In March of this year, a week before all the bars closed, I was mixing drinks and chatting with regulars about the state of things. ‘Sure it’s looking bad, but there has never been a world event so totally global. You’ll be able to travel to any town in the world and ask, “Where were you during the pandemic?”’ True, up until the moment you realise that the definition of travel implicit in the sentence no longer exists: far-flung, high-mileage, low-cost, international.

When the pandemic swept in and the borders closed, I cancelled my long-set plans of moving back to northern Thailand to work on translation, and I got stuck in my hometown. ‘Hometown’ is an American way of saying ‘place I was young in’. It has a sense of home but is not necessarily so. But the town I am in is not the same one I grew up in. It is still perched on the same small peninsula, still windy, still in disrepair. Yet the population has doubled, the median age has doubled and affluence swings out into the streets where overgrown yards used to be. No one knows the history of here. So I started reading and walking, travelling and writing.

• Tags: Conner Bouchard-Roberts, Issue 21