“They function like sharp inhalations—these concentrated, cut down versions of our lives that don’t demand we redecorate, unpack our boxes, bed in, but float on the perfumier's tails.”

Imogen Cassels, a poet and PhD student at Cambridge, tells us about her recent essay for The Still Point on grief, language, friendship, and strangeness. And we hear from David Garrard, Senior Lecturer in Historic Conservation at Oxford Brookes, about the striking survival story of a centuries-old Manchester pub.

What does it mean to leave insomnia behind?

"Grief opens up your constructedness-by-others. You met me at a very strange time in my life, and so now you make me up, and I still don’t know who either of us are."