Well, I am at home again (Laus Deo). The excellent Mr Huxtable (my builder) and his gang have fixed my roof despite lockdown, and the house is now safe, dry and warm. The year, though painfully slowly, is turning away from the winter, and there are bluebells and windflowers in the woods and adorable little black-faced lambs on the moor. It is all very lovely – and it is also (together with and separate from its physical loveliness) delightful to be at home.

But being away from home has made me think about how very little domestic – home – life is celebrated in either the Old or the New Testaments. Adam and Eve are driven out of Eden; Abraham and Sarah “go out” from Ur of the Chaldees to a “land [they] do not know” – and spend the rest of their lives roaming about the Middle East looking for it, not very successfully. There is very little suggestion that their descendants feel settled anywhere; they eventually leave Egypt and shamble around the Sinai desert for forty years. And when they finally cross the Jordan into the “promised land”, centuries of war, exile, invasion and general disruption follow.