In the shower, ignoring the sound of water in my ears, I listen to a podcast discussion about an Anglo-Saxon poem in whcih an unnamed female speaker laments the loss of her lord, then experiences the urge to live in an earth cave under the roots of an old oak tree. Life is unspeakably strange.

Earlier, I stared at a pyramid-shaped tea bag, watched the air bubbles trap between the leaves and the fine mesh. Tea bags often contain trace amounts of plastic, enough that, when you try to compost them without sufficient heat, they leave faint, skeletal forms in the earth long after everything else has broken down.

The woman in the Anglo-Saxon poem wanders the frozen world. She thinks about all the parties she's no longer invited to. She dreams of mead halls, alone on the moor. She calls a thousand years into the future. Scholars believe somebody once used the only surviving manuscript as a chopping board. The manuscript also carries burn marks, as if it narrowly escaped a fire.

In two weeks' time, I will attempt to run further than I've ever run before. I'm worried about my knees, the physical structures that keep me standing straight, but not my lungs. Life couldn't be more strange.