Breakfast was brought to the suite, which let me spend half an hour browsing Kazakh websites and seeing how much of the language I remembered. Like a lot of the former Soviet Union republics, Russian had remained the lingua franca, but Kazakh still held on strong, especially once you were out of the cities. My Russian was okay; Kazakh itself was a Turkic language, not quite as close to Turkish as some, but plenty of crossover.

Most of my time in Kazakhstan had been spent around Aktau, in the far west of the country, on the coast of the Caspian. My job was to assess routes between Aktau and Baku in Azerbaijan, on the other side of that contested body of water. Aktau was pure ennui and I loved it: I had always sought out places that felt as remote as possible, which wasn’t just a question of distance. Aktau had been built in 1962 as a camp for oil workers in one of the world’s most lifeless deserts. There were no addresses, just three-digit numbers assigned to each home. The place was dependent on seawater desalinated with the help of a nuclear reactor, and the few trees that clung to existence had been planted using pneumatic drills. The town’s main statue was of a Ukrainian poet exiled there by Russia in the nineteenth century, who wrote: There is only sand and stones. You would gaze around and feel so dreary that you might as well hang yourself. In the 1960s they briefly named the town after him. I spent most of my time watching oil-service vessels heading for the platforms, wondering when the water froze. Kazakhstan had the biggest extremes of temperature in the world, and this seemed responsible for its stark beauty.

I checked their local news, local bulletin boards, then went to an open-source search tool for videos and skimmed through all recently uploaded footage geotagged to the region. People were filming the snow. Right now it was minus 5 degrees. Workers at a metals factory had gone on strike. Presidential initiatives had been introduced regarding the environment, the economy and social values. I noted what people were wearing, styles of coat and boots and hair.

Perhaps because I knew I was going to go, because I knew this constituted a severance from which there would be no straightforward return, I went to Croxley Green. I still considered it home although there was nothing much there, and I no longer even felt numb, just a wonder at how emotions fade.

The house was now occupied by a cousin who I had met twice, who was grateful for the space and left my old room untouched. I don’t know why I didn’t sell the place. There was some superstition around maintaining it, a sense that if I jettisoned this final connection with my own biography the cover lives themselves wouldn’t work. What would they be? The centre would not hold.