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The lighthouse keeper's daughter had never seen the mainland in winter. Every October, when the last supply boat pulled away from the jetty, Nell watched it shrink to a white thumbprint on the grey and then vanish altogether, and the island closed around her like a fist. From then until March there would be no one but her father, the gulls and the wind, which came off the Atlantic as if it had a grievance and meant to settle it. She did not mind, most years. She had the lamp room, high and round and full of brass that she polished until her own face swam in it. She had the logbook, where she wrote the weather each morning in her careful hand: Wind SW 6, rain later, sea rough. She had the books her mother had left, swollen with damp, their pages crinkled like old skin. But this year was different. This year her father had started to forget things. It began small. A cup left on the stairs. The logbook unsigned. Then, one night in November, Nell woke to silence — a silence so complete that for a moment she thought she had gone deaf. The lamp. The great slow sweep of the lamp, which had pulsed through her sleep every night of her life, had stopped. She took the stairs two at a time, one hundred and twelve of them, her bare feet slapping on cold iron. At the top the lamp room was dark and her father was sitting on the floor beside the mechanism, holding a spanner as if he had never seen one before. 'Dad?' He looked up. In the faint grey from the windows his face was a stranger's face, soft and puzzled. 'I can't remember,' he said, 'which way it turns.' Outside, somewhere in the black, a ship was coming towards the rocks.

Text B: from an online article, 'Why I gave up flying' (2024, written for this paper) Three years ago I took my last flight. It wasn't a dramatic decision. I didn't glue myself to a runway or write a manifesto. I just sat on a plane home from Lisbon, looked at the little screen showing our route over the Bay of Biscay, and thought: I can't keep doing this. Since then I've travelled to Italy, Austria and Poland — all by train. People assume it must be miserable. It isn't. Yes, it takes longer. The trip to Vienna took two days, with a night in Cologne. But I've never once been told to remove my shoes, decant my shampoo or sprint across a terminal because a gate has changed. I've had proper meals. I've watched the Rhine slide past for hours. I've slept in a couchette and woken up in a different country, which still feels like a small miracle. It isn't always cheap, I'll admit. Booking late can cost a fortune, and the European rail network can be a maze of different operators and websites. Some journeys simply don't make sense by train. I'm lucky: I work from home, so a day on a train is a day at my laptop with a better view. But I've stopped thinking of travel as the space between the place I'm leaving and the place I'm going. The journey is part of the trip now. And every time I step off a train, stiff and slightly crumpled, I feel I've actually arrived somewhere — not just been dropped there.

Text A: from a letter written by a governess travelling to Scotland, 1868 (written for this paper in the style of the period) My dearest Sophia, You will hardly credit what we endured upon the night mail to Edinburgh. I had been assured by Mr Hartley that the railway would carry me north in perfect comfort, and that a lady might travel alone without the smallest inconvenience. I wish Mr Hartley had been obliged to travel with me. The carriage was cold beyond description. A foot-warmer of hot water was supplied at York, but it had cooled to the temperature of a pond before we had passed Durham, and I was forced to wrap my feet in my shawl like a market-woman. Opposite me sat a gentleman who smoked a cigar without once asking whether it was disagreeable to me — which it was, extremely — and who informed me, at intervals, that the railways were the greatest blessing ever bestowed upon mankind. I will allow that the speed was astonishing. We flew through the darkness at what the guard declared was fifty miles in the hour, and the lamps of the towns rushed past like sparks from a fire. I confess I held the edge of the seat with both hands, and said my prayers more fervently than I have done since I was a child. When at last we drew into Edinburgh the dawn was coming up grey and wet over the castle, and I was so stiff that the porter was obliged to help me down. Yet, dear Sophia, I would not have missed it. To go to sleep in England and wake in Scotland! Our grandmothers would have thought it witchcraft.