved to the painting, the fuzzier the colours, the more the shapes blurred and buildings danced like the memory of a landscape. In Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu, the writer Bergotte stands before this painting and realises in despair that this is the summit of artistic achievement and glory. He particularly notes the mastery of ‘un petit pan de mur jaune’, a little patch of yellow wall. Bergotte becomes so overwhelmed by the painting before him, how insignificant it renders his own writing and artistic career, that he grows ill and collapses in death before the masterpiece.

In the evening, John was busy with a friend’s dinner party. He was preparing a bottle of Negroni as he suggested I cycle up to the beach and eat in one of his favourite restaurants beside the water. It took fifteen minutes, and I parked the bike at the start of a thin footway which led over a dune and opened wide onto a golden sand beach with choppy surf breaking in the dark water beyond. It was around 8 pm, and the sun was hovering fairly high over the horizon, just beginning to send refracted orange rays into the thin trails of cloud. I looked to the left, and about one kilometre away there were lights coming from a larger town, and I could spot a ferris wheel placed at the end of a pier.

I had a dish of tomato gnocchi lovingly prepared and dearly paid for by debit card, but I thought it was worth it to be eating on the beach, beside the hut-like restaurant, with well-to-do Dutch folk wrapped in blankets, reading, and sitting with their loved ones.

Before I cycled back, I ran over to the water, undressed and dived beneath the waves. Just as it had been in Kent, weeks before, when I had swum in the channel in a village near Dover, here too the water was totally dark and yellowish in colour when I opened my eyes as I swam beneath the waves.

I lifted my head out and lovingly gazed at the beautiful evening setting, the sand and whole coastline cast in darkening golden light. All was quiet and still as I looked smilingly out, once again, onto the breaking waves.

W and I were sitting at the end of a long table in a restaurant that looked out onto the sea. It was the only building in a solitary cove, tucked up at the side of an orange cliff. In appearance, it resembled a large white shack with a steep staircase leading to a roof bar. When we arrived, there was a DJ and a small group of Brits dancing and drinking close to the bar. On the level below, there was the restaurant floor, which stretched out over the beach on dark wooden decking. I remember it had a canvassy roof and open, windowless sides, so that every diner could share in the view of the ocean. We were a group of 15 people, and they had created a mighty table for us that extended out from the side of the restaurant to the centre, like the radius line in a circle. W and I took our places, with me right at the end, being able to rest my forearm on the white, wooden balustrade.

The leader of our troop, G, had a villa in Carvoeiro, a small town between Lagos and Faro in the Algarve. Every year, he invited a group of friends to join him for a weekend of wine-tastings and boat-trips. He liked to plan it around late June so that it could coincide with The Black and White Party, a yearly event in town, where bands and DJs play in the streets, and people dance and drink on the sand. Some people were staying at his villa, but most of us had taken Airbnbs, scattered about the urban area.

W and I had booked a little house on the northern edge of the city. It was quieter up there, with wide boulevards of large, newly built stone houses possessing lusciously manicured lawns and hedges. Once I had arrived and dropped my bags in my room, set the aircon to 22 degrees, I embarked upon the 30-minute walk down to Carvoeiro and the beach.

This was the first time I had ever been to mainland Portugal. Two years before, in May, I had spent a week in Madeira, the Portuguese island further south in the Atlantic, which sits roughly in line with Marrakesh. On this island, there were black beaches which looked out onto towering orange cliffs; houses, shacks, and manors in glistening marble stretched from the towns and up the dark, deep green slopes of the mountains. It felt tropical, akin to the Caribbean with its colourful houses and huge beach resorts. There were business people striding through the capital, Funchal, sporting searing white teeth and pin-striped suits, and darkly tanned old ladies waiting for the bus in white dresses printed with red and yellow flowers. I remember waking up in the morning and seeing the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean through the curtains. I would walk over to the balcony, and the water seemed to flow over my shoulder and down towards my toes. As I moved my head from side to side, all I could see was the blue water creased with the wind, a total view of the forever-extending Atlantic. I was wrapped up by it and comforted, like an injured Russian on the grass, gazing up at the heavens during the battle of Austerlitz.

I used to wonder what it would be like in Lisbon or Porto, imagining a sunnier, Iberian Paris, with old buildings, intricate shutters and roofing, mixed with tourists, rubbish, and homeless people. In the Algarve, the locals I passed were skinny and casually dressed. They smoked cigarettes and laughed with friends beside shops that had shutters partially drawn down. No one bothered to look at me.

At dinner, G was sitting in the middle of the long table, next to his girlfriend. When I looked over at him, he was speaking with narrowed brows to one of the waiters, presumably about the starters and mains we had pre-ordered more than two months in advance. He was wearing a well-ironed shirt, white chinos, and his sunglasses lay propped upon the crest of his short, curly hair.

From my position at the table, I could look out right onto the beach below me, whose dark yellow sand carved over to the cliff on the right. Beyond, out on the water, stood a lone tower of rock, the stacky remainder of a headland, with boats anchored around its calm current. They all had small circular lights placed on their prows. They bobbed and twinkled as the hulls rose and sank with the waves.

For most of the dinner, between mouthfuls of mackerel and bread, W and I let our eyes rest on the view of the water, the cliffs and the stretching horizon that lay beyond. When we had first arrived, a magnum of sparkling wine had been ordered. It was a local bottle from the Algarve, vino verde-esque, and it had a warm, golden colour to it as it bubbled in the glass. It tasted rich and buttery, and we took our fill before crying aloud for another bottle to be ordered - “A Magnum, A Magnum,” I bellowed. This height of drunken glory soon glided down into a mellow, pondering buzz once we had been sitting for a while. W and I had a solemn muse about the water, the view of the stack, how it felt to be sitting here, knowing the next day we would be back to our normal lives - he at Cambridge, I in Paris.

Within 24 hours, I would be sitting in my 'co-living’ house in the suburbs - alone and trying to work in a downstairs study room. Five others live with me in this house, and I try to be cordial and distant with them all. Whenever I am in this study space and they pass by en route to the kitchen, I take pleasure in giving the busy, “can’t talk, I’m on a call” wave and flashing a pained smile. No one gets up as early as I do, and some hop on the train to work, so this little room is unofficially my personal office. I meditate there, eat my meals, and read under the lamplight before bed.

The house is owned by a French couple who began renting out rooms when their two sons finished school. They are top-level musicians, and the house is designed in an attention-grabbing yet restrained, art-deco style. They are kind, engaging, and wonderfully positive.

However, despite all these things, I can never be productive in the house. I feel exiled from the centre, far removed from the buzz of Paris. I like my suburb, especially its proximity to the Seine and the calm. But I detest the transport - the hateful RER D - as well as the lack of any entertainment or good gyms. And yet, I chose to move here - I am a voluntary exile with a heavy heart. I sit alone trying to write and read, fighting to scale an existential barrier, a malaise, and I check my phone repeatedly for messages from a girl who doesn’t love me and drifts further and further away with each passing second and laborious tap of the keyboard...

But isn’t she beautiful and kind and good-hearted! Isn’t life so rich! And so, for a brief moment longer, at that restaurant beside the sea in the Algarve, I was spared the dreadful return to my everyday. I could see the curving beach, the glooming stack of rock in the water, and I looked around me at the table of friends, drinking wine, laughing. The bright hum of their conversation merged and wove into the crash of the waves on the sand, the waiters’ hurried footsteps on the decking.

I turned my attention to W beside me. He was also contemplating the water, his eyes fixed firmly on the great beyond.

After dinner, we walked down past the shack onto the beach and some of the boys undressed to go for a night swim. We rushed into the water, giggling in our boxers. It felt welcoming on my legs, warm and tender after a long day of being cooked in the sun. The stacky former headland was no more than a dark shadow rising above the water, and the lights of the boats shone in a steady stream across the rippling surface.

W and I took an Uber back to our Airbnb, and the next day, I had a 12 pm flight to Paris.

Catullus is one of only a handful of poets and authors from Ancient Rome who have given their name to places around the world. These could be as large as a city, town, a university or as humble as a fountain or small side street. Virgil, the most influential poet from Roman times has a square named after him in Mantua - La Piazza Virgiliana. He was born in Mantua and often speaks lovingly about the city that lies due south of Lake Garda, perched around the cool flowing of the Mincio river. At the top of the square, there is a large bronze statue of Virgil, standing tall upon a slab of marble, decked in a toga. His hair is wreathed and his right hand is raised before him, like an orator. He looks towards his arm, as if reciting a verse. Part of his gaze is also angled higher, stretching into the western sky, above the meadows and hills of Lombardy, to Cremona, miserae Cremonae, a town which his poetry in vain tried to save. But it doesn’t end there! In the US, there are three separate towns called Virgil - one in Illinois, another in New York, and the last in South Dakota.

The love poet Ovid also has an impressive geographic legacy. He was born in the town of Sulmona which lies to the east of Rome, lying on a flat plain surrounded on all sides by rugged, snowcapped mountains. In this city, in a grand, desolate square, beside the cathedral, stands a tall cloaked statue of Ovid, resembling The Batman, his arms crossed and face locked in contemplation. I saw it for myself a few months ago. At that time of year, late March/early April, the dusk of winter/the dawn of spring, fairy lights had been hung between the buildings in the centre. Woven into the strings of bulb were letters which spelled out famous lines in Latin from Ovid’s poems. Sulmona mihi patria est from his Tristia, which means Sulmona is my homeland, or Ut ameris, amabilis esto, if you want to be loved, be loveable. And, also, like Virgil, Ovid’s legacy has stretched from Europe across the Atlantic. There are three ‘Ovid’ towns in the USA - located in Colorado, New York, and Michigan.

Ovid and Virgil both claim their status in the canon of ancient literature. Virgil became the Romans’ answer to Homer. His epic poem the Aeneid, reworked the Iliad and Odyssey to cement Roman supremacy in myth and history. Ovid was a celebrity in the height of the Augustan era and he adored the opportunity and novelty that the greatest city in the world offered him. Like Icarus, whose story he recounts twice in his oeuvre, Ovid took his love for Rome and celebrity too close to the edge of power. Citing the reason of carmen et error, a song and a mistake, Ovid was exiled from Rome and spent the last decade of his life in the seaside town of Tomis, on the Black Sea, modern day Constanta in Romania. He hated it there: the climate as well the lack of culture or interesting people. I hope to head to Romania soon and visit Constanta, where there is another statue of Ovid, in an identical pose to the one in Sulmona. I have Romanian friends, and when I tell them of my plans to visit Constanta, they look at me funny and squint their eyes. Why do you want to go there?

Apparently there are much nicer parts of the country. If Constanta has this reputation now, imagine what it was like during Ovid’s exile! Poor fellow.

Catullus was a great inspiration for both these poets. He was an important figure for the belief that writing poetry could be an occupation in itself, that there was value in acknowledging beauty in the world and translating it into Latin verse. Catullus was the leading figure of the Neoteric poets - an avant-garde group who turned away from grand, heavy poetry on epic Homeric subject matter, and instead preferred lighter verses, about emotion, love, and humour.

One of Catullus’ most famous short poems is a two liner -

Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris.

Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.

I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.

This is short and direct. It seethes with emotional intensity. It describes the feeling of being in love and yet being driven apart by two strong, directly opposed emotions. How can one love tenderly and still feel hate and resentment? Catullus’ short poem captures this dilemma. It most probably refers to his relationship with Lesbia, the name of his mistress that recurs regularly throughout his poetry. Most scholars believe that this is a pseudonym for a real Roman woman, Clodia Metelli, who was infamously hedonistic, aristocratic, and the arch nemesis of the conservative politician and orator, Cicero. Catullus chose the nickname Lesbia to hark back to the famous poetess from the island of Lesbos, Sappho.

This poem is technically an elegiac couplet, a six-foot line (hexameter) followed by a five-foot line (pentameter). It’s also artfully created so that the structure of the poem mirrors and enhances the message of the latin. ‘Odi et amo’ (I hate and I love) begins the line, which is dramatic because of how unusual it is to have two verbs appearing together at the start of the poetic line. This combination of two verbs is balanced by how the end of the second line also ends with two verbs. Furthermore, the end of the first line has the word requiris (you ask) and the start of the next begins with nescio (I don’t know). It gives the sense of a call and response between one person - the despairing inner ruminations of Catullus.

This poem can speak to us all and not just in a romantic framing. We are always being torn back and forth between deep affection and disenchantment. For me, I feel this greatly with the city of Paris. I live just outside the ring road, in a little suburb town called Créteil. There is a university there and the urban area sits contained by two rivers, the Seine and the Marne. I decided to move there for more peace. My old apartment in the 10th Arrondissement, by Gare de l’Est, was a Haussmanian dream with high, gilded ceilings and a whole manner of civilisation mere minutes away by foot. Yet, at night, on the second floor, I could feel the whole building shake with the vibrations from passing trains underground.

In Créteil, there is little traffic and my house stands at a distance from the roaring metro. I can walk down to the banks of the Seine where plane trees stand in sweet-smelling clusters beside the water. The upper branches are thick with parakeets. There is a riverside jungle-gym where I occasionally go to exercise and a boardwalk that follows the river as it bends towards the south. I occasionally walk along it, listening to music, or I cross onto the western bank using the great stone and metal suspension bridge that was built in the early 1900s. The floor of the bridge stands around 15m above the water, plenty high enough for the barges to pass underneath on their journeys through Paris to Le Havre. Halfway across, I can spot large, rectangular apartment blocks rising up in the north as well as a tall thin spire is visible in this distance, appearing occasionally between the high rise. It’s the only view of the Eiffel Tower I can see from near my house. There is another a few kilometers to the north, atop a different bridge at the convergence of the Seine and the Marne. This strange, dark telephone mast - as it appears - is over 14km from my little suburb. It takes 20 minutes to reach the centre by public transport. The RER train zips quickly over to Châtelet Les Halles and from there I can get anywhere in the city. There is a gentleness to this area, a suburban lull with a balanced landscape of cooling towers, new-age apartments, and 18th century houses, painted in white with triangular roofs and ornate door fronts.

I remember those days where I could charge out the door and be at a bar, metro station, restaurant in less than a minute. I sometimes feel I’m foolish to be living so far out of town. The Paris city limits taunt me as I look at the great building that resembles a robot bending its head down to look at the floor. I prefer to call it - the great teddybear - and it stands almost exactly on the ring road. I can see it whenever I walk down to the Seine at Créteil.

Yet as I write these lines, I am sitting on a bench beside the river, in my little suburb, and the water ripples with the upstream-blowing wind, and the smell is verdant, fresh, and full of reeds. The wind also blows a scent from the mighty plane trees above my head. I am reminded that I am in France and that this is the only thing I used to want when I was younger.

Amo ET Amo!

She was the wife of David, my paternal grandfather’s brother, and she had worked as a nurse for much of her life. She also spoke Russian and earned an OBE as Director of the British-Russian Hospice Service, where she travelled to Russia and helped set up palliative care hospices across the country. I had only met her as a baby and a few times in those doddering early years when nothing can be clearly remembered. However, just over a year ago, my parents and I had driven down to see her at the care home where she was living, on the south coast. We ate at an Indian restaurant, and Wendy and I spoke about Russian literature. She told me she was a great fan of Lermontov, whose work A Hero of Our Time, she had studied at school. Wendy’s voice was engaging, and it crackled and shone with laughter. It rose in pitch when she grew passionate, and she spoke faster as the words raced out of her smiling mouth. Wendy knew how to play the organ, and she retained a musicality in her expression.

We went to the funeral to show support for Wendy’s direct family, my dad’s cousin and her children - the twins, Jo and Luke. They are my second cousins, but in the first ten years of my life, I spent two weeks with them every summer, camping on the grassy banks of an Alpine lake, near Grenoble. They are identical twins and are fiercely intelligent, having both published books relating to their discipline. Jo is a teacher, and Luke is a doctor. It was through them that I was first introduced to one of my favourite bands of all time - Green Day. On a sweltering day beside the lake, one summer, Jo passed me his iPod and made me listen to the first moments of Holiday, a song from the album American Idiot.

My earliest memory of them is from one of our lakeside holidays, when I was four years old, and Luke was reading to me inside my parents’ tent, in the central compartment between the two sleeping areas. He was sitting on a camping chair, and I was cross-legged on the floor, beaming up at him as if he were some saint, delivering a sermon from atop the mount. All of a sudden, the canvas tent flap opened, and Jo came in. “Luke,” he said with authority, “it’s my time to read to Harry now!” I gazed up at them, my eyes wide, my child brain recording the situation as it unfolded. Luke looked up from the book and turned an irritated face towards Jo. “No, Mum said I could read to Harry for 20 minutes. We’ve only just started.” His stare was fixed unflinchingly at his twin brother. He was holding the book calmly in his hands. Jo moved a step closer and slowed his voice down, leaving a provoking pause between each word. “It’s…already…been…twenty…minutes…it’s…my…turn…now!” He had barely finished speaking when, like an eagle diving into the ocean and snatching a fish in its claws, Jo grabbed the book from Luke’s hands, laughing cruelly as his twin moved just too late to anticipate it. Luke now rose to his feet and grabbed onto Jo’s arms, attempting to wrest the children’s book from his hands. Joe struggled against him and fell to the floor, Luke raining down blows onto his brother’s legs and stomach. Jo wheezed at the impact, and they growled, fought, shouted and scratched, while I continued to sit, unmoving, on the floor of the tent, watching the scene unfold with equanimity.

Wendy’s memorial service was on a Wednesday in the small Methodist church of a seaside town called Emsworth. The wind was howling, and clouds were scurrying across the sky when we left our home at 1 pm to make the journey down south. The English countryside passed me by out the window: green hedgerowed fields and the chalky summits of Hampshire’s rolling hills. It’s a county that stretches from Newbury in the north all the way down to the south coast. Within its borders lie the town of Winchester, once the capital of England, as well as the cities of Southampton and Portsmouth. It’s also home to the New Forest National Park. It has the shape of a baby elephant’s head, with its little trunk slightly raised up.

Emsworth is a town to the east of Portsmouth: a hub for sailors and military folk with its harbour, calm water and nearby navy bases. The high street looks onto the roaring English Channel, but the town is sheltered from large Atlantic swell by Hayling Island, which lies due south. The little piece of land extends like an anvil, straight down and then out on both sides at a right angle. Emsworth is protected by the anvil’s horn that sticks out parallel to the shore like a muscular forearm protecting a schoolboy from the bully’s slap.

We arrived with 15 minutes to spare before the start of the memorial service. As we walked inside the church, Jo stood up from his seat in the front row and greeted us with a full-faced smile. We hugged him, and he pointed out the other familiar faces in the crowd. There were his parents sitting up front, and Luke beside them with his girlfriend. Back a few rows, he gestured to the backs of John, the half-brother of my Grandad, his wife Ann, with finely straightened silver hair, and nearby, their son, also named John, with his partner Dani. Little John turned around, his long brown hair catching the sun and swishing like in a shampoo advert, and gave us a small wave.

Jo returned to his seat up front, and we all sat down at the back of the church, in extra seating the staff put out to accommodate the great numbers who had shown up to celebrate Wendy’s life. I was sitting next to my Dad, and we looked over at the order of service - a crisp paper booklet that the priest had given us as we walked in. There would be a selection of speeches about Wendy, a couple of hymns, and a prayer led by the priest.

We rose at one point to sing the first hymn, which was called “Make me a channel of your peace.” I didn’t recognise this song, nor the two others in the little booklet. I had been hoping for a meatier, Catholic number - such as Be Thou My Vision, which had been the major hymn at the funeral of my maternal grandfather. In the atoms of my bones, I can still feel how the great organ in St Alban and St Stephen’s church roared to life, like the groan of an aching and triumphant heart. Everyone rose to their feet, in a downpour of creaking wood and footsteps on the marble. In unison, heads turned towards the back of the church, where my grandad’s coffin came along the aisle, held high by the pallbearers who included my two uncles, Pat and Tim. The whole church began to chant the first verse, “Be thou my vision, Oh Lord of my heart,” and I looked towards my granny, who was standing beside me. I saw her chest cave in as she caught sight of the brown casket. Her eyes grew wide, rimmed with tears, and her pupils dilated into large black lakes. She could only watch for so long before turning away and weeping. I moved my gaze from her back to the coffin which passed me by, choking as I sang “Be all else but naught to me, save that thou art”. The coffin, the bleeding of the organ, my granny crying while I stood beside her, shifting back and forth, unsure whether to hug her - I froze in uncertainty, and still the coffin continued on by me, with the tearful expressions of my uncles and the priest, resplendent in a robe of white, green and gold, opening his arms in blessing beside the altar.

Throughout my teenage years, my bones would tremble whenever we sang this hymn at the end of term during my school years. Now, in the room I rent on the outskirts of Paris, South-East, in the evenings, with my curtains drawn, orange light partly coming through the gaps at the side, I listen to Be Thou My Vision on Spotify, through my headphones. I do this while I stretch, or sitting in my chair by the window, journal on my lap.

Back in the Methodist Church for Wendy’s memorial service, the new hymn began in a gentle melody. I didn’t know the tune, but I employed a well-known choir-boy technique of following the more familiar members of the congregation and singing less than a millisecond behind them, as if I too knew the words but was just a bit slow. As the hymn progresses, you gain in confidence and take the lead, predicting what’s to come next. Bathing in hubris, you rise high at the end of a line, and the rest of the choir goes low, and you abruptly stop, lower, and re-adjust, hoping no one noticed. I was the most confident singer at our end of the church, slightly outperformed by a woman across the aisle, a regular, it seemed. She was clear and evidently a well-trained, excellent singer. She never hesitated about what note came next. I followed her willingly, while my dad bleated out some hopeless, whimpering notes beside me.

I only found out afterwards about how famous this hymn is. It was composed by Sebastian Temple, who made the melody and used the lyrics from the Peace Prayer of St Francis of Assisi. It is a hymn about selfless service, asking to be able to care more about giving love than being loved, to offer consolation to others, rather than seeking it out oneself. It was a hymn made more famous in the last decades thanks to renditions by Susan Boyle, as well as being sung at the funeral of Princess Diana. As I sang, I noticed the words fixing stronger and stronger in my brain. What a wonderful idea, I thought, to live by this creed of seeking to help, love, and give for the sake of it. What a good philosophy to consciously perform these acts without expecting anything in return. What an admirable use of one’s agency.

1 Make me a channel of your peace:

Where there is hatred, let me bring your love;

where there is injury, your healing power,

and where there’s doubt, true faith in you.

2 Make me a channel of your peace:

where there’s despair in life let me bring hope;

Where there is darkness, only light,

and where there’s sadness, ever joy.

3 O, Spirit, grant that I may never seek

so much to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love with all my soul.

4 Make me a channel of your peace:

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

in giving to all that we receive,

and in dying that we’re born to eternal life.

On my side of things, I never had such a ring or necklace. My great-grandfather, Jack Jones, passed down a medal he had received in WW1, and now it’s with my aunt on the south coast of England. All for the better, really, because if it were given to me, I would certainly misplace it. I have never been one for jewels, medallions, watches or expensive items to be worn on my body. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have the money for it. If I suddenly became uber wealthy, maybe it would appeal to me more, because it wouldn’t affect me to drop 10,000 pounds on a shiny gold ornament for my wrist. Apparently, watches are more than just status symbols. Nicola, a brilliant woman in my group classes, works for a high-end watch brand, and I felt more convinced than ever about the history and artistry behind them as I listened to her speak.

What I lack in luxurious possessions, I make up for in small gifts and letters that I have accumulated over the years. In my rucksack, I have a little book pouch where I keep my journal. I usually write in it daily. Entries can range from simple thoughts about my day to long, meandering descriptions of certain interactions or questionable analyses of dreams from former nights. I usually have a section where I write down the things I feel grateful for, which feels embarrassing to publicly disclose.

I am regularly given a new journal for Christmas by my mum or Granny. The journals have hard covers in pastel colours, sometimes engraved with my initials = HD. They also have that stringy, built-in bookmark that frays over time with use. I have never enjoyed using that, and so I tend to mark my page by sliding pieces of paper or actual bookmarks in between the pages. Over the past few years, I have been lucky to receive a few letters and cards from friends. Without a dedicated safe place to store them, I slot some of them into the pages of my journal.

Now and then, after finishing a page of reflection, I will pull out one of the cards and read the message. Each one brings with it certain memories, that particular time and moment in my life when someone passed me the card, wrapped in white paper with my name scribbled on the top. I can still feel the crater of the pen’s impact. I pass my hand over the shallow indentations, noticing where the ink is darker and words stand out over the line of curling characters. Occasionally, but not always, I will press the card to my nose and see whether I can pick up any smells, a lingering perfume haphazardly imprinted as a wrist skimmed the white boundary. Most of the time, there is no such smell, and if I think there is, perhaps I am creating it - do the gods light this fire in our hearts or does each man’s mad desire become his god?. Putting my nose to the paper isn’t out of some romantic longing, but instead to truly appreciate the totality of the gift: the energy that was used to buy the card, the time spent writing on its surface, checking over for any mistakes, and then enclosing it in the envelope. Even the card’s design helps me get a better picture of how the moment was. Some of the cards have images of cats on them, others have green, English landscapes or dark blue mountains.

Two cards are particularly precious to me.

The first was given to me by a man called Joe, three years ago, while I was pursuing a PGCE at the University of Cambridge. This is the course to qualify as a teacher in UK schools, and on it, you have to do two professional placements at two different schools across the year. Joe had been with me on my first placement - to a school called Chesterton Community College, just North of the Cambridge city centre. He was training to teach history, and I was doing French and Spanish. We were part of a group of ten trainees at this school, 4 men and 6 women, and we got to know each other as the term progressed. We would all sit and catch up on lunch breaks or arrange to have dinners at one another’s colleges. All my fellow trainees were set on working in a school as soon as the year-long course was over. A girl called Sophie, who was training to teach Classics and Latin, said she longed to find a pastoral role at a boarding school. She came from a large equestrian family and hoped she would be able to teach as well as continue riding horses every day.

I was by far the most unserious trainee, sneaking out of after-school meetings and calling in sick to record a scene with the Cambridge Film Society. I had a mentor-teacher called Scott Hughington, who, while seeming like a nice enough chap, took a subtle dislike to me and was frustrated with my attitude. I enjoyed teaching and put effort into my planning, but Hughington believed that my heart wasn’t in the right place. His teaching style was thorough and authoritative; mine was passionate, sweeping, and amiable. He never smiled much or indulged in the occasional free-spirited diversion with his students. As the term came to an end, and after I had written a poem mentioning his name, my future as a trainee on the Cambridge Course seemed doubtful. The faculty were plotting ways to take me down, to force my hand, which was easy, as I had taken many missteps thus far in the academic year.

As Christmas rolled around, and we entered the final week of our time in the school, I began to expect a talking-to; I felt a tension around me. The head of my subject looked at me with narrowed eyes. Conversations among the teachers I was shadowing would suddenly dry up as I entered the room. I felt nervous but realised I would be totally fine, were I to be kicked off the course, shipped away from Cambridge, becoming but a memory, the name of exile etched into the depths of a database.

On the last day of my placement at Chesterton Community College, we had a Secret Santa - buying a gift for a randomly selected colleague and then staging the ‘Grand Unwrapping’ all together. The gifts were cheap and varied: a woollen scarf, a little toy horse (for Sophie), some chocolate, a mug with a physics joke written on the side… I can’t even remember what I received, but there was much laughter and, when it was over, we all began to pack our bags to head to the local pub for a farewell pint.

As I was closing my laptop and placing it into my rucksack’s top pocket, I noticed Joe coming up to me with an envelope in his hand. He extended it towards me, saying, “Just a little card to wish you a Merry Christmas. You’re coming to the pub, aren’t you?” I nodded and thanked him for his kindness. I would meet them there; I just had to finish packing up. He wandered away, and I held the card in my hand, looking at it for a few seconds before glancing back at Joe moving away, powerful in his grey suit, over to the rest of the trainees, departing to the pub. Joe was a born history teacher, totally in love with the subject, polite and restrained in conversation but loaded with facts and scholarship that he could unleash in a burst onto a class of children. He was slightly shorter than me, and had broad shoulders, with a somewhat silent, aggressive demeanour. He was a fan of craft beer, and he and I had been planning to go to a pub in Cambridge to grab a pint together. Later that evening, sitting in the chair of my 2x4m college room, I opened the card and began to read…

Dear Harry,

It has been a blast training with you; it’s always reassuring to know that there are mavericks still in the world and the profession! Best of luck for your PP2 and we must be sure to grab a beer some time.

Merry Christmas,

Joe,

Mr Peters

It was a simple, circular card, and on the front there was a scene of the baby Jesus in a manger, surrounded by Mary and Joseph in brightly coloured tunics. It seemed to be a photo of a stained-glass window in a church. I was drawn particularly to one part of the card - “it’s always reassuring to know that there are still mavericks in the world”. It took me by surprise to hear him call me that. For the past few months at Cambridge, I had felt increasingly isolated, especially with Scott Hughington’s pernicious, doubtful gaze.

Joe and I never managed to get the pint. The first term ended, and when I came back in January, the head of Cambridge’s education faculty pulled me into his office. After a short discussion, I decided to leave Cambridge for good. Nevertheless, I still often think back to the card Joe wrote me. I regularly pull it out from the pages of my journal and read it over. In times of difficulty, I like to think that Joe was being serious when he called me a maverick, and it makes me believe that I was doing something right, during those days teaching at Cambridge. Perhaps it was true that instead of being an unserious trainee, with my head out the window, I was something strikingly different: I was a visionary, shining with the light of a unique perspective. ‘Everyone else at the school was seeing me wrong,’ I began to easily convince myself as I gazed lovingly in the mirror, combing back my hair. It was only Joe who recognised my true light, my real brilliance. In the following years, I would often excuse little character flaws, mistakes I made, bursts of annoyance, as the actions and expressions of a ‘maverick’. I was once walking to the station with my ex-girlfriend, and I had annoyed her, probably for a very fair offence. I then tried to make her laugh saying, “But Rachel, you know I’m a disruptor, that I’m a maverick.” It was meant as a little tease, but she looked at me, pausing very slightly, staying calm but seething with annoyance - “Harry, stop saying that, you’re nothing but an average bloke.” I grumbled and clutched my chest that bled from her verbal dagger.

The other card that I particularly treasure was given to me less than a month ago, on the final day of my two-week trip to the US. It was given to me by a woman called Sarah, whom I met at The Georgetown Club, where I gave a lecture about paintings that were influenced by the works of Homer and Virgil. There was a drinks gathering before the event began, and I noticed her walking around and speaking with different people. She was wearing a fine, long dress and had light brown hair and piercing blue eyes, at once dark and light, with a layer of holy orange surrounding them. She had a face that stood out from the other people who had come to listen to the talk. I kept trying to look at her, to see if our eyes would meet, but my view was always obstructed by crowding people, suits and heads. In fact, when I gave my talk, she was still blocked from my sight, sitting in the second row behind a long-torsoed fellow. My eyes kept darting back to her unsuccessfully.

My talk was a good one. I had drunk just enough prosecco to hit the sweet spot of tipsiness, a superhuman state, in which people can walk on water or speak fluently in previously unknown languages. I made jokes, I grew serious, I spoke in depth about problems facing a global society. I showed the audience 6 paintings inspired by Homer and Virgil. After the talk, I spoke with some of the attendees before being told by John, my friend who had invited me to speak, that we had to rush off to make our dinner reservation. I made my way through the main corridor, past a group of two men and a woman speaking together, when I heard my name being called suddenly. I looked around, and it was Sarah. She was smiling at me, and her eyes were shining with colour. We spoke for maybe 20 seconds. I asked her name, where she was from, what she did for a living, and then bade her farewell. As I walked out of the room, turning slightly to gaze at her again, I sighed deeply, lamenting that only now had we been brought together, at the moment when I had to leave.

A few days later, I woke up to find a message from her on Instagram. It read

“Hi Harry! We spoke after you lectured at the Georgetown club yesterday. It was so lovely to learn from you! ~ I thought you might want a friend in the area. Do you have plans Sunday morning? “

My heart leapt at this turn of fate, and I quickly responded to her. We planned to meet when I came back to DC in a week. I told her I was planning to visit Charleston, and she recommended I get a slice of key lime pie from 167 Raw, a seafood restaurant on the High Street. I ended up making it to the restaurant with a friend, and I sent her a photo of me holding the slice in its card takeaway box.

When I came back to DC, on my last three days, we spent a portion of every day in each other’s company. We went to an interfaith dinner of the Washington Hebrew community and the Church of Latter-day Saints. There, I met her friend Viola, and the three of us took a long walk back to the metro station through Georgetown, past grand houses partially hidden among bushes of pink and purple azaleas. The next day, Sarah and I spent 4 hours wandering through the wings of the National Gallery of Art and before I flew home, she met me on her lunch break in Georgetown and we visited a large house with expansive, floral gardens. It had been made into a public garden: all you had to do was buy a ticket to get in and you could stay there all day. It was a perfectly blue day, and we strolled through the rooms of the house and the orangerie, and then along down to a croquet lawn with wild flowers neatly growing in a square. Sarah only had an hour on her lunch break. After 30 minutes, we retraced our steps towards the main street through Georgetown. I was going to take a bus, and we made to say goodbye. “By the way, I have something for you.” She looked into her handbag and pulled out a hardback book in gold and read. It was called the Heart of the Matter by Russell. M Nelson, cardiologist and former President of the Mormon Church. In the book, he reflected on the greatest lessons that life had taught him. He passed away last year at 101 years old. I was flattered by the gift and tucked it carefully into my bag as I journeyed over to the airport.

On the plane, 3 hours later, as I tucked my seat belt clikywicky together, I unzipped my bag and carefully extracted the book from my front pocket. An envelope fell out from the early pages and clattered silently onto the empty seat beside me. I opened it and found a soft paper card with a picture of a small, square, windowless house beside a field of shorn hay. In the distance, there were trees, and the subtle rising of a hill far away. Both the inner faces of the card were covered in writing. She wrote about the pleasure it had been to meet and get to know me over the recent few days in DC. She mentioned that from the first moment our eyes met, she had noticed something familiar and seen a unique light shining through me. She thought, like me, that our coming together had been a blessing of sorts…

“I’m grateful our kind acts lead to new discoveries: truths, friendships, answers to our questions, and on. We never know exactly what we will discover, but that is the great fun of life! Thanks for being my new friend, Harry.”

I read the letter a few times, my eyes wide, and my whole body growing warm in a current that began in my stomach and rose up with a lightening touch through my chest, shoulders, and neck. It reached my face, and my cheeks felt as if they were glowing; the back of my neck became totally relaxed, and my mouth felt soft.

As the plane got going, I readied myself to sleep for the 7-hour journey back to London. I took out some earplugs, and my eye mask and then bound the blanket underneath the seatbelt, so I wouldn’t be disturbed by the cabin crew. As I relaxed into the seat, I suddenly remembered Sarah’s letter, which I had placed delicately between the pages of my journal and then into the book pouch. I found the book pouch resting on the seat next to me, and I picked it up and placed it in my arms, holding it tight as the plane bumped and whizzed over the Atlantic and descended into a cool London sunrise at six in the morning.

Perhaps the gods of that mountain looked down on me and my friend Elijah, as we stood in an empty piazza on our first evening. It was 6 pm, and there was a blue sky of dying intensity on the day before the clocks went forward. We were just beside the Cathedral, at the side of a busy high street full of shops selling confetti, the staple export from Sulmona - small, sweet, almond-chocolate balls that are given to children at weddings.

In the middle of the piazza, six feet away from where we were standing, was a grand statue of the poet, Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid. This great lump of metal, iron or potentially bronze, was the whole reason for my trip to this small town in the centre of Italy. Frozen in time, Ovid stands tall with his head slightly bent, his arms crossed, and his chin supported by his right hand. He is in a state of contemplation, thinking about his poetry, and maybe debating what word to put at the end of the line for maximum effect.

Ovid is the favourite son of Sulmona and also one of the greatest poets from Ancient Rome. There is nothing else in the large piazza except for his statue. People walk around its orbit wearily, never staying beside it for too long, nor coming too close to be under its discerning eyes. Elijah took photos of Ovid and me, and on every occasion, the square was empty around us. Perhaps it had been purposefully designed this way? There were no bars or shops, and so nothing to keep someone entertained for extended periods of time. There were also no places to sit, not even a humble bench where book readers or the elderly could linger during the day. Even if there had been a bench, the piazza was completely unshaded. Any tottering individual sitting down to take a moment’s rest would perish under the pulsing summer sun or turn to an ice cube in the winter months. Yes, I thought to myself, looking again at the large, unshaded, empty square. This is a shrine. The figure of Ovid, tall and haunting, like Batman, stood alone under a great stretching sky, head lowered, wincing under the gaze of the divine. And yet, the next day, on Palm Sunday, the priests in their red robes, along with cooing congregation, began their procession at the foot of the statue, at the feet of a man who had questioned the gods, doubted their perfect appearance, and had been exiled for disobeying their laws. It was a mighty spectacle as the bishop thundered from the loudspeaker and Ovid cast his eyes to the floor.

Ovid had spent his early life in Sulmona. He had been born to a wealthy family and then moved to Rome in early adulthood, making his name writing love poetry and stories about humans being changed into animals and rocks. He had fallen in love with the city of Rome, the best place in the world, and his time there - the best, most exciting moment of humanity thus far. He was eventually exiled to Tomis, a Roman fort, which is now the city of Constanta, in Romania, on the Black Sea coast. Funnily enough, in Constanta, there is an exact copy of Sulmona’s Ovid statue, as well as Constanta’s Ovidius University. Despite ending his life in Tomis, Ovid still tenderly remembered Sulmona and spoke of it often - his wonderful homeland, most rich with cool waters Sulmona mihi patria est, gelidis uberrimus undis.

I have studied Ovid from the age of 13, beginning with cheeky love poems in my teenage years at school and then moving on to wider-ranging, complex essays in my university days. As a young boy at school, Ovid offered the perfect mixture of rigorous grammar training coupled with amusing content perfect for a class of rowdy teenage boys. I still remember some of the Latin lines that stuck with me from those earlier classes - non sum desultor amoris, which means ‘I am not a horse-jumper of love’ or, put more simply, I am not an unfaithful lover. We also translated parts of his work, the Ars Amatoria, the Art of Loving, a 3-book didactic poem teaching men and women how to find a lover in Augustan Rome. We focused on a section where Ovid discusses how to find a woman, and notably where to go in the city, what type of events are particularly suitable for flirtation. Ovid advises his readers to head to the Circus Maximus, to the Races, or the theatre - places where people “go to see and go to be seen,” a piece of wisdom delivered beautifully in a chiastic line of poetry spectatum veniunt veniunt spectentur ut ipsae. The Latin classes in my teenage years were times of intellectual exploration, creativity, and pure joy. My teachers were oddballs and persuasive, engaging speakers. It helped that I was in the top set, and so time which, in other circumstances, might have been used to revise the subjunctive or move slowly through a translation, could instead be employed by our teacher to lead us on great, entertaining diversions. My housemaster, Mr Franklin, was particularly good at this, and he spoke with rapture about why the conservatives were ruining the country, how literature moulds the soul, as well as memories from his youth and days at Oxford. He gave us ‘life-lessons’ such as ‘never throw petrol onto a bonfire’ or ‘don’t start a fight with a bouncer’ - the reason for the latter, he told us, is that they’re usually violent brutes who want any excuse to throw their weight around. We would also ask him which teachers he could beat in a fight. He was a skinny, reasonably tall teacher who played squash and table tennis, and once claimed to be able to do 100 press-ups in 60 seconds. He thought his speed and quick reflexes might be the deciding factor against other male teachers, especially those who were heavier and layered with muscle and beer bellies. We asked him whether he rated his chances against another housemaster, Mr Christidoulou - 6ft 3, tanned, with a shaved head and a lean, muscular figure. He had become a teacher of maths after a decade spent as a sniper in the Greek army. Mr Franklin suddenly grew silent, his smile faded and his eyes narrowed. He raised his arm out in front of him, pointing his index finger to the sky. “Gentlemen,” he enunciated gravely, “Mr Christidoulou is a very dangerous man”. I looked up to these teachers more than any others. They seemed more erudite, and they spoke with ease and passion. Being highly expert in ancient grammar meant they could communicate effortlessly, and I always remember feeling that they were here, teaching, because they were passionate about their subject. Their eyes shone with a childlike joy, they carried themselves with levity, upheld by the beauty of the poetry, the wealth of history they were carrying across. In fact, on one parents’ evening when I was 17, Dr Burnand, the Head of Classics, told my mum that he had chosen to be a Latin and Greek teacher because he would always be reading something new. I still see him, and I occasionally grab lunch with him in a charming town beside the Thames.

Over the rest of our days in Sulmona, Elijah and I took in the surroundings. We drove up the slopes of Maiella, stopping to explore mountain villages, drinking Abruzzo wine and eating carefully prepared meals in small tavernas. These towns beckoned mysteriously from the distance, and they were perched precariously, hanging almost, on the side of sharp mountain ridges. Walking through one such town nearby, the streets would be cobbled, steep, twisting and completely silent except for the cold whistling wind and the sound of trickling water running through the drains. We drove up past the town, as far as you could get to a ring road of sorts that carved around the circumference of the great mountain. There was snow packed thick to the sides of the road, over 5ft deep, and a lone hiker was venturing with snowshoes out into a vast white meadow, spotted here and there with trees, before the slope rose steeply upwards.

The long drive to Rome became familiar to Elijah and I. A steady hour of coursing through the mountains and long tunnels opened up to the great vista of Lazio, gently descending from Tivoli to Rome. Squinting through the windscreen, I thought I could just make out the Tiber moving its water out into the sea. Elijah was leaving one day before me, on Monday, and he had to work during the day before his evening flight. We stopped off at Soho House, on the Eastern side of Rome, perched between Termini and the neighbourhood of San Lorenzo. In perfect sunshine, we ate lunch in its top-floor restaurant, each of us working on our laptops. I bade him farewell in the early evening and was joined by Sherri, who had done a few of my group classes. We ate and chatted, and I drove home as the sun was setting just after 7 pm. The two-lane motorway was empty, misty and mostly silent. The peaks loomed like great shadows through the car windows. I spoke some Italian with an old man, wearing a hat and blue overalls, who worked at the petrol station I stopped at. He put 30 pounds-worth in my car and smiled with lightness. The little building where I went to pay was brightly lit, standing out against the dark mountain scenery that encircled the road and valley.

I came back to Rome the day after on the train. It followed a different route to the car, passing by towns such as Avezzano and right through the centre of Tivoli. In the capital, I took a walk through the forum and up the Aventine Hill, where I recorded a video. I had lunch with a man called Alexiye, whom I had met at Soho House the day before. He was an American and had moved to Italy to pursue a career in food journalism. He had written cookbooks about Italian cuisine and was planning a project to create an encyclopedia about pasta. We ate at his local haunt in the area of Monti, where they had rich, peppery amatriciana tomato sauce.

I had to walk with purpose to the station to catch the train back. I was aiming to arrive in Sulmona at 8 pm. I managed to board with five minutes to spare and spoke with the conductor, a chap called Manuel, because I had the wrong ticket. He tried to work out the problem, failing to understand why I hadn’t just booked the earlier time, but eventually shrugged and said I could stay on the train. We departed and I tried to meditate, closing me eyes and relaxing onto the carpetry seat. Suddenly, I felt my jaw tense up, and I looked around frantically as the train made a sudden stop less than 200m after leaving the station. It paused for a few minutes before starting up again. I tried to reassure myself, and I sat back in my seat, only to clench up again as we made another stop near Tivoli, this time sitting in the middle of the track, unmoving for 15 long, uncertain minutes. Our delay began to clock up, 20 to 30 to 60 minutes. A few stops later, the train began doing a special trick of turning its engine off and on again. The whole train grew silent and still. The electric lights in the carriage flickered on and off. In the new darkness, sighing as I leaned my head back against the seat, the twilight-scape through the window became illuminated once more with the lack of carriage light. I noticed the ridgelines of the Apennines glow with gold, casting fiery embers that turned the clouds pink in the darkening sky above. Towns sprinkled on the mountain faces sparkled and bubbled with light.

Later, with an estimated delay of 1 to 2 hours, the train pulled into the town of Avezzano. Once again, the engine was turned off and the carriage grew dark. Other passengers began to leave the train, opting for a taxi instead of waiting it out in the moonlit compartment. I noticed the conductor walking through the train and exiting onto the platform. Through a sliver of window between the seat on the other side of the carriage, I saw him chatting with a station worker. His arms were crossed, and his chin was resting in his right hand. He had his eyes directed above, not to the heavens but rather, just above the roof of the train. I rose from my seat and walked out onto the platform. He turned towards me as I approached, and I asked what was going on. Shaking his head and tensing his eyes apologetically, he explained that the wind had disrupted the electrical wires. There was a repairman on his way now to fix the issue. Until then, I should sit tight. He tapped my shoulder fraternally with his hand. “Have a rest, I’ll wake you up if anything changes.”

I returned to my little section, four seats, two-by-two, facing each other. There was no table between them like in English trains, and I snuggled up to the window, pulling up the hood on my puffa coat. I was tempted to put my feet on the opposite seat, but the voice of my grandfather rose up from beyond the grave: “Take your shoes off first”. I was the only one left on the train now, and I fell into a steady doze beside the window, carried off by the thrill of the adventure, the darkness of the carriage, the desertedness of all around me. I thought of myself like Kerouac or maybe Jack Reacher, though skinnier and 5 inches shorter. If a villain were to burst into the carriage, after easily assassinating Manuel and the other station worker, I wouldn’t be able to snatch his gun or batter him to death, but perhaps he’d cool off, seeing me relaxed and slumped into the window, greeting him groggily with a Buddhist-like indifference. I began to think of Elijah, now returned to Paris, unaware of this diversion on my final day in Italy, as well as all my other friends, and those whom I had recently met: the faces, colours, tempers, of so many people. These forms began to move from inside my mind out into a mist orbiting my head and shoulders. I was a dreaming vessel, the sea was an empty metal horse, parked on a grassy plain, beside a town surrounded by dark mountains, topped with icing. A thunderous bellow echoed through the valley. A flash of lightning struck one of the summits.

I noticed Manuel beside me, gently nudging and speaking calmly in Italian. “Senore,” he cooed, “Another train is coming to take you back to Sulmona. It will be here in 5 minutes.” I removed my hood and rose from my slump in the window, steadying myself with my hands. “Come,” he continued, “I shall walk you to the train”. I rose from my seat, slinging my heavy bag over my shoulder.

It was an empty platform, and Manuel walked ahead of me, the sky above totally blackened with the bright lights illuminating the platform edge. I took a photo of Manuel with his back turned to me and his blue Trenitalia coat ruffled by the wind. We stood for a while until the train pulled in, and he shook my hand, wishing me the best. He had to wait until his own train was fixed and could continue its journey to the other side of the coast, to the city of Pescara, where he lived.

The End

In the past weeks, Northern Europe has been blessed with clear skies and rich, steady sunshine. The nights and morning hours are cool, but it grows warm in the afternoon - on some days temperatures go up to 17 degrees. One past Saturday was particularly spectacular. I met a friend from Oxford and we had a gentle stroll through Le Jardin de Luxembourg in the early afternoon. It’s a large and spacious park, located south of the Seine, in the 6th Arrondissement. On this particular day, with uncharacteristically warm, winter sunshine, the park was busy - elderly couples, young lovers, well-to-do groups of men, families in their 30s with toddlers on push bikes. All these factions of Parisian society were present, primly suited, walking at a relaxed pace and passing their eyes over the grass, where budding flowers were beginning to sprout, and the patterned bark of plane trees stood against the exterior of the Musée de Luxembourg. I was sitting on the steps beside the museum and reading some pages of Orlando while I waited for my friend to arrive. We then wandered from north to south, passing the gilded exterior of the Palais with its grand stone balustrades encircling a large fountain. There, moving across the waters, bumping into the stone sides, there was a fleet of motor-powered model yachts, with pristine sails, and little flags of various countries hanging from the top of the masts. Around the fountain, I noticed people sitting or lying down with their faces upturned towards the rays. Some were slouching on the green, metallic chairs that are provided by the Paris Mairie in big city parks. Others I spotted - stretched out on the stone balustrades, their heads resting on folded coats.

Early on that Thursday morning, as I headed from my house towards the station, the sky whispered the promise of another stunning spring day. It was a delicate pale blue - fading white towards the horizon with a jewel-studded darkness above my head. The sun was beginning to rise above the heights of the grim apartment blocks that are the bane of certain Parisian suburbs. I turned right off my little street, and there, a dark orange shaft of sunlight poured onto the road through a gap in the buildings. It was at its most uneasy point, shimmering and sweaty, unable to truly blaze. It shone onto the road in shards as it hovered just below the wires and fencing of the nearby train track. I was now on a busier road that led to the station. Small trees were planted on the pavements, spaced at regular intervals, and heavy with white, sweet-smelling blossom. Above the road, I noticed a large purple banner hung between two lamposts - La banlieue se fait belle.

I arrived in London at 11 am and went immediately north of the city, to Radlett, where my granny lives. I was staying the night in her house, and I dropped my bags off with her before going for a walk in the nearby park to take a phone call. It was sunny here as well, North of London, in the county of Hertfordshire. In the park, the green grass spread out before me in a wide square, bordered by woods on one side, with swings, climbing frames and a basketball court on the other. There was also a café on the right-hand side and it was packed with women in their 30s, many with pushchairs, enjoying lunch under the pleasant sun, in the peaceful suburban air. There was the hum of chatter, blinkered by birdsong. Now and then, indistinctly amid the other sounds, I heard the roar of a plane above or the ghostly whoosh of a London-bound train. The last time I had walked in this park had been in June the year before. There had also been a clear blue sky, but it had been much quieter earlier in the day. I had been alone, apart from the gentle disturbance of solitary dog walkers. Now, 9 months later, it looked unchanged, save for the disappearance of the white goalposts I used to do pullups on. As I talked on the phone and wandered around the perimeter of the field, I stopped to sit on one of the green benches that was emblazoned with the name of my grandfather, Hugh Jones. I leaned against it and noticed some of the green paint was flaking off.

I had a late lunch with my granny at Pizza Express in the town centre. To any readers who are not from the UK, Pizza Express is a chain restaurant, and you’re likely to find a branch in most medium-sized towns. Unlike Pizza Hut or Domino’s - known across the pond and to the East - Pizza Express has a more Italianate, traditional feel - its pizzas have thinner bases and the ingredients are well-chosen and the food feels healthier. The decor of the restaurants is always the same: white walls, marble tables and warm, subtle lighting that reflects gently in the glass doors and windows. Pizza Express has a staple dish of hot doughballs with creamy garlic butter served in a small ceramic dish. My granny and I ordered a portion, and they came steaming hot on their plate, carried by Reza, a waiter who has worked at the Radlett Pizza Express for over a decade. My granny and I each took a doughball and looked out at the high street as we ate. “This is the life!” she said, and I smiled, thinking of how many times I had been in this small Hertfordshire town - how layered the streets were with memories of my childhood.

The event I was attending that evening was at the Household Guards Museum in central London. It’s not far from Parliament and Whitehall, and so I travelled to Westminster Station, which is special to me because it has a unique, metallic interior that makes it look like the hull of a spaceship. The station exits directly onto the Houses of Parliament, and the view through the frame of the station is specifically dominated by the bricks of Big Ben. The tower looms beyond the pavement, like the huge leg of a rocky giant. As you walk outside the ticket gates, you have to crane your head upwards to see the great spire and clock faces, four of them, like the eyes of unsleeping Argus taking in the whole city with his gaze. The road beside the tower moved left over the Thames and bent off right in the direction of Whitehall. My plan before the event was to find a pub beside the museum where I could sit for a couple of hours and plan a lesson. A quick look at Google Maps showed a place 5 minutes away - creatively named The Red Lion. I started off in that direction, pompously bounding past people who I assumed were tourists, standing in the way of the flow of traffic, gazing up at London’s number one attraction. I looked at them posing for photos, mouths open, smiling. This is embarrassing, I thought, imagining the shame I would feel if someone saw me staring happily up at Big Ben.

As I skirted around scatterings of photo-takers, I remembered a video I had seen once of a woman tearing up as she turned a corner and the view of Big Ben appeared before her. She started to cry and fell to her knees on the pavement as uncaring pedestrians circled gormlessly around her. There was a caption to the video written above her head in boldface white letters - when you’ve been waiting your whole life to see this building. This was posted on TikTok, and, in the comments, people criticised her for being over the top, exceedingly emotional, and for filming herself in the process (a fair point). But many of the comments also focused on how absurd it was to react like this to Big Ben - a monument so well-known, so touristy, so clichédly British. A lot of the critics were from London, they said. They saw Big Ben so often and knew it so well that they found it amusing to hold the tower in such awe, to become so emotional at the sight of it. If you did gaze at it in amazement, it signalled that you weren’t actually from Britain, or worse, that you were British but not from London, and thus a charming provincial. I had learnt from a young age, in my teens, that Londoners were far ‘cooler’ than people like me from the countryside. While the edgy, ‘cool kids’ at my Oxfordshire school would go clubbing at 15 years old and perhaps sample MDMA, the equivalent Londoner would have done cocaine, worked as a drug dealer, and partied on the weekend with the children of celebrities. My friend Guillaume, who grew up near Belsize Park, was friends with the daughter of Noel Gallagher and would regularly attend the weekend parties of billionaires. At one of these events, in some grandiose Hampstead mansion, Guillaume had hopped on a piano to play a tune, only to be told off by a very stern Spike Lee.

With such upbringings, seemingly pulled out of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, it was no surprise that it took a lot to surprise born-and-bred Londoners. Yet, I wondered if this was as simple as it seemed. Was their blasé attitude was actually a façade, a faux-cool exterior, an uncaring mindset they had adopted to appear better in the eyes of fellow city dwellers? Could it be that deep down, they were interested in Big Ben and longed to appreciate it? But would pausing in the heat of the commute, under the view of fellow hotshots, inspire ridicule? To turn one’s eyes upwards, to briefly remove the mask of corporate seriousness, of world-weary nonchalance, and see the lightness of beauty - would this be such a cardinal sin? I would never be a Londoner, and I accepted that, but I still longed to be perceived as a local. I wanted other people, the true Londoners, to look at me and think “Yep, he knows what he’s doing”, or “He’s from around here, he doesn’t even bother to look at Big Ben”. I paused in front of a concrete pillar at the side of the pavement, right beside the corner of the street. It was percisely here where the women in that video had started to cry. A few more steps and I would turn the corner and the view of Big Ben would be lost. I didn’t know what to do. My mind was in torment, and I stood at the edge of the pavement, blinking, sweating, and frothing at the mouth.

At that moment, I thought of a girl I knew called Juliette. I had known her well a couple of years back. She was from Switzerland but had spent a lot of time in London, having lived there for well over 5 years. She was a Londoner by all means - she was trendy, drank beer, worked and had a life firmly established in the city. She also would post a lot on instagram, the majority being photos of glorious cityscapes, bathed in morning sunlight or shots of smiling friends holding coffees, warm pubs with oak panels, and bars shimmering in red neon. Juliette was an athlete too. I can remember her uploading videos of her runs in London parks or along tree-lined roads of the outer zones. These videos were regularly coupled with writing - “so grateful to call this city my home” or “couldn’t ask for a nicer day to run”. For a long time, I thought she posted too much, and it embarrassed me to see her constantly photograph the city. I thought it was performative, and it annoyed me that she put on such a pretence to glorify her life in the Big Smoke. Yet, as I got to know her better, it dawned on me that Juliette wasn’t putting on airs. In fact, shockingly, she was being genuine - she truly loved London, and it gave her pleasure to recognise the beauty of the city, to share it with her friends back in Switzerland. Juliette so annoyed me because she was self-confident. She wasn’t afraid to show her admiration and awe for the city. She didn’t care about seeming nonchalant or appearing like an uncaring Londoner. She was the opposite of me, and so I envied her for doing what I was unable to do. When I moved to Paris, I started to understand Juliette more and more. I would look forward to seeing her photos of the city, and I respected and drew inspiration from her positivity.

The clouds of my mind suddenly parted. “Have I ever truly looked at Big Ben?” I wondered, turning around and holding the great tower in my sights. From my position, right beside it, it seemed to be studded with a million jewels, the way it sparkled, how its flanks were illuminated by the western-moving sun. I had never cared to notice how intricately carved the stone was, lines upon lines of intricacy, interrupted by little rectangular carvings whose design I couldn’t quite make out - perhaps a depiction of trees or the changing of the seasons. In the central section, between the lines, I could make out thin rectangular windows made of stained glass. I then moved my focus to the great clock face, a whopping 7 metres in diameter, standing resplendent in royal blue and gold. Above the upper edge of the face, I noticed 6 shields emblazoned with the cross of St George and above them, the bell tower itself. It was an overwhelmingly beautiful sight, and I understood why there were groups of tourists posing for photos. One lady right beside me was taking a selfie and I instinctively came up to her and offered to take her photo. She posed, and I made an underwhelming picture, unable to angle out a bin and the lamppost beside her. As I handed her phone back, an idea flashed through my head, explosive like a clap of thunder - why don’t I ask her to take my photo? I promptly did, and she agreed. I stood with Big Ben behind me and smiled, knowing that my transformation that day was complete. From ‘faux Londoner’ to pure tourist, the lady passed me my phone and I looked at the photo with glee, knowing that for the first time in my whole life, I had truly seen Big Ben.

This comes from his play - Huis Clos - which means Closed Door in English but takes on the title of No Exit in most British and American translations. It’s the story of three deceased people who are being punished for eternity by being locked in a room together, with no way of getting out. I have always remembered this line, ever since I read the play at university as part of my paper on French existentialist fiction. I imagine this is Sartre’s most famous quip, especially as it suits the scowling, contemplative expression that he wears in most photos.

I made a video recently about this line, that hell is other people, and I got a great response on Instagram and TikTok. It turns out that this phrase isn’t a snobbish remark about how tiresome it is being with less intelligent people. Instead, it comes down to one of Sartre’s existentialist ideas called Le Regard or ‘the look’ in English. This is the theory that when we are in public, an interesting shift occurs in our self-perception. Sartre says that, in the presence of others, we imagine ourselves being looked at and therefore we make ourselves an object, acting and behaving not as we are but how we think other people see us. In this way, we lose all our freedom and agency: we become weighed down by the burden of the gaze from other people.

Have you ever felt the weight of being judged by others? Have you ever walked into a room and sensed unfriendly eyes and hostile lips pointed in your direction? Walking under such a sky, at the mercy of le regard, it’s difficult to act as normal; we long to appear differently, more favourably, to the harsh crowd around us. In our own time, the 21st century, social media has made this feeling even more acute. Every photo posted or video uploaded is scrutinised constantly by a universe of invisible, silent eyes, at all hours of the day. Many content creators or famous people change their persona to adapt to the whims of this faceless mob; they twist and turn and transform for the sake of engagement, the stamp of a like or share, the print of a comment. Who can blame them?

When I first began my Instagram account, before I had even uploaded my first clumsy reel, I was paralysed by the thought that as soon as I did it, thousands, if not billions of people would see me and condemn me to eternal ridicule. This turned out to be untrue - no one gave any attention to my account for at least 6 months. After this point, one video I made about walking took off, and I suddenly had thousands of followers watching my content. It felt giddy to see the numbers rise, but soon I became accustomed to it, and a deep, beautiful apathy settled over my relationship with social media. I would post a video every day and would be mostly indifferent to its existence out there for all the world to see. This only got better as my follower count increased, because the likes and comments I received were mostly from strangers. In that sense, the interactions carry no emotional weight. They see one of my videos about a line of Roman poetry, and they form their own idea of who I am. Many people assume I’m an awkward, scholarly, sweet young man who is obsessed with history, literature, and the Roman world. Often, I’m in awe at how duped some people really are. Many followers ask me how my (nonexistent) PhD is going at Oxford, others assume I am a total expert on art - capable of naming and explaining every artefact in the Louvre. To any one follower, I am someone different; each opinion takes on its particular hue in the spectrum of judgment, and I sit there blind to its shimmering arch above.

I am far more insecure when I upload a photo to my private account, which has some 800 people following me. These people fit into certain camps. A good number are close friends and family, people I love deeply. It is a joy to post photos for them, and it warms my heart to see their appreciative likes and comments. Another good chunk of my followers are less close friends and acquaintances - from work, school, and university. Some of these people I only knew very superficially, and following them is a recognition of a shared past. Perhaps we didn’t talk at all in person, but would notice each other taking a seat in a crowded library or be unconsciously aware of the other’s presence at a formal dinner. It is like a diplomatic gesture to follow these people online. They are there, not out of love, but instead out of a need to legitimise oneself in the history of the world - “we don’t know each other well at all, but we recognise and remember each other’s existence”. A follow from one of these silent acquaintances is a positive stamp in the reputation book. They are saying “I never knew Donoghue, hardly even spoke to him, but he seems a good sort - look what he’s up to now!”. The last type of followers are those I have recently met and connected with. We follow each other as an investment, imagining that down the line, a greater friendship could grow and form. Whenever I post on this private Instagram account, I feel much more stressed and insecure. Each photo speaks to a past, present, or future judgment someone might hold of me. They have their own idea of who I am, based on scatterings of the truth, some from genuinely knowing the entirety of my person, others from being marked by seeing me drunk at university or my voice cracking in a school science lesson. In every photo, I am being interpreted not as I am now, but as how people remember seeing me at a particular time in my life. I wonder if we all feel this way?

Jean-Paul Sartre probably wasn’t imagining the advent of smartphones and the universe of social media. But I’m sure, seeing as he was a famous, public intellectual, the weight of le regard was notably intense. Everywhere he went, people would gaze at him, approach him and ask questions. They all came with their opinions and preformed judgements. He also couldn’t escape the demons of his mind. I once read1 that he would experiment with drugs and give lectures in Paris, and there in the crowd, he thought he saw gleaming red lobsters that would chase him round the city after he had finished speaking. Modern-day celebrities also speak to this phenomenon, of being trapped by the gaze of other people. They are so well known that it becomes exhausting to exist in a world where people have some sort of idea of you and where any expression of anger or irritation can have you shunned from the good favour of the general public.

Perhaps Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase is not so relevant to many of us - the majority of us, in fact, who don’t have a global level of fame. Once in a blue moon, I myself will be recognised by someone in public. They often come up to me, and we have a chat for a couple of minutes. I am always delighted by these moments, and so are other people I know who do things in the public light. A month or so ago, I went to a nightclub in South London called Infernos. It’s famous with rowdy, heavy-pocketed, university graduates who work in The City. The actress Margot Robbie also said that it was her favourite night out in London. I went there following my birthday dinner, accompanied by my friend Pete, who, for the past few years, has been a successful stand-up comedian. He also has an Instagram account where he posts funny, satirical skits. As we moved about in the club and I tried to dance under the growing shadow of fatigue, I watched as the occasional young man would approach Pete, frantically grin and yell, ‘I’ve seen you on Instagram mate - you’re so funny’. Pete, for his part, growing steadily more pissed, would cheer out with elation and pose as they took a photo together. In the Uber back to his house, he expressed how shocked and thrilled he was to be recognised by so many people.

I think we both feel like this because, normally, contrary to what Sartre says about Le Regard, the modern world makes us all feel invisible. Commuting to work in London or Paris can be so dehumanising: the packed trains, phones in front of faces, headphones blaring music. There is no space for gentle reminders of humanity. Eye contact is fleeting, no one says hello or bonjour - and how strange it would be to actually do this to a stranger on the train. Perhaps it is different for me because at this moment in time, I have no 9-5: a great portion of my day is spent in my house outside Paris, alone with my thoughts, my laptop, and books. I try to make my days as productive as possible, and occasionally I become frustrated when I have pre-arranged to meet a friend late in the afternoon. If I have greatly procrastinated that day, I will be driven to a frenzy, angry at myself for having made this plan, and annoyed that the other person is excited to see me. But reliably, every time I actually sit down with the person, a great flood gate opens, and I realise that talking to people, spending time relating and interacting with other human beings - this is the closest I’ve felt to being truly fulfilled, this has to be connected with the meaning of life.

Much of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy I agree with - notably his thoughts on action, and on the freedom we can exert on our lives when we realise the power of our choices. But I don’t agree with his remark that hell is other people - that we are slaves to how we think we are being perceived by others.

Instead, I like to think that if we detach ourselves from this preoccupation, it unlocks such a natural appreciation for other human beings. This is the ‘hippy’ benefit that has come from no longer spending my days in a busy office - I find myself deeply experiencing every interaction I have with a friend or acquaintance. The gratitude and bliss hits me like a drug - perhaps opium, I want to say (have never done it), or the wash of numbing pleasure you occasionally get from alcohol, that constantly fading sweet spot where everything feels connected and intentional and supreme.

I will write more about this shortly, but I prefer what the Roman poet, Ovid, has to say - that all of us, whether we like it or not, are wired to enjoy being under the gaze of other people, and that all of us seek out the gaze, le regard, regularly in our day-to-day lives…

It seemed that I was being bitten deep,
Striding with purpose, parallel to a
wintry Rue Rivoli where crowds packed
Gazing upwards on the steps of Saint-Paul. 
The cold was suffocating, with tight air
Stinging the breeze that cut me out from space,
I turned a corner and plunged down into
A hidden café slightly underground
With empty chairs and tables except one,
And there I saw a face and shape I knew,
who seeing me did smile with clear eyes gleaming
In recognition deep as souls can know.

“Strange friend, I have missed you”, I murmured low,
Folding towards their chest in an embrace.
I pressed my cheek onto their soft shoulder
Feeling their pulse through a jumper and top,
Before pulling myself to picture clear -
Pale smooth skin, hued with a blushing glow,
Bright hair calm like the moon and wide-eyed jewels
Dilating phantom grey and fragile blue.

Gazing at them softly, I continued

“I think about you almost every hour.
I carry you within, along the streets,
In Paris, through the chill and wintry sun,
Orbiting Bastille’s golden, dancing spire,
Or at home, back in England, I recall
There was a time standing up on the hills
Near Oxford, where one sees four counties stretch
And merge in hedgerowed fields beside the Thames.
I was with my friend Bogo and we stood chuffed
To be together in each other's light
As orange dusk stood weightless on the ridge.
From there, we heard the birds and smelt the breath
That comes from England’s grass and oaken soil,
And in my friend’s presence, I smiled for you,
For we too came to places such as this,
We drove in my Passat through Devonshire,
And scaled Dartmoor’s dark hills and winding roads,
Bathing in sunsets, pulsing b’yond belief.
Can you remember this as well as I?
Together we have sat in summer shade
of hotel gardens, by trickling streams
In lonely woods of deepest Somerset:
Bristol’s Park Street has seen us hand in hand
The Severn too, as we crossed into Wales;
I remember the looming Black Mountains
That murmured distantly beyond the fields
sitting upon the English-Welsh border
of the town that would come to see us part.

Floating in the ether, I dream of you
Beyond the clouds, far across the great sea,
In France with a life I do not know,
With people, places, times I never touch.
Parted in the present, a form of you
Perennial still lies within my breast,
A piece of soul, girdled by memory,
That speaks to me gently, and I to it,
Unchanging in its love, untouched by time.
How strange it is to see you here again.”

“It’s evident you’ve moved away from me.
Your eyes betray a distant, glassy flash. 
Looking at you now, I can’t help but see
You think I’m but a normal, average bloke;
Condemned to never be admired by you,
Nor seen as special in your ghostly eyes.
I never know if you truly liked me
But the source within me is only light,
The brightness there for you can never fade.
Within the chambers of my memory,
There is laughter, hand-holding and delight,
Eternity in all the moments past -
Eternity itself to spend with you.

I am the man that you once loved, my friend
I knew you in this dark: for so you shone 
To me from this table, like the first time,
In London’s dry summer, by Saatchi’s gate,
Your eyes slightly quaked in recognition,
Your soul beneath did stir within the sheen
of armour for a person I don’t know.
It lunges at me, striking as we speak,
I parry; but my hands are loath and sad.
Let us go now…

The second late night of the year took place in Poland in early January. Specifically, I was in Warsaw. A friend of mine lives there who had once been part of my group class on Virgil’s Aeneid. He has a kind, likeable face with long curly, grey-black hair and square glasses. He is an engaging speaker with perfect English and a brilliant, sharp, ironic sense of humour. Last summer, after the Aeneid course had finished, he invited me to Cuenca, near Madrid, where he and a friend were renovating a house they had just bought. The friend of his had also done my course on The Iliad, and so I felt assured of being in good company.

The week turned out to be one of the highlights of my year. We toured Roman sites across the region in Spain. I particularly remember visiting Noheda, which houses a large, well-preserved mosaic that depicts the Trojan war and other connected myths. It’s probably one of the few mosaics I have ever seen that has truly stunned me. The tour guide was speaking in Spanish, and I managed to pick up that the mosaic, spreading wide across the trinclinium, detailed the story of Pelops and Tantalus, and then flowed into the Judgment of Paris and the kidnapping of Helen. Along with Dionysus and the maenads thrown into the mix, the mosaic at last arrives at Aeneas with him leading the Trojans into exile towards Italy.

This mosaic at Noheda is considered one of the largest and best-preserved mosaics from the ancient world. You wouldn’t think this from the outside, as the excavation site is plonked right in the middle of a field, and covered by a great white gazebo. There is a little visitor centre, and you park on the muddy grass by a fence at the edge of a field - like at a music festival.

During my time in Spain, we also attended a day of Roman celebration in the village of Valeria. It’s an event called Las Jornadas Romanas, and it takes place every year over a week in August. Everyone wears togas, and there are little stands beside the marble debris of the old Roman town. They sell sparkling bracelets and home-made jewellery as well as armour you can try on and selections of Roman coins from various ages. The great event of that day was the Toga race - a 2km running contest, beginning in the valley below and climbing up a mountain back to the finish in the old town. Eryk and I were the only ones wearing togas, among a crowd of sporty folk, their legs bulging in skimpy shorts. Our goal was to take it easy and avoid being last at all costs. We were, of course, representing our countries in an international athletic competition. We did not want to be put to shame. This turned out to be fairly easy, overtaking the elderly on the flat and then passing a whole swathe of panting Spaniards on the steep uphill. I abandoned Eryk at this point, turning around to see his eyes shimmer with a ‘go on without me, man’ type of message. I passed more people and crossed the finish line, panting and downing a bottle of water handed out by one of the stewards. Eryk finished the race a few minutes later, and Eden walked over from the top of the hill where she had been cheering us on. We got a can of beer and wandered around the Roman site, numbed with endorphins, awe-inspired by the glow of the marble and desert hills painted orange by the disappearing sun. The air was still as we walked to the edge of the Roman town. It had a warm, earthy quality. I wondered if it carried with it the grass from the valley in verdant Cuenca, and maybe some of the smoky taste of Madrid miles beyond, perhaps even a touch of Atlantic salt, miles away to the north. The wind carried the rasping voices of Spaniards further away beside the stands and bar cart. For the rest of that evening, we chatted, drank, and ate a beautiful home-cooked meal in our togas on seats outside the Alcaldia.

On our drive home, a few minutes after midnight, we stopped the car on a country road, at a high point among the rolling fields, to look at the stars. Eryk and Eden marvelled at the constellations from a sky map on Eryk’s phone. I lay down on the field, my back pricked by the hay, and felt gushing gratitude to have experienced all I had in that day, to be where I was in Spain, here in a random field, somewhere I never knew existed until a few moments ago.

…

Poland was different. It was the coldest winter they had experienced in over 30 years, with temperatures reaching up to -20 during the night. Eryk picked me up in his black Mini from the airport, and we drove over to the centre. It was very dark already and the road was wide and arrow-straight. The flowing traffic came to a stop every 600m at traffic lights, their bulbs twinkling through a covering of ice. On each side of the road, there were large, but not ugly, fast-food restaurants as well as stretches of open spaces covered in snow. Eryk told me that in Spring and Summer these areas explode with green trees and flowers. There’s a beautiful view you can see from the road of the glass skyscrapers in central Warsaw standing beyond a frame of tarmac and luscious foliage.

Eryk and I ate at a ‘Milk Shop’ that evening. These are simple, no-nonsense restaurants that serve traditional Polish food at cheap prices, in part subsidised by the state. “The legacy of communism isn’t all that bad,” Eryk reminded me. We then had a second dinner in a modern food arcade. There was a glittering bar in the centre and various food stands lining the perimeter: Chinese, sushi, and a sit-down area with tables set with candlelight. A man of class, I took a chicken tikka masala and proudly spoke in English to the guys behind the counter.

Over the next couple of days, Eryk and his wife gave me an extensive tour of the city. I was surprised to find out that Warsaw was completely different from my expectations. I had imagined a grim, brutalist metropole where people walked back bent, in fear of a repressive police force, who would strike any citizen who stepped out of line. I was right about the scene of endless winter, and people seemed bitter and downtrodden. This was principally because hardly anyone smiled. Eryk told me that it was ingrained into Polish social culture to never smile in daily life. If you laughed or grinned in the street, it wasn’t uncommon for people to ask you if everything was okay or what your problem was. I beamed unintentionally and incurred the grim derision of the city dwellers.

My late night in Warsaw was on my penultimate evening in the city. I had eaten with Eryk, his wife, and two sons at their apartment. It had been a late lunch and we were joined by their friend, a leading endocrinologist at the Warsaw Medical University. She was ebullient and fascinating and I asked half-jokingly if she could inject me with growth hormone. After lunch, buzzing from some wine and a gin and tonic, I taught one of my group classes under a bunk bed in Eryk’s son’s room.

Later on, back in the centre, my night began with me seeing another friend who lived in the city. She is called Lauren, and we met last summer in The Louvre. She had accidentally walked into the frame of my camera during a video shoot where I was explaining a painting. She is pale and slim with dark hair and eyes, and is from Ukraine originally, having moved when the war began. She works as a computer programmer - back end - and was in Paris at that time for a tech conference. The day after The Louvre, we got a coffee on my lunch break, sitting on a dark green bench in Le Marais, in a park just beside The Seine.

Now in Warsaw, we caught up and reminisced about our summer coffee. She came bustling into the wine bar dressed in furs greatly suited to an elegant Slavic woman. We ate and drank for just over an hour and then I walked her to her tram - she had a long journey back to the suburbs where she lived.

I then retraced my steps to head to another bar, where I met a different woman called Zuza. She had messaged me on Instagram earlier in the day, having seen a video I made about Warsaw. “If you’re still here, I’d love to get a drink with you,” read the grey bubble of text. I didn’t know how to respond, and it was by all means, an anonymous Instagram account, with a generic photo of a girl looking at a sea view, perhaps the Amalfi Coast.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained - I decided and, just after 10 pm, I wandered over to a small, hidden cocktail bar. I was later joined by Zuza, who was tall and beautiful, wearing an elegant cocktail dress. I was wearing jeans, and, true to form, I refused any alcoholic drinks and ordered a glass of sparkling water that I drank slowly - enjoying the bubbly fireworks in my mouth. It was a fine place to drink - Zuza told me she was a regular at this spot. They did the best Negronis in the whole of Warsaw, she claimed. Potentially, the best Negronis in the whole Eastern Bloc, I countered with a proud grin. The light was low, and people’s faces were cast in shadows. But the bar was bright with lights projected from its base. These illuminated a tall cabinet of expensive liquors - gins, vodkas, rums - all with peculiar shapes and colours. It stood like a great altar or perhaps like the grand piping face of a church organ. The windows were made of stained glass, and a coloured haze spread about the room, which made it seem as if we were drinking and speaking inside of a purple crystal.

She asked if I fancied another drink but I shook my head with concern. The moon was nearly up; it was approaching 11 - nearly the witching hour. It was time to head back to my Airbnb. “Let’s have a walk first,” she suggested, and we made our way to Constitution Square - one of the last places in Warsaw that has a name linked to the Communist Era. Apparently, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they had tried to rename it as Ronald Reagan Square - but luckily, it faced severe opposition. It was bitingly cold but Zuza cheerfully showed me some of the architectural delights of this part of the city. There were three towering lamps with tall, firm bases and copper-green arms that held orange-glowing bulbs. They stood outside the great MDM Hotel, an iconic symbol of Soviet architecture, constructed in 1952. This made it the first hotel to open in Warsaw after World War II. Zuza pointed to some of the grand properties that stood behind it. They had smooth, warm stone and pristine, palatial outer façades. During the communist era, everyone was meant to be equal, Zuza told me, but the upper floors of these buildings had butlers and high ceilings for those who worked for the government.

It was at this point that I said goodbye to Zuza. We walked together down towards my Airbnb and she told me I should come to a ball that was taking place in a Krakow salt mine later on in the summer. I thought that sounded wonderful, and later, back in my room, I sat in the armchair, dozily imagining myself twirling and spinning under a ceiling made of sparkling salty crystals. Before I dozed off, I glanced at the time on the oven clock - 11:30. I smiled with another night ticked off in the books.

It’s a PDF document I have saved on my computer. I have a version in French as well as a copy translated into English. The document is an essay entitled L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, and it comes from the French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre. It wasn’t originally a piece of writing but instead a lecture given by Sartre at Club Maintenant in Paris in 1945. It was then copied up by an editor unbeknownst to Sartre and sold as a publication. The text we have is thought to be exactly what was said by the philosopher, and apparently, his talk caused quite a stir. People were enraptured by his speech. Can you imagine? The greatest mind of the generation giving a soul-stirring lecture about agency, human responsibility, and all the wonderful possibilities that come from it.

I first had to read this text when I was at university. It was on my reading list for the paper on 20th-century French literature. I had an exam on this topic in the summer of my fourth year, for my finals. It consisted of 3 essays to do in 3-hours - at least under normal conditions. With the post-COVID legacy of cancelled schooling, the Modern Languages department at Oxford weren’t taking any risks in student welfare. For my final year only, the three hours of writing in person under the watch of great portraited figures hanging in exam schools was changed to an 8-hour exam at home on our computers. How greatly I would have preferred the shorter option. No nonsense, all the pressure and prize in this limited time, relying on your memory and the true knowledge you had acquired in 4 years at university. Instead, the 8-hour test became a strange, lucid day where not a second was lost in hyper-focused planning, writing, and obsessive checking over. I took a walk along the country lane near my house once it was all over. I can recall the pleasant shine of the grass where a few cows were grazing. Behind them was a small wood that was dark and labyrinthine within the folds of the trees.

In the 20th century paper, spanning a whole century, you have to write essays on 3 distinct topics within the time period. I chose existentialism, 20th-century theatre, and novels depicting the Holocaust and post-war France.

I stumbled through the latter topics, but found my feet well-grounded in the philosophy of Sartre and Camus. I even bought Sartre’s most famous treatise, L’Être et le Néant - Being and Nothingness - which turned out to be quite impossible to read. I tackled one page before consigning myself to an article discussing the main ideas. Even after university, I have gone through periods where I try to read 10-pages a day. Impossible. The language is too deep, the French is so layered with arguments and counterarguments, clunky words used exclusively for precision rather than aesthetics.

The lecture and now PDF ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ is much easier to deal with. Its main idea is that we as humans are born free from chains of duty and obligation. We are born without an essence or a pre-ordained meaning, and it is for us to decide our own path in life. Existence precedes essence (l’existence précède l’essence) as Sartre famously put it - we begin just by existing and thus have the freedom to assign to ourselves a higher calling, purpose, or mission in the world. Unlike a knife, Sartre says, which is created with a blade for the sole purpose of cutting, stabbing, and slicing, we are created without any such defining quality.

Because of this, we have the freedom to take action and to make conscious choices of how we behave outwardly and inwardly. It is up to us to create the person we want to become.

Sartre gives us a great example of our freedom through the story of one of his students. He describes how one day, he was approached by a young man who attended his lectures. He wanted his advice about a dilemma he was facing, and Sartre said he would listen and counsel him as best he could. The young man’s problem was that he had two possible courses he could take in life. The Second World War was raging in Europe, and the young man wanted to enlist and fight for his country against the threat of Hitler and fascism. In this sense, he would be a very small part in a very important, worldwide cause. However, he also had a widowed mother at home who was ageing and needed looking after. If he left for the war, she would be heartbroken and desperately lonely. Were he to stay and look after her, he would make an enormous impact in her life, even though this was a much smaller cause on the global scale. He asked Sartre which option was the correct one, and the philosopher, no doubt revelling in the wisdom he was about to bestow, replied that there was no right option. It was up to him and him alone to choose the path of his life. Only he had the freedom to do so.

It’s marvellous to live in Paris and to feel the energy of this famous philosopher along the streets. In fact, wherever you go in Europe, there’s some sign of his legacy. A few days ago, I was in the Kumu Art Museum, in Tallinn, Estonia. In one room, there is a timeline detailing the history of Estonia during the War, USSR, and then the subsequent liberation. There, in 1964, it read that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had visited Estonia. You simply can’t escape him.

He is often paired alongside Albert Camus, the Franco-Algerian novellist and philosopher who won the Nobel Prize for his work l’Étranger. Camus was cooler, more stylish, tanned, and easily charming. Sartre had a more agressive countenance. He was fiercely intellectual, heavily donned with academic recognition, and lacked Camus’ smiling appeal. However, one shouldn’t be misled. Whenever someone asks me whom I prefer, Camus or Sartre, I find it hard to make a decision but deep down, I think I prefer the philosopher.

There’s something about his high-octane intellectualism - the way he rejected the Nobel Prize when it was offered to him because “he didn’t want to be institutionalised.” Sartre was also more woke than Camus on issues such as feminism and colonialism. I also love how despite a fierce and elitist exterior, Sartre’s philosphy shines with hope and joy - the boundless possibilities of humanity, the burden we all carry.

Sartre’s essay Existentialism is a Humanism, reminds me of the last paragraph of another book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” by Joseph Campbell. It speaks of the idea that we have a choice, a difficult, existential burden. It is the only thing that matters and thus there is beauty in struggle and desperation, an honour in striving to live as authentically as possible.

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed, must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalised avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says “as though the day were here”. It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribes great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

On the television, there was a livestream from London. At Westminster, the firework show was underway. Some people I knew were there at that very moment. A girl I once met at a gym in Oxford was in a nearby members’ club, The Ned. The next day, I saw a video on Instagram of her posing with the view behind her. Tall and blonde, in a chic blue ball gown, she stood with her black-tied boyfriend, both with drinks in their hands. She had a brown fur scarf draped over her shoulders. I had only met her once, on an afternoon in October, as I headed into the gym. She was at Brookes - the other university in the city, and she perfectly fit the stereotype for girls who went there: pretty, sporty, and intensely posh. As the years passed, I had brief glimpses into her life through social media: trips to Ibiza, the Caribbean, as well as rainy afternoons with friends in English fields, dressed in tweed coats and flat caps, a shotgun slung over her arm.

I wondered if she remembered our encounter. It seemed probable, as she still follows me on Instagram. One day, I may be blessed by a ‘like’ from her. Early on in January, I looked again at her photos from New Year’s Eve, wondering if she had thought of me in that moment.

I had received offers from friends to head out to London for New Year’s Eve. My friend Ophelia asked if I was interested in a party she was attending at some large Kensington mansion. She went to a few of those in our final year at Oxford, and her stories from those events made me think of a mixture between The Great Gatsby, the film ‘Saltburn’, as well as Trainspotting - among the stylish Oxbridge set, in fine dinner jackets, sipping their drinks, were scruffier folks at the sidelines selling powdery drugs in small plastic bags. I shuddered when I thought of such a night.

My other top friend, Pete, had suggested we do something as well, but he was now off skiing with another chap, Miguel, in Chamonix. One week later, after he’d returned, Pete told me of their great nights out after a day on the piste. They would stay in après-bars until 8 pm and then have a grand dinner with Miguel’s parents in the hotel. It was only after pudding that they went out again to the Chamnoix nightclubs - Pete wearing a pair of comic yellow sunglasses, which all the girls complimented him on. On other nights, past 3 am, he would sit, boozed up, in the hotel sauna, sweating out the next day’s hangover. He even bumped into my great almost-love from Oxford, Viola, who approached him saying, “Hey, it’s Pete, right, you’re Harry’s friend?”

When Pete told me this, I groaned like Aeneas watching Troy burn before him. “Did you tell her I want to marry her? What else did she say?” I stuttered, holding back tears and begging for more information.

New Year’s Day began like any other. I read and did some writing before my relatives arrived at midday. In the afternoon, we went to a local abbey in the countryside for a choral concert performed by a London-based youth choir. It lasted two hours, and I was sitting beside my uncle, admiring the grand space - the towering ceiling above, a pleasant mixture of warm wood and glistening stone, white walls. After we left the concert, we drove home, and the sun burned orange as it set over the pleasant, hedgerowed hills that stood on the western horizon. Later, we had a family dinner and then retired to the living room, in front of the TV, drinking and snacking all the way up until midnight.

At 10:30, I tried to sneak off to bed. I wasn’t bothered with seeing the night through to the New Year. I began to broach this with my family, but my uncle laughed and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Where do you think you’re going? You’ve GOT to stay up to midnight!” he exclaimed through a grin.

I tried to reason with him. I had to plan a lesson the next day. I wanted to get started on it early, before more family arrived for lunch. In my mind, it was more than a fair excuse.

My uncle took a sip from his gin and tonic, ice cubes clinking together in his glass.

“If you go to bed early, I’ll just come and wake you up,” he threatened.

I frowned and let out a sigh. I took out a book and read until 11:50. Then, I opened a bottle of champagne and filled five glasses - just in time to toast as the chimes and fireworks from London sounded through the TV.

My family and I rose from our seats, all grinning, and clinked glasses with each other. It was a moment I was glad to have stayed up for. Being sober, I managed to glance at all the faces of my family who were standing around me. I felt grateful to have spent this auspicious moment with them. I turned my face to the TV that showed the fireworks going off outside Westminster. I thought back to what I had done and where I had been on past New Year’s Eves. My former selves floated before my eyes.

I remembered New Year’s Eve in 2017 when I was black-out drunk with two school friends, at a houseparty in some London suburb. I had been invited by a girl I barely knew, and, using my salesman skills, I had persuaded her to let my two pals come along with me. It was a brief glimpse into what could have been, the youth I may have had if I had spent my teenage years living in the capital. The people I met there seemed mentally older and more world-weary. They had been doing drugs for years at that point. Most of them smoked and had grubby faces, peppered with stubble, and mouths lined with coffee-stained, tobacco-marked teeth. I can recall watching the guys my age leaning against the walls, taking drags from the cigarettes they had rolled themselves. As they drew in breath, their eyes narrowed, and their lips formed a sickly grimace. They seemed depleted, full of ennui, and resigned to the fact that they had spent their teenage years in London. Nothing could top that. Adulthood offered no new or exciting possibilities. The march towards old age had begun. With my provincial naivety, I wondered why they all looked so depressed.

In more recent years, in 2022 and 2023, I spent New Year’s Eve at my ex-girlfriend’s house in Switzerland. I was the only Englishman in their little gathering of hometown friends. At five minutes to midnight, shunning the drunken crowd, I rushed upstairs to the top floor and watched fireworks alight over Lausanne. Alone with my thoughts, I felt the New Year come and go peacefully. The fireworks were spread across the whole city. The light from their explosions reflected in the flat darkness of Lake Geneva and illuminated the mountain peaks on the other side of the water. On the floor below, I heard the light footsteps of my girlfriend searching for me.

I watched these ghosts of my past flutterabout and wisp away into the fireplace. I felt calm and warm around the familiar voices of my relatives.

I know Paris very well now, and yet I still don’t feel completely at home. I love the city in parts, but I miss England and I often think about London where all my friends live.

I am writing this before heading to the gym. With my laptop on a table and sitting on a wicker chair with a green back, I am looking south onto Place de la Bastille. I am inside one of the brasseries that line the square. Directly in front of me, there is the modernist opera house and on the right, the blue bronze ‘July Column’ with its glittering golden statue. So much history surrounds this little area of Paris. When this column was fully unveiled in 1840, the inauguration featured a procession of musicians playing Berlioz’s Grande Symphonie funèbre et triomphale. What’s more, it was Berlioz himself who was directing it. What a spectacle that must have been! In the group classes I run on Virgil’s Aeneid, I share a part of Berlioz’s opera Les Troyens. Specifically, it’s a piece in the opera called The Royal Hunt and Storm, and it follows a moment in The Aeneid when Aeneas is in Carthage as the guest of Dido. A hunt is organised, and the Gods create a storm so that Dido and Aeneas can shelter together alone in a cave. There, they are married in a strange ceremony, and they make love as a storm rages outside their little shelter. This piece in Berlioz’s opera is so great because there are no singers: it’s purely music played by the orchestra. If you close your eyes, you can picture the storm and imagine the different components in the scene.

The 18th Arrondissement

When I first moved to Paris, I was living in the 18th arrondissement with my ex-girlfriend. We had a medium-sized apartment near Porte de Clignancourt, which is the stop at the northern end of Line 4 of the metro. It is right by the périphérique, and when I used to come home from work at 6 pm, there would be large groups of men speaking Arabic and African languages, smoking outside a dreary bar. There were also illegal cigarette vendors, chirping like strange birds - “grep, rett, rett, grep” - and occasionally someone, usually scruffy, would approach them and hand over some change for a packet of counterfeit smokes. As you walked towards our apartment, more men could be seen hanging outside buildings, on the pavement, shouting to each other. I remember learning a verb when I was 16 in my French class at school, “traîner dans la rue” which means to lurk about in the road. It was a term loaded with negativity and often a key phrase in the topic on anti-social behaviour and integration. On my walks in the morning and evening, en route to or returning from work, I’d smile as I looked about me and saw these men in the road. “Trainer dans la rue”, once a mere piece of vocabulary to learn for a test, now a reality before my very eyes - the word become flesh. Of course, these people aren’t doing anything aggressive for the most part. They’re just living their lives, taking part in their community that has been pushed out and scorned by the French government for years. At first, in the late 1800s, the northern parts of the city were inhabited by working-class, manual labourers. Émile Zola depicts what life was like for them in his work L’Assomoir. Then, the area shifted into a Jewish ghetto, especially along Boulevard Ornano, which is a main road linking the Péiphérique to Gare du Nord. Now, it is home to immigrants from North and Sub-Saharan Africa.

But the 18th Arrondissement is so diverse. Indeed, on my walk home, after I passed a little park on the right-hand side of the street, the shop fronts would begin to change. Zambian grocers start to disappear and in their place sprout wine bars and trendy bistros selling Perriers for five euros a piece. Further up, there are pizzerias that have chairs and tables on the pavements in the summer months. I remember passing them on evening walks in spring, and the warm smell of tomato and cheese would hang pleasantly in the air.

Technically, it’s a different part of the 18th arrondissement at this point. It’s quieter here and further removed from the congested ring road. Porte de Clignancourt fades away, and in its place, I would enter Jules Joffrin, a well-to-do, bohemian quartier perched on the northern face of Montmartre. My old colleague and now friend lives here and he’s as French as they get as well as eerily resembling Harry Styles. My old apartment is in this area, along a quiet street beside a barbershop. It has one bedroom and bathroom. It faced onto a large courtyard where other towers rose around it in a square. It was quiet, and for the whole time I lived there, our window was covered in scaffolding as works were done to our particular section. One night in March, there was a fire in our flat. Some of the insulation the builders put in had self-combusted and filled our room with vile fumes. We had been out for dinner and had seen a fire engine outside our door. I have a great photo from the night of the firemen, in the dark, climbing out of our window, their suits and silver helmets reflecting in torchlight.

I have very fond memories of the 18th Arrondissement. My ex-girlfriend and I used to get coffee on the weekend at the end of the street. It’s a place called Dose, and they made delicious banana bread and rich, silky flat whites. I also used to greatly enjoy the short runs I went on before work, through Jules Joffrin and past the metro. There I would turn right and climb a steep hill, followed by three flights of stone stairs that led to the summit of Montmartre. Paris was just waking up in those moments. Bistros at the corner of the street would be setting out their chairs and tables. I remember passing waiters smoking cigarettes, leaning against the outer door of their bistrots, resting ahead of a long shift. The stairs came to an end on Rue du Mont-Cenis, a street named after a mountain in the Alps. The main route through Montmartre was deserted on my early morning runs and I would work my way left, through a street warmed by neon and the sparkle of polished glass. Another right turn and a further 50 metres led me to a magnificent viewpoint in front of the Sacreé Coeur that looked out over the whole of Paris. It was a view that got better in spring when I’d see the sunrise. In those moments, as it got lighter and lighter, more details of the city would come into view. “There’s the Pompidou Centre; there’s the church near work.”

I haven’t been back to the 18th since October last year but it remains a treasured place in my heart, and those views, encompassing the whole, mesmerising urban area, still fill my soul whenever I look back on the phot

I shall explain myself, and, as a note before we get going, I want to say that this took me ages to write. I’m not sure why. I think I was partly embarrassed to share this. I felt like the subject was personal, and thus I struggled to find the right words. And even then, when I found suitable vocabulary, it felt like clumsy writing. Regardless, here is my attempt to explain why I set this as a resolution for 2026.

I’ve written before about how I prefer early nights to late nights. I’ve mentioned that I don’t often go clubbing and that since the age of 20, I’ve been gradually decreasing the amount of alcohol I drink.

It’s always been rooted in my DNA. When I was 17 and 18 and exposed to beer for the first time, I would head out to pubs and bars with my friends, but would always leave early by choice. I wanted to get home, rest up and then begin my day early the next morning. I never saw the appeal of staying out very late and coming back to bed as the sun rises.

At university, I went out more, I drank regularly with friends and headed to nightclubs multiple times a week. It was a searing experience, and overwhelmingly new, but after a while, and several nights out on the trot, it began to feel forced. I remember noticing that I was expected to have a beer every time I was out. Furthermore, I saw that I had developed a desire to drink and a longing for a slight taste of alcohol during a normal university day.

It had become a habit of the university experience, an expectation that all were ordered to submit to. If you weren’t drinking, what were you doing? To lower your alcohol intake was to voluntarily ostracise yourself from the social scene at Oxford. You couldn’t go out clubbing, nor could you seriously belong in a sports club. Everything seemed to revolve around the stuff. Political organisations, arts and writing societies - they all had events and activities framed with the prospect of boozing on free drinks. A notable mention was the feminist society whose Friday night meet was called “Wine and Whine” (I admit I never went, but always remembered the name with a smile).

It was hopeless. Even if you joined the college chapel choir, there was post-service sherry and complimentary wine at the formal dinner afterwards. Alcohol consumption was a tax to be paid if you wanted to be sociable and fit in with the group. It was a common agreement to give up control, to sacrifice a part of one’s health aboard the bus to oblivion, for the good of the soirée. As soon as you decide not to drink and not to pay that tax, you also have to step out of that world. Whatever people say about “It’s okay, you don’t have to drink”, just know that’s what they say is true, but that all action comes with consequences. The people next to you or sitting opposite around the table realise that you’re not as invested in the fun of the event as they are. They’ll begin to trust you less, and a noticeable divide appears - it’s something in the ether, caught in their eyes, spread in the atmosphere above. You’re not one of them anymore. You’re acting selfishly and have abandoned the tribe. Nevertheless, it’s okay, and the shock of removal quickly decreases as time passes. Out afresh into the world, you come back to yourself. The wind is calm and warm, and a new journey commences.

At the beginning of my second year at Oxford, I had a breakdown, or rather an important moment of discovery. To set the scene, my best friend and I were moving into the swankiest apartment in Trinity College. It was called the Newman Room, named after Cardinal Newman - saint of the Catholic Church - who had once lived there. It was universally believed that the Cardinal had cast a spell onto the room and that it was blessed by his spirit. This meant that future generations could act as they pleased in the room, do whatever they liked, and suffer no consequences - a protective shroud of sainthood enclosed the space. Convinced of our immunity, we accepted the challenge and sought to build a mighty year of drinking and fine dinners together.

However, it wasn’t all perfect. Something clicked inside of me on the first day I arrived back at Oxford. I wasn’t sleeping well, and I felt anxious a lot of the time. I decided to begin to decrease my drinking and adopt healthier habits. Over the next two years, I dramatically reduced the alcohol I consumed. Even when I was working as a sommelier after university, I only drank once, maybe twice a week.

I also began to get rigid with my routine, always going to bed and waking up at the same time, cutting out caffeine and avoiding bright lights in the evening. I followed wellness, health podcasters such as Andrew Huberman, who, through their doomsday pronouncements, tightened my resolve to avoid things that could hinder the health perfection I sought. My sleep and wake routine became increasingly rigid. I vowed to never venture out past 9 pm and thus wake early to go to the gym and write.

I thought that this was fulfilling me. It freed up time to spend on writing, and it gave me a sense of control. I felt, in a grand, stoic, and sanctimonious manner, that I was choosing the noble path, shunning a side of society that I deemed superficial. I chose to abandon experiences that reminded me of my early adulthood, when I was more unsure of myself and scared about what I didn’t know. But the control over my routine still made me feel anxious. I feared stepping even slightly outside of its bounds: the voice of Andy Huberman would come to me like a phantom if I chose to even look at my phone past 8 pm - Do you realise what you’re doing, boy?!!!

The Change

It was in June last year that I made a change. In the year leading up to that point, it felt like something wasn’t aligned within me. I was healthy and fit but unfulfilled: as if there were a whole side of life that I was refusing to look at. Something out of the dark encouraged me to explore and experience. I felt a calling; there was a gap within me like a shadow. But if I were to give it all up, my health crusade, my rigid routine, would all that I had built fall apart, all the confidence? I began to worry, and I delayed my decision to make a new start.

Everything stagnated in a no man’s land of inaction. There was no set moment when I had to act, and so I drifted for a while, contemplating my options. It was only when I was wasting time on YouTube, watching videos while I ate lunch, that the moment of change was bestowed upon me. The video I was watching was a compilation of scenes from Fight Club, the 1999 movie with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. I was eating a bowl of food that I had bought from a local eatery - popular with professionals working around Le Marais. In my bowl, there were strips of chicken, glazed with a sweet sesame sauce, cheesy pasta, and soft baked carrots with hydrating green beans. I had eaten this particular meal so many times, and yet I always murmured with pleasure and delight at the mixture of flavours - the warm, thick pasta and the strong, honey-sweet chicken. The women who run the restaurant knew my order by heart. The owner, Louisa, actually gave me her number, so I could preorder a bowl and skip the queue whenever I went. At that moment, I was sitting in my office, taking a delightful forkful of food, when my attention was pulled back to the screen of my laptop, where Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were talking to each other heatedly in a car.

Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt): This does not belong to us, we are not special. *voice rising* Fuck what you know, you need to forget about what you know. That’s your problem, forget about what you think you know about life.

*Screaming* Look at you, you’re fucking pathetic! Stop trying to control everything and just let go! LET GO!

I watched this scene a few times. It particularly struck me how Brad Pitt’s character was shouting aggressively and yet his overall manner was relaxed - he was leaning back into the seat of the car as he drove, and turning every so often to speak to and look at Edward Norton.

It may seem clichéd to say that this moment was the impetus for me. It brought home that I, in a fever, was trying to control too much. I was desperate to keep an order in my life, and, by doing so, an inner mess of doubt and fear was bubbling over.

I was resolved from that moment on to “Let Go”. I was happy to keep my routine and continue going to bed early, but I swore to be less fixated on it, to allow myself the grace to be free to move outside of it and experience more things as I wanted to.

There was a moment when I thought back to my earlier self in the second year, at Oxford, where my desire for control, health and order had been born. Out of a place of fear and self-love, I had sought to become stronger and healthier. I have greatly succeeded in this goal, and it was a difficult, long road. I believe my younger self would be happy and proud of me, but so the road goes on and on. Indeed, it’s an infinite game where there is no glorious finish or homecoming.

Now the road splits for me to change course and reassess. In June 2025, I decided to stop caring so much about controlling my routine. At my own pace now, I am seeking to explore and experience more, to stay out later if I wish.

And thus, my goal for 2026 is to have 52 nights where I stay up later, if possible, past midnight. I will write about each one of them here in my Substack, and I hope you enjoy what is to come.

I had taken the train from Oxford to Bristol, which is a 2-and-a-half-hour easy journey with a change at Didcot. The wait at Didcot is always over 25 minutes. I always found myself standing on a silent platform, shivering in my coat. The platforms are long at Didcot, maybe reaching 100m, and they are well lit by orderly lights that project onto the tracks. There are also departure boards that have snaking orange letters, announcing the coming trains and their scheduled stops. Beyond the edge of the platform, there is an abyss of darkness, broken irregularly by the lights of an arriving train. I would stand along the platform or sit on a bench, awaiting the connecting train, alone with my thoughts. Often, I made the mistake of placing my duffel bag too near the platform edge, and would have to dive and pull it closer to me as a fast train rocketed past, sucking the air and sound and light into it like a horrifying vortex - a thrill to experience.

That evening, the plan was to go to a DJ event at a nightclub called Lakota, famous for drum and bass music. It was a Halloween-themed night - Pulp Fiction x Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I had brought a charity-shop Hawaiian shirt, a bucket hat, and faded blue jeans. I dropped my bags at Callum and Daisy’s, and then we taxied into the centre of the city, to a pub located on the Wharf by Park Street. The bar itself is called the V-shed, and it’s grotesque with two floors, each one decked with sticky wooden chairs and stained carpet floors. Callum and Daisy wanted to stay at the pub for a while. Their plan was to pre-drink for an hour or so and then head over to the club for near midnight. I fought against this idea. It was only 10 pm, and the event was due to begin at 11. I wanted to be through the doors early. I had old school friends to see, music to enjoy. Why delay the good that was to come? Callum and Daisy had ordered drinks, but I was restless, constantly turning my eyes around the space, checking the time on my watch, adjusting my bucket hat. Daisy’s friend had joined us, and she was sorrowfully recounting a tale of heartbreak, regularly pausing her story for a sip of purple cider. I was furious, indignantly declaring aloud that I hadn’t travelled all the way from Oxford to sit in a grotty bar, unmoving, stagnant, just to arrive late to a music event we had all paid money to go to. I was now pacing around the table, arms stretched out pleadingly, palms upturned skyward, eyes burning, pitching my case for an immediate move away from the bar and off to the nightclub. They grudgingly relented, and we walked over, queuing for 20 minutes before passing the bouncer and entering an exciting, unknown building, darkly lit and packed with strange, diverse human beings.

…

It was hard to get my head around the great space. It had many levels and flowed unexpectedly into different rooms, moving in an instant from a low-ceilinged bunker to a wide, warehouse floor. The walls and air throbbed with bassy tones: streams of coloured light illuminated shafts of air, heavy with alcoholic fumes. I quickly lost Callum, Daisy, and their heartbroken friend. A bar opened up on the right-hand side of a room, and there I spotted Lex, my friend from school, in a fresh blue Hawaiian shirt, his blonde hair swept back, eyes slightly glazed, rippling arm veins on display.

For a while, we stood in a central space, close to the main entrance of the club. We had a couple of drinks and moved to the beats of music that neither of us particularly enjoyed. Instead, the great drops and the pounding drums made us giggle. We cast our eyes around the room in glee, both feeling a deep, giddy absurdity. For the seven previous years, Lex and I had shared the same school bus, morning and evening, 190 days a year. From the ages of 11 to 18, we had sat next to each other, I by the aisle, and he, squeezing past me to go by the frosty window. Coach companies had changed, the design of the carpety seats along with them, and journeys had been delayed as buses broke down by the side of the road. Through all of this, my space beside Lex was a constant of our friendship. It was a foundation built on hours of silence through our late childhood and teenage years. I would be reading or chatting to others, while Lex would listen to music - back straight up against the chair, eyes closed in rest, or jaw crunching, bulging out the side of his face as he ate a chocolate energy bar. Like family dinners or stroking a beloved pet in the morning, it was something easy to take for granted. Lord only knows how many hours of our early years were spent on those buses. We all came to know the tarmac of those roads, each bump and pothole. I still follow the route whenever I drive to Oxford. It begins in Hampshire and moves due north through Berkshire and Oxfordshire, over the curving ridgeway, before flattening out in the upper Thames Valley. How I loved that ancient line of hills, the folds of the land, the hedgerowed fields, a barren green in winter that erupts with wheat and bright flowers in Spring. Those journeys of our youth were coloured with deep sunsets and icy mornings.

But here we were now, in a different kind of silence, unable to communicate over the music. The bond we had went beyond words; we understood the texture of the silence, and so we moved. The dance floor was busy, but there was still space to slide between groups of people. I checked the time on my phone. 11 pm, the peak time for people arriving at the nightclub. As I looked at my screen, I saw a message from another school friend, John. He had just arrived and was ordering a drink by the entrance. I paced over with Lex to see him, making my way through huddled bodies swaying to the music, tapping people on the shoulder with a smiling excuse me. John is very different from Lex and me. He had been a rugby player at school, and now, in his 19th year, stood at 6ft 3 and weighed just over 100 kilos. John and I had been in the same tutor group at school for our first two years. We had always got on well, but only truly became friends in the summer of our first year when I did a karate course hosted by his mum. John was already a black belt aged 11. Sure of his physical skill, he oozed confidence in the schoolyard. This only increased as he grew taller and heavier. He was also funny and jokingly confrontational. He was never afraid to say what he thought, and often spoke his mind after a few drinks, a brutal form of comedy. He never cared, but it often created awkward scenes as passersby would be irritated yet paralysed - how could they call him out or try to intimidate him when he was so intimidating himself. After our first two years at school, John and I saw each other less. We were in different general sets, but we were occasionally invited to the same parties. Without a doubt, he was cooler than I was. Highly sporty, boisterous, he wasn’t afraid to talk to girls or get into a fight in his houseroom. We reconnected as if by divine providence in our penultimate year at school when he happened to be in my maths and Spanish class. We would sit next to each other in every lesson.

I spotted John from far away, lingering, drunkenly leaning at the side of the bar. Some of his uni housemates stood beside him. From afar, it seemed as if there was no conversation between them. They all seemed sluggish and were looking around the space with blank expressions and unfocused eyes. I arrived closer to him, beaming and calling his name, “John! John!! You alright?” I seemed to cry, bubbling with happiness, arms wide for the embrace. He stood up, putting his weight onto his right leg, leaning as if moving in slow motion. His eyes too, gradually circled before coming onto me and shining with recognition. “A-aaaaa-lrighttt, Donners?” He slurred carefully. In real time, I watched his eyes grow wide and pupils dilate before we pulled each other into a hug. “Wee-uh, we took a (inaudible word), a while ago.” He stuck his tongue out and confusedly grinned. His friend, a strong-looking guy with a shaved head, in a black shirt, placed his hand firmly on John’s shoulder, as if for support. It seemed as if any attempt at meaningful conversation would be lost. “Send me a text if you need anything,” I shouted to him over the music, before Lex and I dove back into the folds of the nightclub.

I met a girl called Gemma at some point soon after, and her I circulated for a while, dancing together in the wide open room. We darted around the club, discovering private spaces and tables hidden away from the public view. She had dark brown hair and long eyelashes, with an athletic figure. Her eyes were small and amber coloured, and she had dark eyeliner. The effect of it all made her seem curious and questioning like a cat. She studied biochemistry, and at one point, by accident, we ran into John again, who seemed to have sobered up completely from whatever he had taken. Now he was just a bit drunk. He laughed as he saw me and called out with a clearer tone. Gemma saw him too and excitedly burst out, “Oh John, it’s you!! We’re in the same lab! It’s nice to see you outside.” She turned her face up to John, who had a dark expression, a blank countenance - “I’ve never seen you before in my life,” he said without emotion. Gemma shook her head, laughing, “Yeah, yeah, John, (smiling still) - we are literally in the same group for Chemistry.” John, in turn, doubled down on his denial, his voice slightly louder, not aggressive or unkind, but instead clear and unbiased, as if he were reading the news or stating a commonly known, boring fact. “I have never seen you before in my life.”

I steered Gemma away from him, and we danced some more in the open space. At around 2 am, Callum and Daisy came over to me. They were calling an Uber home and asked if I wanted to join them. Gemma was making a move too, and I sped over the dance floor to say goodbye to Lex, who was with a friend who was whispering in his ear, and then to John, who was revelling in a drunken second wind, moving his heavy body to and fro, giggling with some girls.

…

I caught up with Gemma, my new friend, the next day in a coffee shop at the top of the hill on Park Street. The roads were damp from showers during the day. There were small puddles in potholes and dips in the tarmac. We went for a walk over to Cabot Tower, a high point that looked over Bristol. It was early evening, and there was no one else at the viewpoint, nor in the tight spiral staircase that led to the top of the tower. Speaking softly, we emerged through the opening and held the evening city in our gaze. The tower had an all-encompassing view - the stone platform wove in a circle around the staircase. I stood looking south-east, towards the wall of brightly coloured terraced houses over Totterdown, where Callum’s apartment was. I could just make it out, and everything else seemed blurred by the flashing orange and red lights of the street. I breathed through my nose and placed my arm around Gemma’s shoulders. Everything was still; this was the present moment, perhaps a pivotal experience in my last year as a teenager. I felt Gemma move away from me. She walked up to the wall, placing her hand on the edge before turning back to look at me.

…

After the day of skiing, long after Fluorescent Adolescent had finished playing, we were walking out along the bottom of the piste. Richard and Dick were behind me. There was a pizza restaurant on the other side of the small village, and we had a table booked there for dinner. The sun had set three hours before, disappearing behind one of the tall peaks that enclose the resort. There was the slightest purple afterburn lingering further east, and we could see the valley stretch away through the gap between two chalets. There, perched on the side of the hill, was the town of La Rosière, a larger ski town than our little village. I could see the road winding up in hairpins to a flatter plain filled with many houses, a finger of a church spire - all cast dreamily with warm light that made the whiteness of the snow glow pink and then blue.

I thought back to that moment on top of Cabot Tower with Gemma - her dark hair and full cheeks that sloped into smile lines that formed a triangle with her mouth and lips. I hadn’t seen her since that evening on top of the tower. We have tried but never succeeded in meeting again. I follow her still on Instagram and see updates of her life, living in London with her boyfriend. She falls neatly into the grander picture of Bristol and the memories I have of it during my student days: the nights spent in Bristol in Callum’s terraced flat, traipsing into the centre to dim bars, sipping cider by the canal.

The grand Halloween night-out was the peak of these memories. Soon after, lockdowns arrived, I moved to France for a year-abroad, and when I came home, Callum and Daisy had moved out of Bristol, further down in Somerset, far from city life and its fire of culture.

I still come to Bristol, and I hope to do a night out there soon with John, who is now stronger, still as sociable, and a high-flying businessman. In more recent years, post-university, I spent weekends there with my ex-girlfriend, and we enjoyed evenings in wine bars, and our days in coffee shops, searching for books in Oxfams that lie along Park Street.

…

We were now right by the pizza restaurant, and the glow of Le Rosière, set upon the side of the mountain brighter and more sparkling than moments before. Deep down in the valley floor, past the snowline, it was dark and silent.

As I sped down the mountain, I would turn back every so often to check on the progress of my father and his friends - all good snowboarders, but much older than me. Richard and Dick, two of my dad’s best friends, were 50 when I was born.

Dick is 75. He is short with tanned skin and a lean, athletic body. There is thin hair on his scalp, and he has squinting eyes, wrinkled and searching. Usually, he wears glasses with thin rectangular frames. They’re not particularly stylish, but they’re fit for use. His face is calm, and his expression unreadable. If you watch him as he moves about, there’s a whole cocktail of traits sown into his face - wisdom, emotional depth, witty humour. When he laughs, hints of vice appear on the lines around his cheeks. The combined effect makes him look like Lance Armstrong or Barry Chuckle. He was a P.E teacher his whole life, born to an English mother and Polish father who served in the British Army during WWII. His father was in charge of a tank at D-Day, and was the only member of his team to survive when Canadian friendly fire blew up their vehicle. After the war, he came to England, where he studied at Oriel in Oxford. I turned back and caught a glimpse of Dick’s silver helmet that glinted like bronze in the sun. I have a blurry childhood memory of a family hiking trip up to a glacier at the foot of Mont Blanc. Just a young boy at the time, Dick carried me on his shoulders, and I remember sitting there, exhilarated by the speed and the cool wind in my face, as he strode quickly up the mountain path.

Just behind Dick, Richard came into view, executing austere turns at the side of the run where the snow is soft. He had bent knees, and his torso was perfectly aligned with the board. His arms were outstretched, not fully, but almost in an extended karate guard, waiting to pounce on the invisible man he seemed to be pursuing. I always try and keep my arms by my side, especially my right hand, which tends to stick out and ruin the relaxed aura I try to present. It’s best to keep it tucked behind me, resting on my lower back.

Richard is the eldest of the group, a keen surfer, from Bournemouth, on England’s south coast. He is taller than Dick, and once stood mightily at 6’2” before shrinking under the weight of the years. Also formerly a P.E teacher, Richard had once inspired the youth in London’s East End. He likes to remind me, in a grave tone, that he used to confiscate guns and knives from his kids. He has a rich, jocular voice with a clear accent that extends occasionally to accusatory cockney tones. Like me, he speaks with his hands but is uniquely passionate with his opinions and musical with his rebukes of the conservatives. Richard also burns for the music he grew up with, proudly stating he saw The Beatles live three times, and on each occasion, didn’t hear anything over the screaming of girls in the crowd. With music from his youth and early adulthood, Richard is widely appreciative, singing the praises of artists ranging from B.B King to U2. If you play Miss Sarajevo in his presence, he’ll start to cry when Pavarotti gloriously enters the track Dici che il fiume trova la via al mare. Yet, with more modern music, any rap, pop, or rock from the recent decade, he’s vicious with condemnation. It’s as if he’s not willing to see the beauty in any new music until the years have passed and it’s been nicely etched into the canon of good taste.

I turned back in the direction of the slope, leaving Richard and Dick to continue their snowboarding unobserved. I was listening to music - something that makes skiing more dramatic and enjoyable. My white wire headphones spiralled down from my ears, out the front of my puffa, before disappearing into the coat pocket at my chest. The song I had been listening to was ending, and there was an empty lull, where briefly the world lacked any colour. A silent universe, punctuated by my breathing and the scraping of my board on the snow. I wondered what would come next but all of a sudden, I heard the famous, jerky guitar riff that begins Fluorescent Adolescent by The Arctic Monkeys. It lasts 20 seconds or so, before Alex Turner chants You used to get it in your fishnets, now you only get it in your nightdress.

It’s the only song I like from The Arctic Monkeys. I find their music too grungey and loaded with ennui. I listened to their album ‘AM’ when I was 13 on my school bus. Tucked by the window, on a carepty seat next to my friend, songs like Do I wanna know? made me feel bitter and lonely. Alex Turner’s voice seemed uncaring and resigned to disappointment. I much preferred songs with inspiring melodies and bridges that were wide-ranging with haunting angelic vocals, searing with emotions that, while not always happy, at least were woven with awe for beauty and worldly experience.

I debated changing the song as I snowboarded: coming out of a turn and then shouting to Siri - next song please. But as I rounded a corner and once more the view opened up - this time with the summit of Mont Blanc appearing over the wall of a different ridge - I let it continue playing as, unannounced, a memory of an altogether different part of the world took over my senses: Bristol.

…

Specifically, I was taken back to the times I have spent in Bristol with my friends Callum and Daisy...

They used to have a flat in the south-east of the city, up the hill past Temple Meads station - the top floor of a terraced house, with a steep-sloping garden behind, where Callum had planted flowers and a vegetable patch. At the top of the garden, he had also put chairs, a table, and a little hut where he would go to smoke weed and sit with friends on warm summer evenings. On one occasion, late at night, surrounded by their friends, I looked up and left where the skyline of central Bristol would sparkle unevenly. To the right of my view, there was the corrugated shed of the train station and mostly grim apartment blocks, layered in grey metal, interspersed by cranes and an industrial chimney that stood like a tower of sickness, drawing dark clouds from above. Moving my head to the left, I saw more trees and green spaces. Red brick houses rose up and the great stone structures of the university quarter. I caught sight of the The Wills Memorial Building, perched at the top of Park Street, tall and strong, looking like an owl standing straight with its wings by its side. Further along, at the limit of my vision, I spotted Cabot Tower and the grand properties of Clifton with their warm stone façades.

Callum and Daisy have since moved away from central Bristol, much to the regret of me and many of their friends. They now live an hour's drive south-west, in Burnham-on-Sea. It’s useful when I’m heading down to Cornwall as it’s just off the motorway, but for the rest of the time, it’s painfully distant, as well as uninspiring. Bristol itself serves as a boundary for the South of England. The 106 miles of straight line between it and London are surrounded by the nation’s true glory: rolling hills, the Cotswolds, Bath, Oxford (if you take a slight detour). Past Bristol, the countryside becomes more medieval - dark-green moorland and rocky ranges of hills. As Devon blends into Cornwall, the dual-carriageway thins out and soon there are only lanes that course through fields of sheep and dive down steep cliffs to white-sand beaches with choppy seas. Bristol’s culture is defined by its geography - this boundary between the civilised south of the country and its Arthurian western wing. Not only that, but Bristol sits on the Severn estuary, where, beyond, across the banks, lies Wales. Perhaps this confluence of culture and peoples led to the ‘west-country’ accent, which some Bristolians have. It shows itself through stressed pronunciations of the letter ‘r’ after vowel sounds - for example, mothurrr, instead of mother. You can try it for yourself - a clichéd greeting is ‘alright, my luvver’. It’s a sing-songy manner of speech, and anyone who has this accent is seen as jolly and charmingly different.

But in Bristol, like in many places, the hardened locals have been replaced by a more cosmopolitan crowd. The influence of the universities in Bristol casts a long, but not unpleasant, shadow on the cityscape. It feels young, and it’s buzzing with fun, experimental restaurants, vintage clothes shops, cosy independent cafés, and countless bars, pubs, and nightclubs. I had many friends who studied at Bristol, and so whenever I visited in my university days, I saw the city through two lenses. There was Callum and Daisy, who worked and lived in the city, each with families marked with West Country blood. Living behind the station, up on the hill in Totterdown, where lines of brightly-coloured terraced houses look down on the centre, I’d sit with Callum and we’d play Fifa on his PS4, before going for a pizza at Paintworks, opposite his flat. It was a creative quarter of the city with lofts, creative spaces and studios for hire. The pizza restaurant was open-plan with blankets tossed onto chairs, copper pipes scurrying along the ceiling, metal cups, and industrial-looking lamps and lights. Against this, I was also drawn to the other side of the city by friends such as Lex and John, who studied there. I’d meet them separately on Park Street, we’d head for coffee or get a pint at The Wetherspoons. They’d bring me down wide roads, flanked with grand, detached properties, and we’d go for drinks overlooking the Clifton suspension bridge.

On one occasion, these two worlds came together in a flashing, alcohol-misted, eardrum-bursting soirée on Halloween night in 2019…

I kept having to remind myself that I was in Africa - a whole new continent - a great boat journey away from France. The closest part of Europe was Sicily. In the north, the coastline of Tunisia strikes out into a finger-like peninsula that points towards the Italian island. Perhaps it had all been one happy country before the great clump of Pangea shifted into the continents. Many Tunisians seemed to retain a part of this long-lost geographical connection. Their faces were tanned, with dark hair and Italian features.

The minibus continued to roll through the town. Hassan turned around to look at us from the front passenger seat. He asked us whether we wanted to explore the old town or head away from the centre, to the beach. Wallop and I sided with the latter option. Hassan turned back around and began talking to us about the city. He had a charming, world-weary accent, and now he was speaking softly, at mid-volume. Although we were the obvious object of his speech, it felt like he was really preaching to the wider world around us. I looked over at the back of his head, covered by a white Trilby hat. He was wearing a white shirt with a cream blazer on top. As he spoke, almost inaudibly, it made me think of videos I had seen of monks reciting a mantra, lost in a deep meditation, or repeating an infinite prayer. Driving through Tunisia, coursing into these ancient, bustling cities, it all seemed to fill Hassan with spirit and a commanding presence. He stood taller, and when we walked into museums, he moved like a holy man, shaking hands with the staff and smiling lovingly at all who passed us by. He even greeted random families, telling them they had the most lovely children, placing a few dinars into their hands.

Soudak moved into the left lane, and I had a passing glance at the entrance of the vieille ville. There were shack-like shops beside the old city wall, with most serving soft drinks and snacks. Excitable vendors stood in front of them, gesturing like orators, tirelessly proclaiming their business to passersby. There was a large square space carved out of the wall, where once there must have been a gate. Through this gap, I had a view onto a crowded cobbled street, with bleached white buildings sporting bright red shop fronts, specked with writing in Arabic. Above, on the upper levels, balconies came out from the walls, their railings a light blue. Lamps were suspended above them, and they were beginning to throb with orange light. My brief glimpse of the old town lasted mere seconds before we had driven past it. I turned my head to the other side of the road, where there were taller concrete buildings - mostly blocks of flats and the occasional glitzy hotel with similarly dazzling white walls and large electric-blue signs.

The nature in Tunisia also reminded me of Europe - that part of Spain where the shrubby desert begins to turn green on the approach to the sea. It’s a mismatched landscape, a liminal space between two distinct ecosystems.

The villa I was staying at was perched on top of a small mountain with orange, tooth-like rocks. Hassan had told me this region was called El Monshar, which apparently meant “the dagger rocks”. The villa was a grand, secluded property in the middle of a traditional Bedouin settlement. On morning runs, Wallop and I would pass these clusters of houses and barking dogs would bolt out of the gates, making sure we stuck clear of their territory. The villa is called Apolonya, and it’s the most luxurious, beautiful place I’ve ever stayed in. It had nine, large, kingly rooms, a gym and yoga studio, a stable with llamas, horses, peacocks and Shetland ponies. It had one view that stretched gradually out onto Hammamet, a city 100km north of Sousse. If you were in the infinity pool, your arms resting on the ledge, you could watch the land steeply descend through divided fields of brown crop. These fields extended towards the coast, houses began to spring up, and the crops grew greener, with trees sprouting up around them with increased density. You could see the urban planning of Hammamet: the suburbs, the business quarter, and the central seafront. In the evenings, the sun would set behind our villa, so the sky would be cast with streaks of reflected orange, and the lights of the city would start to sparkle, brighter and brighter, as the sky moved from orange to red to purple to black. After that, you could no longer see the contrast of the light blue sea. The only proof of it being there were the steady lights from cargo ships, anchored for the night in the deeper water.

By the other pool of our villa, you had a view looking further west and south, along the ridge of El Monshar. Beyond, the land began to rise up to the crests of the Atlas Mountains.

Rumble, rumble, the minibus took a big left, and we came onto the road that runs along the shore. It had a wide boulevard beside the sand, and families were strolling together along it. Bars and restaurants lined the other side of the road with large curling Arabic words, illuminated with electric light into the near dusk. The sun was about to set. Soudak parked the car, and Wallop and I walked over to the sand.

We hadn’t planned to go swimming, but in an instant, we were in our boxers, scantily clad amid women in full burkhas who were looking on from the boardwalk. I nodded at Wallop, he smiled back, and we jogged over together to the choppy sea.

Warm water lapped around our ankles as we giggled and trudged further into the water. Waves were breaking, maybe 2 feet high, but they were messy, coming in irregular sets, at different angles. It was a far cry from the pristine lines of swell that you’d see on the Bay of Biscay. After a few more steps, the water was level with my waist, and I dived under an oncoming breaker. As I moved beneath the water, I turned my head up and watched the spiralling wave engulf itself in a crash of white water.

After it had passed, I stood up and looked at Wallop, who was just behind me, swimming with his neck above the water. I raised my hands, laughing, intoxicated by the freshness of the sea, enlivened as it buffeted me, causing me to bob about, hopping from foot to foot.

“My friend,” I half-shouted to Wallop, “Can you believe what we’re experiencing right now?” I looked back out onto the coast. People were scattered on the boardwalk, very few even making it to the sand. A large bar was opposite, on the other side of the road, with green letters and spotlights onto the pavement. I could see a great swathe of the Tunisian shore and the urban landscape - lots of Arabic, buckets of neon, with palm trees and a fading orange-purple sky behind. I felt my body cut in two, my upper torso exposed to the warm air and wind, with my lower half suspended in the current. A melody began to sound from deeper in the town - it was the call to prayer proclaimed on the loudspeaker of a mosque I couldn’t see.

I let the North African moment wash over me, feeling that though the culture was distinct from dear old Europe across the Mediterranean, I still could recognise the parts of a shared experience. There was humour, culture, history, as well as the pleasure of stripping off at the side of the road and bathing in the open water.

On that particular evening, the queue didn’t seem too long, but I must have waited at least 20 minutes in the cold, alpine night.

I remember the feel of the clean, empty air and the ghostly silhouettes of the mountain peaks surrounding the ski town. It wasn’t snowing, but I felt cold wearing just a t-shirt under my big blue puffa. I had jeans on my lower half and no thermals. I didn’t want to risk getting sweaty legs when we were all dancing. I remember chatting and laughing with Pete, my best friend, who was standing next to me. He and I were sharing a chalet with others from our college. We aren’t friends with these people anymore, but I still look back positively on the night, knowing that I had Pete beside me - my closest chum, the man whom I fell in love with after first hearing him laugh.

I can still picture those 20 minutes in the queue, the liminality of it all, existing in the static no-man’s land of the threshold, the infinity of the ‘moment before it begins’. But it would turn out to be a highly forgettable evening. It’s part of a general trend when I look back on the nights out of my past. They seem to form one mass of drunken dissatisfaction - a dark cloud of unfulfilling grey, coloured here and there by sudden strikes of vivid and violent remembrances.

I have never been totally sold on the concept of ‘going out’. I like to head to bed early, and so I would often feel a bit sleepy when the time came to leave wherever I was, with a particular group of people, and head to the nightclub. I would try and get in the mood, perhaps ordering a drink, and letting the faces dance before my eyes - the colourful clothes, the accents, the personal histories that each person carries around with them. I find it fascinating how the unique disposition of a person, normally hidden by a mask, can suddenly erupt onto their face whenever their drink gets spilt or they’re pushed unexpectedly. Late at night, a few cocktails deep, the trauma of the subconscious hides like a snake in our throat, ready to spring out and attack at the slightest provocation. All these various components of the night out are overwhelming and exciting for a while, and I can admit to feeling a buzz, a sense that where I am, dancing with other strangers, is the centre of the universe. Give it five minutes though, and inevitably the alcohol starts to wear off, the dancing gets repetitive, and I begin to think about when I can best slip away unnoticed and head to bed. This moment always appears like a kindly ghost on my shoulder, shaking its head and raising its eyebrows - what are we still doing here? I try to push on, however, and start to experience a type of ennui where my eyes glaze. I start to lazily feign a smile, and my shoulders bob robotically to the music. A friend from school calls it - Monging out.

On this particular evening, I was in Val Thorens - part of the famous Les Trois Vallées ski resort in the French Alps. I had just finished my first term at university, and I was now on The Varsity Trip - the annual ski event for students at Oxford and Cambridge. Every year, more than 30,000 students from both universities arrive in the Alps, packed onto coaches or flying into Geneva. It’s a week of skiing down powdery runs, drinking beer on chairlifts and dancing at glamorous après-bars. For the more intrepid students, there is a wide range of activities at their disposal. I remember having the option of signing up for a mountain-top fondue dinner or getting up early to attend a guided yoga session.

Take me back in time, and I would have gladly signed up for all of these activities. Why didn’t I? Simply put, I lacked the bravery to book onto these events alone, as well as the maturity and self-awareness to realise that such experiences could be worthwhile. At this point, in my late teens, I was condemned to seeking fulfilment in drinking too much beer and heading to clubs with people I didn’t like.

Yet, I managed to enjoy myself, nevertheless. On one of the first nights of the trip, Pete and I had ventured alone to a bar in the centre of the resort. We had drunk a few cocktails and danced on the table, singing along to the reggae mix of John Denver’s Country Roads Take Me Home, looking into each other’s eyes, lovingly beaming at each other.

Outside the club, nearing the front of the queue, I lamented that this night would be far less enjoyable and personal. One of the girls in our group, Lucy, was beginning to panic, fearing she would bump into her ex-boyfriend from another college. Being the prettiest girl of our group, others began to swarm to her, consoling and cooing, as she blubbered and expressed her frustration to the uncaring mountain peaks. I sighed as the bouncer motioned us forward, scanned our tickets, raised his eyebrows at Lucy, and motioned us below into the belly of the club.

The nightclub is called Malaysia, and perhaps, dear reader, you also have been here. It was a long space with fairly low ceilings - perhaps double head height. There were large concrete beams at regular intervals - now that I think about it, perhaps it had once been a car park. It was obviously dimly lit, with the DJ firing showers of green, red, and white lights across the dance floor. My group and I had been to the bar and ordered a round of drinks, and were now in a little huddle, clustered together, mindlessly moving in the great throng of other bodies.

And yet there was no great throng. It was a club full of people, but it felt spacious, and people had room to walk by each other without getting jostled. I remember this clearly because it was in this club that I first saw her.

I was on the point of ‘monging out’. I was longing for the return - back to the chalet, getting under the covers and falling asleep, only to be woken again by Pete as he stumbled into bed with me (our cheap chalet meant we had to share a bed).

I was feeling increasingly sleepy, and I turned my eyes away from my group, from grumpy Lucy, and searched for an exit. I danced around, my eyes floating without focus, before they connected with a girl across the space, perhaps 10m from where I was standing.

Like me, she was orbiting at the edge of her cluster of friends, her body angled between them and me. I noticed her head occasionally glance back at her group before moving again to meet my eyes as we both danced together at a distance. People walked between us, in this space by the concrete pillars, obstructing our view momentarily. Yet there was some sort of channel created, binding us together in this space of loud music and sweaty congregation - a force enveloping us in a private universe.

I recognised her, though we had met only very recently. Just a few days before, I had been introduced to her through our mutual friend Eliza. Eliza had brought me over to her group of friends at an après-ski bar called 360. I had briefly chatted to them, asking their names, and making light, innocuous conversation. I remember noticing this particular girl, her beauty, how she had raised her eyes at me and smiled as thick flakes of snow landed on her hair that was tied in a ponytail.

“Harry, this is Viola!” - Eliza said, in her posh, London girls-school accent. Eliza’s voice didn’t sound completely like a horse, but there was a neighing quality to the ring of it: the way the pitch travelled, rose and then sank again when she spoke, or how she ended certain words by a croaky deepening, a trailing off, as if it tired her to finish her sentences.

“How do you do?” I asked, as I looked at Viola, smiling and clutching my ski helmet in my hand. I can’t remember much more of what I said or how she reacted, but I can picture her face, the way her teeth became slightly exposed as she smiled. I can also recall the setting. My hair was very sweaty and clung messily to my skull, as the snow began to fall in heavy clumps - the size of squares of chocolate, or like thousands of white rose petals, all tumbling down from the heavens. After a minute or so, I left Viola and the rest of Eliza’s group. “I hope to see you around,” I said, as I turned towards the other side of the bar and spotted Pete. He was standing on a table, perilously swaying and grinning, clutching two pints of golden beer. I went over to him, and as I moved through the dense crowd of Oxbridge skiiers, I cast a look back at Viola, who was taking a sip of her drink, her glistening eyes on me still, her hair wet with fallen snow.

Now in the nightclub, we didn’t say a word to each other. Instead, we both moved, sitting together in the channel carved by our eye contact. I couldn’t hear the DJ anymore. A new music seemed to rise within me, maybe she heard it too: a music, impossible to analyse, to detail, immune to the touch, fluttering away whenever you get close. Nevertheless, you can hear it, this force, something unearthly, bound to the realm of the spirit. What was it trying to tell me?

I would end up seeing Viola again, and I even got to know her a bit better. In fact, just a month down the line, I’d walk into a French Grammar class in Queen’s College - and there she was sitting opposite me. For that first session, taught by Renée - a famous French grammarian at Oxford - I was so nervous that I couldn’t make eye contact with Viola. My mouth felt parched - I didn’t know where to look or what to focus on. I resolved to keep my gaze fixed on my laptop screen. The occasional glances I ventured towards Viola confirmed that she felt the same.

When we finished going over the translation for the class, I quickly stood up and walked out of the room to avoid her.

Later that same day, I was with friends at a rooftop bar in central Oxford. I was in my gown before a dinner at Merton College, and the locals were casting mean glances in my direction. At one point, I went over to the barman and ordered a glass of red wine. Before returning to my friends, I stood at the end of the bar, by the metal railing and looked out over the city of Oxford. To the north, I saw the Radcliffe Camera, the Bodleian Library, and beyond, the clock tower of Trinity, my college. Even further away, I could just make out the Radcliffe Observatory in Jericho as well as its statue of Atlas on the roof. I felt the wind on my face, the wine beginning to lighten my head. I thought back to Viola and the class I had rushed out of like a coward.

Despite the blare of car horns and the chatter of groups behind me, the night was quiet. I could still remember how I felt a month before, in Val Thorens. I thought back to the Alps, the snow-covered, bunker-like entrance to the nightclub, and the vision I had of Viola: dancing at a distance from me, both of us cast with red, green, and white light, glistening eyes bound to each other, and the hum of the music of an unknowable universe.

The bistrot was on Boulevard Henri VI, a road that runs from Place de la Bastille down to the Seine. It then crosses the river onto Île Saint-Louis before landing on the Rive Gauche and joining Boulevard Saint-Germain. I was on the Bastille side. The occasional blare of a horn sounded from further up the street. The houses along this road are Haussmann classics with large shuttered windows and warm, spotless exteriors. There are wide cycle paths, separated from the pavement by a line of trees. From where I was sitting, I craned my head to the right and could see a collection of brake lights at the end of the road. The golden statue at the top of the Bastille column was just visible above the trees. It glinted in the setting sun.

There were fifteen people sitting outside at the bistrot with me. We were all there for the leaving drinks of our colleague Oskar - a tall, smiling Estonian. He and I had become good friends over the past months, strolling through the streets of Paris and surfing together in the waters of the Atlantic. With him leaving, there would be no one to accompany me on trips to grab coffees at the vegan boulangerie, or oranges at the Tunisian fruitmongers at the end of our road. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who would be impacted by his absence. As a testament to his fine character, lots of people had turned out to bid him farewell.

I had asked him a few days before what his plans were when he returned to Estonia. He had shrugged - relax a bit, see my family, plan my next move. It was mysterious, and I sensed that Oskar was conflicted - drawn back to the comfort of his home country, but also pre-emptively missing the buzz of central Europe: the unique energy and beauty of Paris and how connected it is to other countries, especially Amsterdam where his girlfriend is studying.

On the terrasse, Oskar had moved from where I was to the other end of the table. Wisely, he was sharing his attention with everyone present.

I watched him walk over to a couple of interns in the customer care team. I was sitting at the head of the table. To be specific, it had formerly been the head of the table when Oskar had been sitting next to me. Now that he had moved to the other end, my position had become the foot. Once soaring at the height of importance, placed next to the man of the hour, I was now reduced to the lowest social rank of the party. My peripeteia was complete. It was palpably quieter now.

I was sitting between two groups of people. On my left was Leo, a close friend in my team at work, and muscular enough to almost take up two chairs. On my right were two Hispanic girls - Maria and Ana. They are both older than me, and occupy a hidden space in the office, at a table, partially hidden by a thin white wall. Their job is to recruit artists through targeted email campaigns. They’re high performers, fuelled by coffee and reggaeton music that blares ceaselessly through their headphones. They’re a silent force powering the art gallery: I only see them when they leave their chairs for cigarette breaks.

As a salesman, I am condemned to take centre stage. My seat is at the back wall, looking out over the whole office. Whenever I make calls, I am like a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company performing at The Globe. My job is very performative. I’m not just selling to the artist, but rather to the whole company. The quality of my pitch affects the morale of the entire organisation. However, it pushes me to sell better, to persuade more intelligently, knowing that whenever I speak, more than 40 people can hear me and perhaps occasionally listen to what I say.

Leo is very good friends with Maria and Ana. They all do pilates before work once a week, and they often go out for drinks together. Sitting at this particular terrace is a regular occurrence for them. What would have been smooth, effortless banter and conversation was disrupted slightly by my presence in the circuit - necks had to be angled past me if they wanted to say something to one another.

I couldn’t be bothered to shift, though. When Oskar had been sitting with us, I was talking and smiling in full bon vivant mode. We had begun a conversation across the table with Madison, an American girl from California. She worked in the logistics team and was very reliable and effective. I didn’t know her that well, but I admired the impression she gave at the office. She was an expert at the corporate shadow dance - a game of superficial interactions, repressed desires, and soul-destroying ennui. Her mask was immaculate, every movement in the office was well timed, and she never engaged in unnecessary interactions. Despite this, she was always good-natured, but I always felt that I knew nothing about her.

On this particular evening, placed a few seats apart, I finally managed to speak with her. I enjoyed listening, and like a child at a pantomime, felt myself swept along by her stories. Her well-manicured hand cradled a glass of chenin blanc, and she told us about her time at the University of Arkansas. Although a very republican state, seemingly in the back of beyond, it was unparalleled in the beauty of its nature - especially in summer when she and her friends would go hiking or day drink and swim in one of the many creeks or hot springs. Madison had also been part of a sorority at her university. She regaled us with stories of the intense hazing she had to undergo in order to be admitted.

…

That conversation had taken place when Oskar was still sitting with us. The atmosphere was less upbeat now. Leo was on his 5th pint of beer. He had told me earlier in the afternoon that he wouldn’t be drinking tonight. Ship him over to a fraternity, I thought to myself. The waitress passed us by, and I sensed him jerk in desperation. His great muscular frame moved as she passed, causing a mini earthquake under the table and my seat. He was itching to order his 6th pint de blonde, longing for oblivion. The waitress didn’t notice him, and her eyes seemed unfocused before she saw Ana, sitting calmly, previously hidden by my big head. The waitress’ lips erupted into a smile when Ana noticed her in return, and they began speaking to each other in Spanish. I realised that she, Maria, Leo, and the other members of their clique had created many boozy memories sitting around this terrace, on evenings after work. They knew the waiters and probably got special discounts.

Did I envy them? I pondered, looking on at Ana smiling with the waitress. I have never been someone for friendship groups. I have always preferred having very close friends dotted around and spending lots of quality time together with them. But was I actually in the wrong? Was I missing out on a whole new type of experience - a true community of like-minded people, a support network, a gang? I thought back to other occasions when Leo and Ana’s group had hosted parties or organised after-work drinking sessions. I had no desire to be with them, but deep down, a forgotten voice from my childhood ached to belong - a snivelling 12-year-old in an oversized blazer and pink tie wanted to be included. Was it a price worth paying - to give up on my quiet evenings of reading and writing, all for the purpose of joining a group?

I wasn’t sure. I tapped on my phone screen. It was 19:50 - high time for me to head home for dinner. I edged out of my chair and went into the bar silently to pay for my Perrier. As I came back out, Oskar was on his feet, arms stretched out with his palms facing the sky - reminding me of Aeneas, caught up in a storm in the Mediterranean. You’re leaving already? He cooed sadly. He sounded drunk, but this was an impossibility - Oskar is as straight-edge as they come. Instead, he was giddy with love, intoxicated by the great display of affection he was receiving at his leaving drinks. He wrapped his arms around me in a hug. I am very happy to call you my friend, he said quietly.

I felt warm in the hug, and my lips stretched into a toothy grin. I came out of the embrace slightly, still holding onto his shoulders. You too, dear friend I replied, both our eyes sparkling.

We parted ways, with me promising to visit him soon in Estonia. Oskar said he would show me Tallinn, the capital city, and that we could rent a car and drive to Narva, the town on the Russian border. I pictured myself there with him, on the precipice of enemy territory, gazing at the skyscrapers of St Petersburg that glint and shift in a distant mirage. Oskar also claimed he could arrange a meeting for me with Arvo Part, the world’s most important classical composer. Absolute rubbish, I don’t believe it, my father said to me on the phone jealously, when I told him the next morning.

Just as I was turning away from the table, more colleagues appeared from around the corner - Doug, an American friend who had been with Oskar and me on our surf trip, among others. It was evident that the party was just starting to get underway. Walking beside Doug, I spotted a black-haired Croatian girl called Francesca, who came from a small city near Zagreb. During office hours, I used to pass by her desk and talk to her about Diocletian’s love of Croatia and his palace in the city of Split - a place known formerly to me only as a location for ‘lads’ holidays’. Francesca is very stylish, radiantly beautiful, and volunteers with the homeless outside of work. I would always smile at her as she passed my desk and try to lay my British charm on extra strong. Her boyfriend lives in Moscow, so I thought it was always harmless when she smiled back and cracked the occasional joke in return.

I noticed her standing next to Doug as I began walking away from the bar, towards the metro at Place de la Bastille. I nodded to Doug, and he smiled before I turned my gaze towards Francesca. She noticed me and we made eye contact. It lasted a while: we seemed to linger there together, held in the same visual space, a garden of strange intimacy that lasted just milliseconds as we moved in opposite directions. It was uncharacteristically long, especially as both our heads were twisted to the left. There was a sudden climax in our shared moment together. I noticed Francesca’s eyes sparkle involuntarily in recognition, or perhaps her pupils dilated, opening so as to allow the light from the street to briefly shimmer in those black pools. Her expression stayed neutral or slightly smiling, but I knew, at that moment, that I had seen into her soul, that there was some sort of attraction, a feeling that had been expressed by a sudden lapse into her subconscious. The moment lasted less than a fraction of a second, but its connotations stayed with me on my walk to the station. I concluded that never would I be able to sit with her, as a boy and a girl do, and ask her honestly what she felt at that moment, what that sparkle in her eyes meant.

The drumming of fate, the implications of the moment, the voice of Leo as he finally ordered his sixth pint - these all became less overwhelming as I moved further away from the bar, and closer to the illuminated column of The Bastille.

I was staying in a remote cottage in a hamlet on the south coast of Cornwall. It’s a very inaccessible part of a county that already sits at the end of the earth. The only way to get to this part of the country is to go by car. Theoretically, you could also walk, cycle, or sail over, but the former two options are dangerous and time-consuming, and the latter requires a high level of skill and a familiarity with the hidden rocks that are only visible at low tide. There are no buses or trains, and the farmers are unlikely to offer you a lift on the back of their tractor.

On that evening, it was chilly, and the sun had long since set past the wooded hill on the other side of the valley. There were six of us around the table in the conservatory: two young naval officers, two people I knew from Oxford, and Pete - our host. From my seat, I had a view of the garden. I was sleeping in a tent that night, and I could just spot the canvas top, sticking out from behind a bush. A bright moon was illuminating the wide lawn. In the daytime, it is a garden full of flowers that resounds with birdsong and the hum of pollination. It is bordered by a short fence - more to mark the boundaries of the garden than to keep anyone out. If you walk over to it, you get a view of the quiet cove below and beyond into the creek. There are several dinghies and flat-bottom boats anchored in the shallow water. There are a few buildings where you can hire paddleboards and canoes, and beside them, there are larger yachts on trailers - their great hulls suspended a few feet above the ground. During the day, tractors drive up from behind the cottage down to the boats, moving them out to the water. Men in blue overalls fix the riggings, repair engines, and zoom about on little speed boats. Their accents are thick with Cornish intonation, their faces are etched with Celtic features. These people are the ancestors of those who sailed over from Brittany to escape the invasion of Julius Caesar. It’s a harbour of sorts during the day and then, when evening comes, everything is silent. In my tent, I can hear the wind passing through the trees and bushes as well as the occasional moo of a cow from the farm up the road.

The water is almost always glassy and clear. It’s a very spiritual place to swim - equal in my opinion to Kootenay Lake, in Nelson, Canada. There is a gentle current that wafts you out to sea, schools of bass, and seaweed that has blue bioluminescence as the current buffets it underwater.

On the other side of the cove, there are a few houses, the majority of which were built within the last twenty years. They have white walls and large windows opening up to the eastern sky. The light reflects onto the water in the evening, illuminating part of the black space between the ships. This part of Cornwall, once only home to local fishermen, has begun to be invaded by rich Londoners. They build hillside houses with sea-views, defying planning permission refusals by challenging the local council with legal battles they can’t afford to fight.

Back at the table, we were having lobster for starters, and there was roast pork in the oven for the main course. We each had a chopping board, a sharp knife, and a special, thin fork to pull out the hidden meat that lay inside the lobster claws. I looked down at the large animal on my wooden board - its shell was a sunburnt red and its pincers were still sharp. I hesitantly touched them and jerked my finger back, expecting them to snap shut. Luckily, Peter - the chef for the evening - was well versed in catching, freezing, boiling and then eating lobster. In this part of the Cornish coast, not too distant from the Lizard peninsula, he had around 10 crab pots, lurking in the water, rigged with bait. Every summer, he’d go out to sea daily in his boat Merry Maid and delicately pull each of them out. It was rare to go a day without some crab or lobster being caught. If they were empty, he’d get out his line and catch a few mackerel for dinner. Now and then, a dogfish would be stuck in one of the pots. Peter would take it out with a firm grip and pose for a photo before throwing it back into the sea. You have to be careful holding these dogfish because their whole body is made up of muscle, and more than half of their skin is razor sharp. Lobsters are the easiest to deal with. Once caught, you place them in a pot or bucket and then in the freezer.

I looked down at mine on the chopping board. It was definitely brown-bread. It had once been purple-blue in colour, as all lobsters are. They only turn red after being cooked for a while in boiling water. I stroked its back, frowning slightly. Whenever I go on the boat, I always beg for part of the catch to be spared and released back into the water. Forgive me little friend, I whispered, as I picked it up and looked into its dead eyes. It struck me that it was, in a sense, a hybrid creature - possessing an insect front and a more fishy tail-like behind.

I looked over at Peter, the head of the group. He’s a tall man in his 70s, and at that moment, he was using a wooden rolling pin to break an unusually resistant lobster claw. Only a few years ago, he had retired from being a high-ranking civil servant. Before then, he had been a naval officer. He had a rich, musical voice that climbed and descended the scales as he spoke. He had studied at Merton College, Oxford, and regularly reminded us that his college was far older than ours - and therefore a lot more serious. Peter had been a scholar at Merton and had the rare privilege of having had a term’s teaching, one on one, with none other than J.R.R. Tolkien. I had met him (Peter, not Tolkien) at an Oxford dinner in 2019 through a mutual friend. I had been on fine form that evening, with my head lightly spinning from enjoying the open bar. Bold with my banter, Peter and I had hit it off. After a few follow-up meet-ups, he had invited my friend and me to spend a few days down in Cornwall. Every year, he told us, he rented the same cottage on the coast and hosted friends there for the summer. There would be fishing, delicious seafood dinners, and lots of interesting people to meet.

This indeed turned out to be the case, and I drove down to the cottage on many of the following summers, alone or with friends and girlfriends. There’s something about the wild, Celtic feel to the Cornish coast. It feels like you’re entering another land as you cross the River Tamar and leave Devon, knowing full well that the dual carriage-way is about to become an inhospitable single-track road, winding its way through forests of ancient oaks, crossing medieval, fairy-tale bridges, and ending up at the sea, on the frontier of Albion, where you can look onward to France and dream of other continents far, far away.