The houses are kept at bay and the people are playing or sitting in the holding sun, without fret or urgency, out of the space and time of the city. Our breakfasts were prolonged, and the tea was drunk hot, lukewarm and stewed — the buckthorn ameliorated the bitterness of the ever strengthening dregs, as the hot water ran out and we were draining the tepid condensed tea essence, or zavarka. I had never noticed this room for the whole long lockdown and suddenly it claims my attention with its mess and sprawl, its restless reader.

The players settle into their tunes and are brought tea, and glasses of whisky are offered to the elders. The ground about the bandstand is slightly raised and curved, like a cake, and the wide floor is covered with dry brown leaves that have been left to pile and rustle. The book must be three inches thick, the pale green cover of Penguin Classics, I’m guessing what it is.There has always seemed to me to be something friendly, comforting about moss, its springy, water saturated gentleness — so I did not feel threatened by this mass occupation of the pavement, although it was strange. On Sunday afternoon I stood on the street, looking down through a gap between buildings and watched the train with the last of my visitors inside it cross the bridge over the Clyde and set off towards London. Two years of enforced relative stasis by pandemic and I am still drawing breath, relieved at not having to spring into step at my own or other’s demand. After prolonged soaking in hot brine the swelling in my finger began to recede, but twelve days on there is still some numbness, the last pieces of thorn are still rising to the surface, tiny brown specks in the skin. The sun was setting in streaks of dirty pink behind the darkening, almost immobile, figure of the sniper, who presided like the ultimate viewpoint, the watcher, a shape of awe and fear, over the proceedings.

When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated. The next night, back home after an eleven hour journey by land and sea, I look across the street to the house opposite.

Occasional bursts of sun and shower would descend in the distance, striping the islands at sea before us as we set out on a small path over flat coastal fields. Gluzberg has had an extensive teaching career – most recently the Royal College of Art, where she was Reader in Contemporary Visual Production for many years. We are taking each other in, newly alert to the fragility of each person, and perhaps more carefully attentive as we attempt to sound out the edges where our seperateness meets; that must also be re-found after the long imposed distancing.