Lacking wifi these days, I am out-of-sync with the volatile, accelerated rhythms of a digitised world. It feels perversely nice, for now. The present has been filtered, and it is cold, slow and clean-tasting: rolling hills downy with snow, hail clinking on the rooftop, lace curtains pierced by sunshine. It's a time and space for the epistolary, for rescuing memory from the slaughter of the hours.

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