‘Trompe l’Oeil’ also starts with an old object, in this case a piece of embroidery that will be framed to make a fire screen. I have one like this a peacock on silk that screens the fireplace in my sitting room. The one in the attic that I keep meaning to ‘do something with’ has a piece of tapestry featuring a huntsman in a red coat. I love the combination of skills in fire screens; woodwork, glazing, sewing and the way they show us what can be achieved with left-overs, remnants, scraps. I wanted to create something that paid tribute to that and that echoed how I think poetry often functions, taking fragments and cast offs to create something that covers and comforts a gaping open hearth and heart.

In Darkness in the City of Light, there’s a poem in the narrative called ‘Taking Line 5, January 1945’, where one of the disappeared men comes back to Paris. The Germans took a million and a half Frenchmen away – I didn’t know that – and the survivors dribbled back and they were broken. At first, people didn’t want to look at them, they didn’t want to look at their own defeat. In the Metro carriage, it takes a while for a woman to get up to give him her seat – but then everyone finally acknowledges he’s there.

I knew immediately that I wanted to write about tenderness: what it was for me, how it has affected my life, and how I might inhabit it as best I can for the remainder of my life. There is less life to be lived now than before, so tenderness was a term that enabled me to look back as if telescopically and isolate certain moments I now see might be called moments of ‘tenderness’. Suddenly I was seeing tenderness everywhere. It deferred a new authority on my inner life. All the things I had thought about, reflected on, through moments of happiness and moments of disaster, could be pulled out of their tight casement and seen for what they were: the simplest moments of tenderness.