Flatness feels like the air is gone from your tyres – so when you go to move the flatness makes everything harder, bumpier, slower, and wrong.

Flatness feels like the cold hard tiles on the floor – ready to chill your toes and send you slipping over if you don’t take care.

Flatness is week-old lemonade in a glass – dull and uninspiring and not what you need or want at all.

Flatness loses all your horizons and hopes – smoothing them with a drab cold one-dimensional coat.

Flatness can be like all those and much more. Flatness, being flat, can slide in between the layers of you, and take away your joy. Flatness, being dull, can slip across your shining soul and dim your very light. Flatness, being boring, can drill into your brain and drain out bits of sunshine that you need.

Flatness is the even layer, smooth, unbroken, prone. Though it sometimes lays us low, flatness also makes a place to build – a straight-out absolute that we can use to lay down bricks to raise us up again. A place once reached, though low and level; it can be used to lay foundations, can give us room to rest and ponder before we start to make us whole again.