No.93, Monday, 9th. March 2026

A lone dog is barking almost ceaselessly in the middle distance. A home-alone dog? I do not know. Does it bark on every weekday? Quite possibly, but this morning it is particularly noticeable. It doesn’t bother me in the least, other than the thought that it may be missing its human companion. The air is still out there and the fog, which has persisted for at least 36 hours without break, seems to be acting as a sound dampener as well as everything else dampener. Car sounds are almost absent; dog sound not so.

The whole world is just a small bowl containing me, the unseen dog, the cul-de-sac and the ever-present fog. To the dog, the big house on the hill no longer exists; I cannot see it but I know it is there, temporarily hidden by fog. It still exists. Imagine for a moment that when the fog lifted, everything beyond the fog that is invisible to me at present, failed to reappear. That would be frightening. Probably not to the dog, but certainly to me.

So there you have it. Morning thoughts about fog and a dog meander to a script for a horror film. Is it just the world I can normally see that has disappeared, or all the world beyond it? Has it disappeared for me alone from my place in the sitting room, or for everyone in the cul-de-sac? Or the world? What would happen if I left the bungalow and walked out of the cul-de-sac; would I, after only a few hundred metres, come up against nothing, or would I be in a perverse bubble that limited my vision to only a cul-de-sac-sized chunk of the world?

I do not know. However, I do know that I need another cappuccino.