“The house will not burn down when you’re gone.”

HOME, 11.30pm.

I am in bed. Tomorrow morning, I will depart for Glencairn Abbey, where — for an article on monastic life, I shall stay for two nights. My preparations for tomorrow’s trip are complete. I am Googling ‘monastic silence’ while my husband reads The One Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed out of the Window.

“Wow. This monastic silence thing is really interesting,” I say. “Did you know that Cistercian monks had their own sign-language?”