At the start of 2020, I still thought of myself as a travel writer. A couple of months earlier I’d sworn off boarding planes (at least for work) because of the cumulative depth of my carbon footprint, but I wasn’t intending to give up boats and trains. Then, on March 11, the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic. I did no travel writing, and almost no travelling, for a couple of years.

But if the body couldn’t go far, the mind carried on wandering, thanks to the books on my shelves — including Jonathan Raban’s Old Glory and Nigel Hamilton’s biography of John F Kennedy — and 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’ve been running on this site in weekly instalments since March 11 this year, 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 in Northern Ireland and my passion for Southern soul and Springsteen. 

Partly by necessity, it also celebrates what the painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the writer Rebecca Solnit have called “the faraway nearby”. Until four years ago, I lived near Epsom, Surrey, and one of the places I went to for fresh air 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. Teri 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 Teri 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.

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