I’d been craving this for a long time.
Not a break, exactly, but a kind of spaciousness. A solo retreat in Lancaster: five days of unshared quiet. No conversations, no compromises. Just the luxury of hearing my own thoughts again; uninterrupted, unperformed, unedited.
There’s a particular quality to silence when you’re alone in a space entirely your own. That first day, I noticed it—not just the absence of sound—but the absence of being observed. The walls seemed to soften, the light landed differently and something in me exhaled. A kind of psychic quiet.
And yet, the stillness felt strange. Disorientating, even.
Five years of cohabiting softens your edges, teaches your senses to attune to another’s presence. Even when your partner is gentle and undemanding, honouring solitude as much as you, there is still a subtle weight to sharing space. A constant calibration of two inner worlds moving in parallel.
That first day, I missed him—and Paco—more than I’d expected. I’d longed for solitude, then mourned the absence.
I’d come with so many expectations: to read deeply, to sketch, to paint, to plan. To find stillness and clarity. And, ideally, some great revelation. But expectations don’t sit well with quiet; they hum too loudly. They hover in the corners and tap their fingers on the table.
In the end, I had to let them go. Not all at once, but slowly, and in pieces.
My days in Lancaster soon found their own rhythm, shaped less by intention than by light. I woke early, stirred by soft sunlight slipping through the skylight above the bed, then padded barefoot across the warm wooden floor to make coffee.
There was something deeply satisfying about that small ritual. The scent of freshly ground beans from Atkinson’s, the soft plunge of the coffee press, the quiet echo of birdsong through the open kitchen window. I’d settle beneath a blanket on the sofa and read, page by page, without checking the time.
Each day I wandered slowly through the city, with no fixed plan other than coffee or air. Lancaster is compact and quietly elegant, all Georgian façades, slate rooftops, uneven pavements and sun-warmed lanes.
In the afternoons, I painted. A jug of tulips on the kitchen table, their stems lazily angled in the sunlight. I picked up watercolours again last year after decades of disuse. I’m not especially skilled—my technique hasn’t evolved much since I was a teenager—but there’s something about the fluidity of the medium that feels forgiving, even generous. It invites you to relinquish control, to let the pigment pool and spread, and see what blooms.
And that was the point. Not to make something good, or useful, or even beautiful. Just to make. To watch colour move across paper. To notice shape, line, and shadow. To disappear into a process that doesn’t need to lead anywhere. The quiet joy of creating something entirely for myself.
One afternoon I walked up to Williamson Park, past crooked garden walls and quiet terraces. At the top, the Ashton Memorial rose into view, perched high above the trees. The air was crisp and clear, the view stretching across Morecambe Bay to the faint outline of the Lake District. I stayed there for a long time, not looking for anything in particular, just taking it all in.
I hadn’t set out to explore every corner of the city — this solo retreat in Lancaster wasn’t about discovery in the outward sense, but about circling inward. A chance to live slowly, and let the hours arrange themselves around rituals of coffee, reading, walking, painting and rest. There was no urgency to do Lancaster. No list of must-sees. And maybe that’s why it felt like such a good place to be alone. It made room, without fuss. It let me inhabit it quietly, fully, without performance. Which, in its own way, felt like the deepest kind of hospitality.
It’s easy to romanticise time alone when you haven’t had much of it. But the solitude I’d been craving wasn’t just logistical, it was psychic. A return to the version of myself that existed before the ambient hum of domestic life began to shape my inner weather. I’d lived alone once, for three transformative years. I learned the contours of silence, and found a strange, steady companionship in my own company. I’d forgotten how restorative that could be, and how necessary. It’s a form of rest that’s difficult to explain unless you’ve known its absence. Not rest as in sleep, or even relaxation, but rest as in the release of vigilance.
It’s hard to say what changed. I didn’t come home with grand plans or sudden clarity. I didn’t solve anything. But something shifted—not loudly, not all at once—just a gentle reordering of my internal landscape. A loosening of the grip I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.
Solitude, I was reminded, is not indulgence but restoration.
Creativity can exist without purpose.
And time moves differently when you stop counting it.
All photographs © Kate Baxter. All video footage shot on location in Lancaster, using iPhone 13 Pro & DJI Osmo Pocket 3.