This is how our Editor-in-chief is spending lockdown

As soon as I wake up I try to go for a walk. It’s like the sun has become not just a living thing but a friend I must greet, a presence across the room at a party, one I am happy to embrace. I stroll past the duck pond and under the blossoms, ridiculous wads of Hubba Bubba-pink ickily-stickily stuck to the branches’ fingers. I smile/not smile at fellow walkers. I catch their eye/don’t catch their eye. I see the morning mirror shine on every blade of grass. I pass the nutters and their shouty ways and their pointy fingers up to the sky. If I just sit here and wait long enough, I think I will catch the moment when the wisteria actually breaks from its soft caterpillar chrysalises to become purple dragon-mouthed silk-leaf pockets of light. That would be a thing!

I can concentrate/I can’t concentrate. I am full of energy, I am a husk. I am so sad I cannot stop crying, I am so grateful my arms cannot grasp speedily enough at life’s ever-spilling jewelled fruits. I’m not making headway with my lockdown resolves: the Stormzy raps are longer than I anticipated, for example. I have cooked home-made pasta (fat pigs’ tails that tasted like slices of someone’s aorta). I haven’t ordered the shisha pipe (so much kit!). I must remember to ring my Dad (he is dead). That’s fine – I have this realisation once a day. Oh! Which reminds me! Often I catch myself saying in my head, ‘They’ll regret this when I’m dead’, about the three teenagers I find myself quarantined with. I ask, ‘You don’t want to watch Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon with me? Containing some of the most opulent sets and lighting and drollery ever displayed on screen?’ Or ‘You don’t want to decorate a single egg with this thick, colourful nail varnish – by Chanel! – the shade of the blood of a thousand felt-tip pens?’ Or ‘You don’t want to learn a co-ordinated group semi-stripper dance routine along the lines of Yanis Marshall’s “My Neck, My Back”?’ And then they make those faces like they’d rather be eaten by wolves, or just say ‘I’m fine’ and leave the room, which is worse because it’s not even an aggressive response that I could at least take umbrage at. And then I say to myself, all plumply satisfied, ‘Well, they’ll regret that when I’m dead.’

Last year while I was waiting for a skin-cancer diagnosis, I spent 10 days convinced I was about to die. For 10 days I reflected on who I was – the kind of person I should or could be in the face of this final curtain – what mattered, what was important. I deftly manoeuvred myself around these realisations as smoothly, as organically, as lovingly, as mist around a lamppost. I have never seen so clearly. It was a gift.

When I found out that the cancer I had could be treated easily, I held those realisations aloft. I could adhere! I could be the person I saw!

Ten days to see the light, and exactly 10 days for it to be dimmed. Which is precisely my concern right now. At the moment we can all recognise what matters. What we must relish and respect: friends, family, health, nature. And when we come out of this so many of us will have resolved to be good people who make good decisions. To go out into the world being aware of how and with whom we spend our money, how we are connected, how we choose to pass our time, and how we proliferate our power in a way that is for the whole and not for the one. We must adhere! We must be the people we know we can be!

This is the new issue of Condé Nast Traveller: the Hot List issue, celebrating the beauty of travel. As a force for good. To shine a light, to support, to appreciate the consequences of our choices. Travel as the connective tissue to all our human-ness.

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12 reasons to buy the June 2020 issue of Condé Nast Traveller

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