The Light I Left On

On May, 31, 2026, I left London on a 23,000 kilometre cycling expedition across Europe, For A Future Without Cancer.

Before I left, I took one final photograph of my studio.

Not of a finished work.
Not of a wall dressed for display.
Not of colour, canvas, or applause.

A light bulb behind an art frame.

That was all.

A small, ordinary light standing close to the floor, half hidden, half waiting, casting its presence through the hollow body of a wooden frame. The room was almost empty, but not abandoned. Something had been left behind deliberately. Something was still awake.

I think every departure needs a witness.

When I closed the door and stepped towards the road, towards London, towards Europe, towards all the unknown weather of the journey ahead, I left that light on as a promise. Not because I feared the dark, but because I wanted the studio to remember me. I wanted a small glow to remain in the room where so many inner storms had been turned into colour.

The frame leans there like an unfinished sentence.

It is empty, but not vacant.
It is waiting.

Perhaps that is what a frame really is. Not a border, but an invitation. A way of saying: something will return here. Something not yet seen. Something shaped by distance, fatigue, silence, strangers, rain, generosity, and the long ache of becoming.

The bulb behind it feels almost sacred to me now. A domestic star. A lighthouse in miniature. A soft signal from the life I left behind to the life I am riding towards.

I left home to cross the world, but also to cross a version of myself.

The road will change me. It already has. Every border, every valley, every lonely evening, every kindness from a stranger, every hard mile beneath a heavy bicycle, they are all entering the work before the work exists. They are gathering behind the frame.

One day, I will come back to this studio.

I will open the door.
The room will be different.
I will be different.

And perhaps that little light will have done what I asked of it.

Not to keep the room bright.
Not to protect the past.
But to hold a path open.

A light left on, so I can find my way back home.

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