AT THE LAST moment, I had stuffed K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher into my carry-on case. At 817 pages and weighing in at over a kilo, Fisher almost cost me an excess luggage charge. Better to have packed my local bookshop’s most pilfered title, Fisher’s pocket-sized Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Having landed at Alice Springs, I hired a car and headed west to a motel. Every afternoon, after driving out to explore, I had stationed myself outside my room on a plastic chair, sticky with sweat, sweltering in the heat with Fisher and squadrons of tiny flies.

A year after my trip to the desert, I was under lockdown, my days rotating between reading, walking within a five-kilometre radius and Zooming out to other parts of the world.