In 2020 I embarked on a deliberate attempt to use time as an idea. Interestingly, the whole COVID scare came to embody much of what I was thinking about in terms of slowing down time. Suddenly people had more time than they knew what to do with and the lack of daily events to mark the passage of time became a distinct problem. The journeys up and down the house were marked by events such as TV watching in a particular place or meal preparation in another but the sudden paring back of time markers confounded both the conception of time as people had known it and their own existence.

What I had started with though was not Covid, but Kodokushi. What had seemed a Japanese phenomenon in elderly people in particular, dying alone and undiscovered for extended periods of time, quickly became a picture of universal neglect that stretched across the world. The explanation and blame-laying that accompanied all of this and then came home to roost in the number of aged care deaths in Australia, became another level. I began to look at the failure of language initially as excuses for inaction and then as a symptom of the social media age where endless published words amount to very little. I did not, however, want to become a social commentator.