I’m sitting in a room, looking out a perfectly round window. In the distance, there’s Red Hill with its restaurant perched on top. The sky is a gun-metal grey, and the clouds hang low. It could be cold, or it could be humid—it depends how close the rain is. This has been a strange December. The weather can’t make up its mind.

It’s incredibly quiet, just me and my MacBook, curled up on the couch. My thoughts haven’t been this uninterrupted for twelve months. The silence, because I am listening to it, feels loud. I lean into it, mentally, needing it, craving an emphatic absence of stimulus.