Then the whole long line set forth in the dusk, their shadows in the water more beautiful than the line itself.

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. What became immediately apparent as I began walking and drawing at the same time was that I had to make split second decisions about what I wanted to register on the page when I was already moving past the object as I looked at it.I listen to lieder for the German words I know almost nothing of and read Prishvin’s diaries from Moscow in 1930, as he watches, and photographs, teams of workers destroying the vast church bells. Somehow we have to learn this knack of living between, treading water, of things being neither one thing or another, but a constant shifting. The front bar was bare, a line of men standing at the counter, but the adjoining lounge bar was spacious, low lit, the decor intact from the eighties.

I had first come across it thirty two years ago, on a weekend at a dacha outside Moscow, where we had been invited by friends we barely knew, just a week after arriving in the city for our year’s study. 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. It was pouring rain, but a gazebo was put up in the centre of the turning circle by the main doors, and ten of us huddled underneath it. I think it is the best bench in the space, and feel surprised and grateful that it has been left waiting for me.They had found a source, almost on the grounds of a nuclear power station, looking over to the islands of Arran and little Cumbrae. It reminds me (a little) of the work I did with children during the ABE (Art and the Built Environment) project back in the 90s when we experimented with drawing strategies used by architectural students to develop their understanding of drawing within an open space.

Down the corridor, smashed glass, the washing up still in the sink, a whisk in a milk pan, and below the window, a child’s toy hard hat on the floor with the real rubble. The project was delayed last autumn when residents came out and stood in front of the diggers, and for now it is on hold.

Under the tarpaulin awning this year there is an array of fiddlers of all ages, young pale freckled faces and older, rough red cheeked and white haired. 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. Masha’s brothers have left the country, one to Israel and the other just a few weeks ago, leaving behind his job, wife and children and crossing to Georgia via Armenia. I was reading this mail, and listening to the voice of my own father, who has commentated on television broadcasts of the Remembrance ceremony for several decades. This death coincided with the publication of an online journal article about the Crown Letter entitled Waves of Care.

The house was sold almost thirty years ago, when my parents stopped living together, but we can put it together to the last detail, every surface and texture. In the fifteenth century, people suffering from syphilis were shipped to the island and left there to die. We hear news of bombardment, and we see the cities with their half-collapsed and burnt out buildings, but it is shocking to see the everyday interior, the fine detail of doors and wardrobes and windows, smashed and fallen. Weary trees drip with rain and leaves are fallen like light of days, into darkness — the pleasing German “ dunkel”.

Advertising cookies help us monitor the effectiveness of our recruitment campaigns as well as enabling advertising to be tailored to you through retargeting advertising services. When I went to my window this afternoon I noticed a light on in the basement room opposite, the bedclothes were rumpled and some objects had appeared on the bedside table.