The crash back down to earth was pretty dramatic though. Just after getting back, we were asleep upstairs when people broke in through a downstairs window & somehow managed, without waking us up, to take most things of value in the downstairs of the house, including the keys to the van we use for kayak trips & in which we stored kayak & mountaineering gear (lots of lessons here about maintaining better security).

Greenland was almost the last journey in my current book project. This book, Afloat, is about small wooden, canvas or skin boats & the cultures that have been built on them. These were boats that were uniquely tailored to the specific stretches of coast they travelled, that were treated as living members of the family by many owners, & that reveal huge amounts about the possibilities for living well with environments & elements. The project was supposed to involve a year’s travel in 2020, but, after the pandemic intervened, the journeys have happened across 2022-3 instead. As well as Greenland, it has involved time spent in Connemara, Lewis, Faroe, Newfoundland & Barbados, talking to boat builders & taking long journeys across spectacular coasts where distinctive communities have built sophisticated ways of living in their environments.

I lost a substantial amount of writing in the burglary, but there are ways in which this can work to the advantage of the book: parts of the manuscript were slowly working their way from inelegant complexity to something clear & readable. Rewriting these from scratch, now I have a strong sense of what they need to do, will surely produce better results than the intensive editing I would have otherwise done. I have the luxury, too, of three summer months with plenty of time to devote to writing, before study leave from my university post in Jan-April 2024 gives me even more writing headspace.

My camera & lenses, sadly, weren’t insured (more lessons here…), but by the end of the summer I should be able to afford to replace them with new, upgraded versions that have plenty of scope to help me improve my photography. And there’s always a chance the van - a distinctive grey VW Transporter converted to sleep in and with kayak racks on top (almost impossible to remove while leaving the roof intact) - might find its way back to us eventually. I’ve found myself with a little extra appreciation for the things that might sometimes be taken for granted, too: glad that the thieves didn’t take or damage any belongings that have deep personal meanings, and glad of the friends whose messages have meant a lot.

All in all, after a couple of years of intensive uni teaching, this feels like a moment of new departures: a long spell with the chance to reflect, rebuild, & write. I think that’s maybe why my response to all the events I’ve described above has been to start building myself this new website: a place to put my best pictures, write up blogs of journeys I don’t want to forget, and share some visions of ocean, sky & sealife.