On: Live: US to escort ships through Hormuz as Iran warns of ceasefire breach

The morning light, thin and watery, falls across the breakfast table, catching the rim of my teacup, making the porcelain gleam with a false promise of peace. Another headline, another bluster from across the ocean - “Project Freedom,” they call it, as if freedom were a thing to be escorted, a cargo to be delivered through a narrow strait. One imagines the great ships, ponderous and slow, moving like beetles across a polished floor, while the air around them crackles with unseen tensions. And the words, always the words, like stones thrown into a still pond, rippling outwards, disturbing everything.

One thinks of the sea, vast and indifferent, yet here it is, reduced to a channel, a passage for human will and human folly. And the men, always the men, with their pronouncements and their projects, as if the world were a chessboard and they, the only players. The room feels suddenly small, the walls pressing in, and I long for the garden, for the unruly tangle of roses and the quiet hum of bees, where the only project is growth, and the only freedom, the wind through the leaves. This constant clamour, this ceaseless rattling of sabres - it wears one down, like water on stone, eroding the very possibility of thought, of that quiet space where ideas might bloom, unbidden. What room, I wonder, is left for anything else, when the world is forever bracing for a breach? The tea grows cold.