It’s not often you find yourself leaving home with the perfect companion. This is especially true when travelling.

The pressure to have a good time can sap you of the joy that you end up wearing as a mask to hide the strain. So I was pleased to recently find myself on a trip to Cyprus with Geoff Dyer.

As a fellow “professional of distraction”, he did for me what I, at the time, couldn’t bring myself to do, out of lethargy and a sense of existential displacement. That is to articulate the sense of disaffection and fatigue with both the interior and exterior landscape.