[from six months ago] In his 1987 book, The Songlines, the British author and traveller, Bruce Chatwin wrote, “A journey is a fragment of hell.” My wife and I have been journeying together for nearly 38 years. Except for eight years in Australia, in the early ‘00s (during which we lived in seven different houses in Sydney and its northern suburbs), we haven’t settled anywhere for very long. Indeed, the longest we’ve stayed in any one 'home’ has been the three years we’ve lived aboard Wrack and since 2023, she has sailed more than 2,700 nautical miles, from the English Channel to northern Morocco, and from there to Spain, the Balearic Islands, and the southern coast of Sardinia. During the same period, we have also spent several weeks at a time ashore, in Berlin, Tangier, Truro (Cornwall) and Rome. We might have sailed even further east across the Mediterranean if, at the end of September, last year — a year which began with my wife being hospitalised twice, in Spain, with heart problems — I had not suffered a heart attack while visiting our son in Rome. I underwent an emergency procedure, a balloon angioplasty, to unblock an artery. After a sluggish recovery, I spent most of January, this year, in bed with COVID and a painful lung infection. Neither my wife nor I can ignore the portents, let alone the physical and psychic toll. We are tired and frail. The time has come to stop, to stay in one place — if not a home, then at least a long-term refuge or bolt-hole — and shape a different sort of life, no longer peripatetic but persistently still. It’s not going to be easy. We have few options and multiple financial, social and legal obstacles. Still, we’re determined to be settled within a couple of months. I’m ill at ease with the prospect of returning to a shore-bound world that is anything but settled or predictable; in fact, it’s downright scary. But my wife longs for a real home and feels we won’t have any peace until we find one. As she puts it, “We need to get somewhere we can start again.” At our age, that might be the biggest challenge of all.