It was always a question of how well I would cope with the flies when we moved to the country. I loathe them. I truly, with every filament of my existence, loathe them. A solitary, revolting, juicy blowfly in our inner-city Melbourne home was enough to send me into a Rumpelstiltskin rage. When one of these filthy vermin flew into my facemask and buzzed around my lips for a while in the early days of mandatory mask-wearing, I vowed vengeance on them all. My family has been quietly observing my exchanges with the paltry, grotesque creatures since we moved to central Victoria three months ago.

We are urbanites who, like many other city dwellers, caught a hint of country air drifting across our claustrophobic lockdown homes and acted on a privileged, romantic whim of the promise of liberation and emancipation: the promise that gum trees or salty ocean might bring the happiness and rejuvenation that was now so tenuous in the city.