As we joined the main road through the power station we found a bush so thick with fruit that we stopped for a last plunder.

The sun shines through the square of her yellow sun hat and makes it liquid, a translucent golden blur. I want to take in this sounding part of her — a pitch and sway as pleasingly familiar as her gait, not conveyed by the e-mailed words which have had to stand for her in this recent absence — that breaks out of her speech and runs away in the other direction, like water. The International Human Rights Observers were there, in pink vests and armbands, they are in the city to make reports on public gatherings. I listen in and as I listen I watch a strange progress of shadows of people passing behind my friend’s head, their heads descending along a slope cast by the sun’s inflection.The student painter is at her easel painting, and the other student, from India, is sitting at her desk in front of a screen. We are suddenly centre stage — reports from our city are bounced back to us on the internet or from the mouths of friends in other countries. I walk quietly through — a woman on a bicycle and another walking towards me smile at me, almost a welcome, as if recognising a stranger in their hidden land. It’s wonderful that you feel inspired to set out on your own walking drawing journey and it sounds the perfect way to become familiar with your new surroundings. 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.

I wondered if it was the dark that had done it, or Christmas, or prolonged unhappiness, and of course the added isolation of the pandemic. I had not known then that she was from the hostel, or from Ukraine and anyhow, she may not have wanted to be disturbed. We saw another woman from Ukraine on this beach the other day, she was young and alone, and she smiled as she walked out across the sand, and sat down on a rock with her book. We cross the Golden Lane estate where she used to live, and where I stayed with her whenever I came to teach in 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. Nadia, me, my children — to and fro and round about with the person opposite and the person by your side and then moving as a four, on to the next line.

A comforting cadence, the singular rhythmic contortions of a voice that exists as a thing apart from verbal insistence, from which words can actually distract.A last long segment of orange light fans out towards me across the leafy floor, and then that too is eclipsed. I am not a poppy wearer, nor a monarchist, but on dark November remembrance weekends in Glasgow I have usually listened to the Cenotaph and watched the blue sky, plane trees and sun on the grand white stone facades far off in London. And the light has a strangeness, an unfamiliar intensity, there is not the usual dampening mist in it. Tonight we rebuild the strange slope-roofed triangular room that was full of suitcases, half way up the stairs. Friends have travelled from other cities and peopled my rooms with stories of places long unimagined.

I wanted to photograph this procession of figures as they passed across the wall, so certain and elegant in outline, so removed from the actual, more awkward and garishly painted bodies who had given them life. 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. They had forgotten to tell me you need gauntlets and secateurs for these tough and multi thorned branches. In the fifteenth century, people suffering from syphilis were shipped to the island and left there to die.Among them, I suppose, was the book that I had watched the woman reading one early sleepless morning at the end of the summer, when the sun still rose early. We gave up on the music lesson and decided to watch the spectacle, and await the motorcade who should be passing through in an hour or so. I also changed the orientation of the paper switching from an A5 portrait to a small square sketchbook as this seemed to offer space to capture a broader view more suited to the open countryside I was walking in.