We can speculate about care in art, we can think about the lack of it, but can we actually take care through art, by means of it, at such times of extremity? She says she doesn’t know why more people aren’t lending their houses, so many empty houses here she says. I had never seen such a gathering, but realised that they must have been blown down from the gutters, or the slate rooftops by the lifting winds. Gluzberg has had an extensive teaching career – most recently the Royal College of Art, where she was Reader in Contemporary Visual Production for many years. There is a Russian word that surfaces when I am writing to a friend in Moscow: Безвременье, Bezvremenye.

She has spoken and led sessions on Drawing and the City at conferences in Glasgow, Moscow and Paris.

It was pouring rain, but a gazebo was put up in the centre of the turning circle by the main doors, and ten of us huddled underneath it. Initially, the main objective was simply to put a response – any sort of response – on the page and to get comfortable with the kinetic challenge of carrying a sketchbook, a handful of pencils, making a mark and at the same time, walking safely through a space in a particular direction.

Masha’s parents introduced Nadia and I in those early Moscow days, when we were both obsessed by painting, and we sat about the kitchen table shyly, in the flat where they still live — a top floor flat in a building without a lift, a flat almost entirely unchanged from Soviet times. The professor even allowed me a moment’s nostalgia for the Soviet produced three and five litre glass jars that were such a ubiquitous detail of my Moscow year — thick blue-green glass vessels packed with pickled cabbage, or marrows, or mushrooms become slimy and viscous, too large or many for the fridge, they sat out in rows on frosted balconies, in easy reach of the kitchen table. There are Holm oaks, sycamore, chestnut — sweet and horse, hornbeam, high poplars, not pollarded thin and straight but allowed to spread thickly — and a huge silvery willow that holds its own space, not planted in a line with other trees but standing solid in the middle of the grass. Before it was developed, I shared a studio with some other artists in the broken remnants of the old schoolrooms, where the tiled walls and children’s murals were still intact. She was not allowed into the building but had continued sessions online, and visited and waved through the windows.Each year, the procession stops at the house of a well known fiddle player, now many years dead, and there is music and dancing outside the house. What became immediately apparent as I began walking and drawing at the same time was that I had to make split second decisions about what I wanted to register on the page when I was already moving past the object as I looked at it. Then the whole long line set forth in the dusk, their shadows in the water more beautiful than the line itself.