Last spring I came out of a long quarantine near the start of the first lockdown and well remember being alone on empty streets. When I got sick everything was as it always had been and when I came out... the world had stopped and everyone was gone. I walked for miles. As a kid we used to talk about what we'd do if everyone just vanished and as a teenager we read a novel called Empty World at school (a new virus kills most people) and I read The Stand and then Day of the Triffids (which begins with a man falling ill and when he recovers finding that everybody has gone), and then there was 24 Days Later, which starts the same way. It felt like all of those. The city I'd always lived in empty. Empty streets with no sign of life, total silence for miles. I'd lived it in my imagination when I was younger but never expected to truly live it. It felt as though I'd fallen out of real life and into a story. It reminded me of The Magician's Nephew where they find the dead world. I'm tearing up typing this, but at the time I was shell shocked and there was something exhilarating to it, as though all those old imaginings really happened and it was my world now. Just me alone. I just walked. The major roads were the weirdest and most thrilling. All my life I had the constant background noise of traffic and just like that it was gone. Replaced by the wind and birdsong. The quietness was so loud! I walked along the centre of a major road and I remember standing on a flyover bridge staring for a long time at the empty road just stretching away. There was a distant sound and then a minute later a car, alone on the miles of empty road, pedal to the metal just driving on all the miles of nothing. A fellow lost traveller. That time was a haunting experience which I will never forget.