She has given talks in Russia, France and the UK and she teaches at the Royal Drawing School in London. I had first come across it thirty two years ago, on a weekend at a dacha outside Moscow, where we had been invited by friends we barely knew, just a week after arriving in the city for our year’s study.

On Sunday we played our Christmas gig at the Neurological Rehabilitation Unit, at the biggest hospital in the city. I don’t know where this envisaged idyll has come from but its hold is as convincing and actual as the shape that it inhabits before me.Many of the larger lumps had taken flight, descended to the pavement, and there were bare gaps where once there had been bouncy hillocks of green. It was strange to see the light shining from behind the triangular shaped gap in the curtain, as if the woman was still inside the room. She has exhibited in joint and group shows at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4RD), Artspace Gallery and the Royal Academy in London and in Glasgow Project Room, Transmission and Mansfield Gallery, Glasgow; she has also shown work in Russia and in France: at the Echomusée, Paris and at the Universities of Lyons and Cergy-Pontoise in collaboration with the Banlieue Network. And when I finished my swim, dried and got dressed, I picked up my bag from the shore and walked back to the road.

The woman in the Ukraine flat in early spring, the start of the war, playing out to spite the devastation, and Masha’s father this autumn in Moscow, his children and grandchildren gone, bent over his long dreamed of piano, playing on as his city becomes ever more unreachable. A lonely turn of the century room with a woman inside it — painted by Bonnard, or told by Jean Rhys. It feels safer to have more languages to say things in, to keep the words endlessly edging around the things, moving in and out, so that the feeling of a thing is not disappeared by its definition. But I was too absorbed in following the movement of my friend’s voice and the shadows passing behind her, holding the two of these together, and could only imagine reaching into my bag for the trapping camera. We left the building cheered and woken up, a crowd of music fans processing along the wet pavement towards stations and buses.

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.

At the bottom of the hill, approaching the sea, I find myself at the edge of a large open park that I never knew was there. As my confidence grew, I drew more purposefully and learned to make quick judgements, processing sensory and visual information at speed into marks and lines.And yet she always addressed me by my full name and surname when writing to me privately about things that I had written, making me feel that this name was also my own.

Snipers are stationed on the top floor of the old Children’s Hospital that looks over the river, training their guns on the ground below, taking aim all day long.I am shocked at how suddenly it ruptures the sandstone silence of the street, the glowing end of summer light, this gentle rhythm of my confined life, watching shadows, watching light, watching the women opposite in their rooms. The darkening mornings gather pace, six am is no longer a space full of light, but seems to be still night, a few days ago it was dawn, a fraying edge of morning.