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Places

Where the house writes, in its first year.

The house writes in a few places. The place is chosen in the first conversation, and it is sometimes not the one you arrived with.

  1. Corsica

    Corsica

    For the island you can smell before you can see it, and for the villages that never came down to the sea.

    The maquis, the scrub that covers the hills, carries on the wind a mile offshore, and islanders have said for centuries that they could find home with their eyes shut. Inland, the villages sit high, built when the coast was the dangerous place, and they still keep their distance from it. The sea is where you end the day, not where you spend it.

    The season
    May and June, when the maquis is in flower.
    The way in
    From Nice, by sea. Or a short flight from Paris.
  2. Svalbard

    Svalbard

    For the summer when the day does not end and, after a while, you stop waiting for it to.

    An archipelago halfway to the pole, with one small town, where the light does not leave and neither does the quiet. Nobody hurries here, because there is no evening to hurry towards. You come home with a different idea of what a day is.

    The season
    June to August, under a sun that does not set.
    The way in
    Oslo, then three hours north.
  3. Kenya

    Kenya

    For an hour on the plain, sitting still, while something walks past that does not know you are there.

    Whatever you have read about the migration, the moment that stays is smaller than that: a lion lying down in the grass at dusk, twenty metres away, and nobody speaking. The plain does not perform. You are the one who has to slow down to see it.

    The season
    August to October, with the migration on the plain.
    The way in
    Nairobi, then an hour by light aircraft.
  4. Croatia

    Croatia

    For the islands after the last ferry has left, when the stone gives back the heat of the day and nobody is going anywhere.

    The Adriatic is best when the day visitors have gone: a harbour going quiet, a table set outside a house that has been in one family for two hundred years, and a swim at dusk from rock rather than sand. The house writes the islands, not the coast road.

    The season
    September, after the day visitors have gone.
    The way in
    Split, then by water.
  5. Switzerland

    Switzerland

    For the valley behind the one everybody photographs, in the week the larches turn.

    You have been to Switzerland. So has everyone at your table. The house goes to the valley behind that one, in late October, when the larches turn and the passes are still open, and it writes the silence between two villages as carefully as the villages themselves.

    The season
    Late October, in the week the larches turn.
    The way in
    Zurich, then the train.

Elsewhere

If the place you keep returning to is not here, write anyway.

The house adds a place only when it can write it well, and never before. If yours is not among these five, say so in the first conversation, and the house will tell you plainly whether it can write it this year.

Every journey begins the same way. With a conversation.

Begin the conversation