I sprawled on the decking of my patio outside my study, Dearth already a bad and chilling memory. I was born to be a warm climate man.

It was great to be home again, a place I left as infrequently as possible. The house I lived in with Jo would possibly seem to many people to be too big for only the two of us. It was long and low, single-storeyed, shaped like a capital E, with wings at each end and the kitchen/diner and other rooms sticking out in the middle. The rest of the living and bed rooms were arranged along the central section, which Jo and I always thought of as the useful corridor that joined us. Our work rooms were sufficiently far apart that we did not disturb each other, but sufficiently close together that we could when the mood took us wander along to see each other.

Roughly aligned east/west, the front of the house became a natural suntrap during the long summers on Raba, and we made constant use of it. When Jo and I first moved in we loved staring out across the sea – the view was one of the main reasons we bought the house. Gradually, though, as the years went by and the house became more intensively a place of work, we neglected the garden. Thick undergrowth grew up to hide the view. We encouraged that: most of the bushes and young saplings that sprang up were natural to the forest, and we planted a couple of other trees as well. We were not alone in doing this: many of our neighbours also encouraged a natural screen. A road ran past the house, between us and the beach. It gave the harmless impression to anyone walking or driving along the road that the beach was fringed with forest greenery. Very few of the houses could be seen from the road, but most of them, like ours, had rough-hewn paths through the trees that were kept open down to the road.

Jo’s studio was in the wing at the western end. It was a huge room, cluttered with art materials, canvases, sketchbooks, film and video projectors, bottles, huge coils of rope, plastic fishing nets and driftwood salvaged from the sea, dozens of pieces of work, some unfinished, some early efforts. The studio had a specially strengthened concrete floor, overhead in the reinforced roof space was a pulley used for lifting and moving heavier pieces into place, and one of the exterior walls had been entirely replaced by sliding doors. Medium-sized trucks could squeeze alongside the house and reach the studio, bringing in or porting away the largest pieces. Recently, Jo had been spending less time in her studio, and instead was now pursuing a more lucrative career in freelance theatrical design.