We headed home through the park in darkness, to the sound of speeches from an impromptu rally taking place in the children’s playground. There is a carpet on the floor, a sort of Persian carpet rather like the ones in the house where I grew up, and there is sunlight coming into the room, filtering through the weave of the curtains, that is to say through the brush strokes, and for the past twenty years when I was lying in my bed here this light would come in through the rough weave of my curtains, in just the same way, to fill up the space of my bedroom so that it became a day dream space, safe and encompassing, and so that I could almost see the traces of the two children in the room also, the boy and the girl, one sitting, one standing.

The houses are kept at bay and the people are playing or sitting in the holding sun, without fret or urgency, out of the space and time of the city. I swim with my nose at the level of the water, perfectly held between the air and the underwater, my eyes fixed on the island before me that is transformed, transcendent — the real world before me holding within it the dream, the idyll of the painting. I inhabit instead this stretch of space that is somewhere between the Moscow that I trod deep inside me over thirty years ago and the spaces of my childhood.Its water soluble nature encouraged me to take more risks with the drawings and I combined it with a carbon pencil to achieve a variety of line and tone; occasionally I would add in a water soluble coloured pencil. Before I heard the news about Dettie’s father from Manuela, I had written down my Father’s words about the dead, in Ireland, and elsewhere. The coloured pencils I’d been using didn’t capture that sense of gathering twilight and I switched to black artgraf (a solid block of ink), as I was keen to explore its expressive qualities. I am educating myself on the difference between the PCR and RAT that may or may not be demanded of me, according to the law next month.

Later I think about truces and conflicts, in families as well as in war, and the ways that we try to resolve them. Down the corridor, smashed glass, the washing up still in the sink, a whisk in a milk pan, and below the window, a child’s toy hard hat on the floor with the real rubble. From the top of Leith Walk the blurry blue outlines of land on the other side of the Firth are like Greek islands. I thought it was someone she knew, but it turns out the clip was widely circulated at the start of the war. The women had come out of their facing doors and we stood together in the hallway under the strip light, the hallway where I had watched the people in their white papery suits standing, pausing a moment in their gruesome work, the hallway through which the woman had been carried out in the early hours of the day before.But I kept going, almost enjoying the pain and scratches, bending and wrenching the branches off with my bare hands as we marvelled at the abundance.

In spite of the deferred anxiety of a large family gathering, the wider family creep into my dreams — my father and brother, my mother, my sister, all visit me in my room and present their needs in turn. Weary trees drip with rain and leaves are fallen like light of days, into darkness — the pleasing German “ dunkel”. Then the whole long line set forth in the dusk, their shadows in the water more beautiful than the line itself. Half way down the street is a Greek café and I step down into a sunken dark space smelling of burnt sugar and ask for an espresso and a papery pastry full of warm custard.Perhaps the most we can hope for is to wake ourselves up, to keep ourselves vigilant, watchful; which is a sort of care, but it is not breaking down the door, indeed it is often watchfulness from a place of hiding. It is huge, with a row of old houses on two edges, and the carved articulations of a municipal façade on another. Masha’s parents introduced Nadia and I in those early Moscow days, when we were both obsessed by painting, and we sat about the kitchen table shyly, in the flat where they still live — a top floor flat in a building without a lift, a flat almost entirely unchanged from Soviet times.

The late sun kept striking the lighthouse and the half-ruined buildings of the island, lighting them up pink and gold. It is like missing a step in the dark, suddenly you stumble and sink deeper than you were feeling for, setting off a momentum that is like a tumbling, you must keep descending into darkness in these overstretched bounds, without pausing. The sun moves around the circle like a clock hand, but without fret or urgency; its light is neither glaring or intrusive, and the circled space is still, suspended in this gentle afterglow. The road is banked with high hedges of fuchsia and montbretia, resilient in this western wet, the air is warm. On Sunday we played our Christmas gig at the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit, at the biggest hospital in the city.To relinquish some control over the process, to open myself up to what might emerge if I added an element of chance into the drawing, I began to spray the page randomly with water to see what would happen to the media as I drew. I follow a child cycling straight ahead of me down its narrow white diagonal, back out to the world left behind on the other side. Although every refugee I have met so far in Ireland or Scotland has been a Russian speaker, it is still polite to ask, you can’t presume, now that everything is charged and the language a person was born into has become the language of the aggressor. They might have been the traces of my young children, who for a few years ran exuberant and naked through the rooms of this house, who sat or lay in the patches of sunlight that warmed the floor, concentrated in their own intent, the ferocious but imperceptible pace of their growing.