Sometimes, when the skies are cloud-free and the sun has risen just enough to bleed its light into a new morning, we sit in bed and watch the pale blue being slowly and elegantly slashed. An anonymous, odyssey-driven hand making long pink incisions that heal slowly before our eyes, leaving only the faintest of scars.

At the leading edge of each graceful gash, an aeroplane, not short of company in the complex cat’s cradle of flight paths. Yet it looks, for all the world, to be a distant and lonely object. It’s hard not to think of the passengers and crew. Each separated from someone they love, by speed, trajectory and altitude. Some carrying the undeclared weight of loneliness, others immersed and at home in their own turbulence.