Years ago in a car crash in which I so should have died, I had an out-of-body experience. It was my first day of university, and I was driving to Manchester along the M1, turning my INXS tape over in the cassette player and crying that I was leaving my boyfriend behind. It was pouring with rain. At some point, I realised that I was about to ram into the back of the vehicle in front of me, so I yanked the wheel, over-twisted, hit the barrier in the middle of the road and flipped the car twice across all three lanes before landing the right way up but back to front on the hard shoulder. I know this because I saw it while calmly looking down on it from high above. (If I was to guess the distance my separated self was at, I would reckon 50ft.) The experience of watching the crash was entirely quiet, and calm, and smooth, and in slow motion.

The reason I’m telling this story – because I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this story before – is that I imagined, having gone through this intensely unusual moment,
I was saved for a reason. And yet, 30 years later, I’m not sure listening to Chopin in the bath at three o’clock in the afternoon is that reason.

However, I no longer care. Conversely, I have found lockdown intensely liberating. The not being watched. The rule-less-ness. The unplugging of myself from the mainframe of a job that has had me scheduled to the wall. Sometimes the freedom of it hits me like I’m a storm-tossed boat and I feel as if I am literally at sea. It is both unsettling and exhilarating. At some points in my life, I have been so anxious it’s as if the electricity in my body was short-circuiting. But now, meh. In the incarceration of these four walls there’s been a kind of release. The third lockdown has dredged up some pretty intense phantasmagorical memories. It has forced the final peeling open of a door I’ve tried to keep shut. There has been nowhere for me to hide. But most interestingly, nor have I wanted to. Partly, while taking the girls back to school – the cumbersomeness of actively doing that – and losing them, and bags, and dogs, and tripping over leads, and forgetting keys, and not being able to chit-chat with the other mums, I’ve thought ‘Wow! This re-entering the world, I’m going to be shit at it!’ And partly, I just feel free. For sure I’m scared. It’s scary. But I like it.
So was I saved for a reason or was it just the body’s neurological self-defence reaction to a shocking physical event? Because what’s happened is that I am emerging out of this lockdown having shirked a wild, self-inflicted pressure (with such a profound level of expectation, of course, I could only ever come up lacking). And in the meantime, I have slipped warmly into the scrappy suit of myself, and I am fond of it, and excited for where we shall go.
This is the new issue of Condé Nast Traveller Uk magazine. For those who might, like me, be spending the afternoon with their husband, doing nothing more or less meaningful than picking up rubbish in the park with their new matching picky-uppy rubbish sticks that just arrived in the post

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