Whilst being strongly oriented around my own comfort zone, it’s disconcerting to have chosen to be entirely responsible for a chain of circumstance that has led me firmly outside of it. Here I am in a foreign land, in a town I’d never seen before, in a place without immediate friends and hardly any wi-fi access! In order to develop a coping strategy to deal with the ‘discomfort of now’ in the hope that my comfort zone will begin to re-establish itself, I made myself a strict timetable for today and more or less managed to keep to it.

However, the cycle ride, on a wonderful, silent electric bike, up the perfect smooth cycle routes past crag and castle, and the golden woods of the glorious valley of the high Danube, in the perfection of late autumn sunshine and colours, was enough to put a blessing on the day.

The woodland above the Danube near to Imrizhofen