Between the office and the pub, I haven't been writing as much. It's all a little weird. When the pub was closed for a year, I had weekends, days clotted thick with time. I liked best the hours in a hotel room, by myself, humming over notebooks, observing and remembering and feeling the mysterious edges of my self. As I wrote to a friend on the day before the pub re-opened: "There are hotel rooms haunted by my ghost, reading and writing, luxuriating in time, forever unmoored from everyday exigencies and schedules, this thing called life."

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Over the weekend I started a book by a Japanese author, which the husband said he couldn't finish. The protagonist, a writer, becomes fixated on having a baby on her own: she reads infertility blogs, researches donor insemination programmes, and attends a lecture by a man conceived through donor insemination. Around this point the husband left his last earmark. An earmark, a little fold in time, identifies the part of the book to which you’ll eventually return. Here, in retrospect, it designates the part of the book where he couldn't go on. I caress the earmark, contemplate smoothing it out, and then leave it alone.

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