Dionne Warwick will be eighty years old tomorrow. Whatever her chronological age, in my mind she will always be the twenty-something whose voice filled my grandparents’ farmhouse.

Listening to Do you know the way to San Jose? and it is a summer Sunday morning and lunch is being prepared. My aunt’s pale blue transistor radio is sitting on the kitchen sideboard and Dionne Warwick’s voice fills the low-ceilinged rooms.

There was something unmistakeably happy about Do you know the way to San Jose? It was a song that had a …

November days when the drizzle falls and the sky is on the ground bring a wish for blue skies and clear, sharpness. “I feel much better when it is clear and dry,” says my mother.

Perhaps it is about space as well. Since the lockdown resumed, the motorway has been quieter. Driving is not crammed between dozens of lorries and vans.

Perhaps there is a correlation between space and contentment. Perhaps wide open rural acres lend themselves to a more mellow view of life. Or, if not mellowness, an inclination …

Glen Campbell’s By the time I get to Phoenix was played on the radio. The gentle ballad of a man who leaves his long-standing partner speaks of physical distancing that accompanies the metaphorical distancing that has begun.

It was a song given frequent airtime in my teenage years. The place names were familiar from the American television programmes that filled the schedules. I would have answered without hesitation if I had been asked in which state the cities would be found.

There were no opportunities to check out the details …