Today felt so hard, not least because it is a privileged cocoon that I live in as I listen to to the horrors all around, from desperation on Lesbos, to choking fires and devastation, to levels Malthusian plague and pestilence.

But, it is my world and this is the one I inhabit. Just me in the end and this is how it felt today. With a desperate feeling of devastation the lifelong connection with place is finally coming to the point of severance. With it everything feels as if it is tumbling. Today I had the lines of Emily Dickinson in my head ‘I felt a funeral in my brain’ and could almost feel the internal structures imploding and collapsing.
I tried to normalise and swim after work but just got tossed around, crying into the lostness of it all.
I watched my friend and her husband drive off afterwards and felt the distance as their car drove away and I found myself dropping back, and back ... disconnecting. Everything is disconnecting and I wonder if I ever really have connected with life at all since you died (...who am I writing to, by the way?). I have always relied on this place from the year dot. It has seen me through everything when all else has fallen away.