We meet in the middle of Arnold Circus, at the bandstand, an octagonal structure set high on a mound and circled by seven plane trees. The curtains that hung in this room, and that were hanging here twenty years ago, when I moved in, were so precisely the colour and texture of those in the painting by Ensor that I couldn’t believe that it was not also of my room, although in fact the painted room was in Ostende, and there are two windows in it, with a mirror between, whereas in my room, and in my childhood room, there is only one — it must be the light that does it. We can speculate about care in art, we can think about the lack of it, but can we actually take care through art, by means of it, at such times of extremity?

There are benches against the house for listening to the music and most years there is dancing on the tarmac. Two days ago the sun nudged just above the walls of the back tenements, enough to push a triangle of light into the corner of my room for the first time in months. And yet she always addressed me by my full name and surname when writing to me privately about things that I had written, making me feel that this name was also my own. The audience is kept masked and distanced but more and more players are allowed on to the stage, and even a singer to sing Korngold’s Songs of Farewell: Der regen fällt.I Live Here Now was the title of my book of drawings and writing about living, walking and looking in Moscow, London and Glasgow, published in 2008.

Here, it was clear, on our street, there had been a failure of care — a blanketed stretcher brought out in the early hours of Christmas morning. Such lines of shoes are the first things that greet you as you cross the threshold into the private space of a house. There is a carpet on the floor, a sort of Persian carpet rather like the ones in the house where I grew up, and there is sunlight coming into the room, filtering through the weave of the curtains, that is to say through the brush strokes, and for the past twenty years when I was lying in my bed here this light would come in through the rough weave of my curtains, in just the same way, to fill up the space of my bedroom so that it became a day dream space, safe and encompassing, and so that I could almost see the traces of the two children in the room also, the boy and the girl, one sitting, one standing. Gluzberg has had an extensive teaching career – most recently the Royal College of Art, where she was Reader in Contemporary Visual Production for many years. The sun moves around the circle like a clock hand, but without fret or urgency; its light is neither glaring or intrusive, and the circled space is still, suspended in this gentle afterglow.Snipers are stationed on the top floor of the old Children’s Hospital that looks over the river, training their guns on the ground below, taking aim all day long. I wanted to photograph this procession of figures as they passed across the wall, so certain and elegant in outline, so removed from the actual, more awkward and garishly painted bodies who had given them life. Each year, the procession stops at the house of a well known fiddle player, now many years dead, and there is music and dancing outside the house. We left the building cheered and woken up, a crowd of music fans processing along the wet pavement towards stations and buses. Thank you for your wonderful comments about my walking drawing resource and it’s lovely that you’re inspired to try the process out.

I had first come across it thirty two years ago, on a weekend at a dacha outside Moscow, where we had been invited by friends we barely knew, just a week after arriving in the city for our year’s study. The house was sold almost thirty years ago, when my parents stopped living together, but we can put it together to the last detail, every surface and texture. There it was — the motorcycles, then the long line of armoured cars supposedly flown in with the US delegation, shiny black, one squat with a chimney like an old stove, one rammed with men in special headgear bent over what must be weapons and suddenly the traditional long low limo, small American flags fluttering at the front, the flash of a face and white hair, the first face to look out our way, the American president. As I watched the television Remembrance ceremony on Sunday morning I was thinking of writing something to do with war for my Letter from Glasgow. Orange red was the colour of the berries, and the colour chosen by EDF for warning and direction signs throughout the power station.The woman in the Ukraine flat in early spring, the start of the war, playing out to spite the devastation, and Masha’s father this autumn in Moscow, his children and grandchildren gone, bent over his long dreamed of piano, playing on as his city becomes ever more unreachable.

But by the end of the night we were taking it in turns, improvising and playing along to each other’s tunes. I am shocked at how suddenly it ruptures the sandstone silence of the street, the glowing end of summer light, this gentle rhythm of my confined life, watching shadows, watching light, watching the women opposite in their rooms. There seemed to be only two colours that day, the silvery grey-green of sea mist and sky, of the metal surface of the nuclear station and of the leaves of the buckthorn bushes, variously inflected and shifting in the light. Instead of talking with new words I swop texts and translations with Crown Letter friends who I have never met in person, we try out words between us, send them back and forth from our screens.

The road is banked with high hedges of fuchsia and montbretia, resilient in this western wet, the air is warm. L’arbre à l’extérieur de ma fenêtre arrière garde ses feuilles quand tous les autres autour ont soufflé. I am making imaginary journeys — they don’t quite feel like real journeys, but I have booked my trains. Instead I take cues from my surroundings; slowing to the rhythm of light, air and sound, trying to establish where I am in space through the echoes in the back court: the burr of wood pigeons and the soft melodic cough of the man in the flat below. It feels safer to have more languages to say things in, to keep the words endlessly edging around the things, moving in and out, so that the feeling of a thing is not disappeared by its definition.