It has been a while, perhaps a month, which is nothing and everything, and I'm approximately six hundred miles north of where I was the last time I wrote a newsletter. As well as literally moving myself northwards, it also feels as if I might be six hundred miles to the north inside my head—a good thing, a hard-to-keep-up-with thing. The last two weeks have been spent in the Scottish Highlands, a place of vast, reassuring emptiness and, at this time of year, snow and sleet and winds strong enough to wash you from the side of a mountain.