Ten days after symptoms began and eight after a positive LFT I am finally getting ready to leave the attic and return to the world.

Of the eight days I've been isolating I have only managed to paint on three of them. The rest of the time I have read, written, eaten, completed a tax return, watched birds and surfed the web aimlessly.

I had hoped to get more work-work done but even mild symptoms have kept my concentration at a minimum.

Tomorrow I will head back into the studio, with plans for the year beginning to materialise and plenty of work to be done.

Fate would have it that I tested positive for Covid the day after we had to put our dog to sleep following complications after an operation. It was a tragedy made surreal by my almost immediate secondment up here to the third floor.

When I go back into the studio tomorrow, it is to paint from photographs I took on our last long walk together in early December. We had a fantastically expansive, golden day. I was looking forward to painting from these photos, excited to go back and walk that landscape with him again in 2022.

Now, of course, the photos are tinged with loss. But not just the photos, the landscape too: Where the physical meets the psychological, and where the latter modifies the former. Looking at the photos now, I see them as an example of how landscapes can shift in our perception, how fluid our relationships with landscape is. How they change us, and how we change them.