It’s five years today since the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic (on March 11, 2020). I’m a travel writer who did no travel writing, and almost no travelling, for a couple of years. But if the body couldn’t go far, where could the mind take me? 

Quite a long way, in time as well as space, when it was set wandering by the books on my shelves and the bits and pieces picked up on earlier travels, from a CD by the Aussie rocker Mark Seymour to a medal for a run in Mombasa. In Lighting out of Lockdown, which I’m planning to run on this site in instalments (weekly at first, then maybe more often), I tell the story of a strange time.

It’s a book combining memoir and travelogue, in which the pandemic is background hum rather than constant din.  Ethiopia, Nicaragua and the Grand Canyon feature, along with the Lake District, Sidmouth and Romney Marsh. The book travels across time, too, touching on my early journalistic career, my roots (I was raised a Catholic in Northern Ireland and somehow ended up working for a Conservative and Unionist newspaper in London) and my passion for Southern soul and Springsteen.

Partly by necessity, it also celebrates what Georgia O’Keeffe and Rebecca Solnit have called “the faraway nearby”. Until recently, I lived near Epsom, Surrey, and one of the places I escaped to was Nonsuch Park, where the Mansion House, during the pandemic, served as a  vaccination centre. In 1665, when that park was the site of a palace, the Exchequer was moved there “by reason of the great and dangerous increase of the Plague”. 

Mid-pandemic, my wife and I moved house, from suburban Surrey to the seaside. We’re now in Worthing, West Sussex. She lived here for four years as a child  — but I arrived conscious that I had done less research on Worthing than I did on many places I visited for a few days as a travel writer. The initial idea was to end the book with our move, and the exploring we were looking forward to doing. Then my wife was forced into a lockdown of her own by a back injury and sciatica… and a new variant began spreading. I wrapped up my book with the end of another unusual Christmas and — in an afterword — the end of Covid restrictions in England in February 2022.

If you’d like to read Lighting out of Lockdown, please return regularly to Deskbound Traveller. You don’t have to pay, but if you’d like to support my work you can make a donation via Ko-fi.com (see below).