When I am not in good health, what I require is tender handling, and to be indulged in the way that only family tends to do. If you’ve ever found yourself away from home – about a continent’s distance – you will recognise how difficult it is to be ill and not at home. But then, if you are lucky, a light appears in the gloom of healing. And then a series of lights follow.

The first light after my emergency surgery was the homemade soup, hand delivered, with a hug and a kiss and the urgently stated instruction to “text if you need anything”. There followed, in no particular order: bread, grapes, smoothies, a bouquet of lilies, small tubs of pineapple and vanilla yoghurt, a little Peperomia ‘Rosso’ plant, housed in a cheery yellow pot. From my sickbed (aka the repurposed living room sofa), each care package looked like a tiny, tangible love letter. There was the friend who brought me home, woozy from anaesthetic; the sight of her shoes in the hallway for those first couple of hazy days was oddly reassuring.

Will this dental pain be useful someday? It doesn’t feel like it | Bim Adewunmi Read more

Another friend got the train from DC, arriving at 2am, to spend the weekend cooking, restocking my fridge and promising to read aloud to me, since screens were giving me migraines. Yet another arrived after work, bearing floury potatoes to make me mash, the core of my newly required soft-food diet. Texts flew in, as did direct messages; if we still used ravens, I think I would have got one of those, too. More than once, because I’m a sap, I cried.

It’s been two years since I moved here. It has never felt more like home than when I was laid low, and the many lights of the proverbial village I had inadvertently built helped me back up. To friends.