This is the Guardian.

For my family's first beach holiday,

we found the perfect seaside cottage with a stunning ocean view.

After spending the day splashing in the sea, exploring rock pools and slurping ice creams,

we loved coming back to our own quiet retreat for easy dinners and story time with the kids.

The Guardian Labs has partnered with cottages.com to celebrate the joy of finding your

perfect family escape. This message was paid for by cottages.com.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, I'm Mark O'Connell. I'm the author of Splendid Isolation,

how I stopped tying by sitting in a forest for 24 hours.

I remember being quite a difficult piece to write. We went through quite a few drafts.

It was one of those pieces where we ended up being about something that it wasn't

directly about at the very beginning. So I began it as an enterprise in writing about

immersion nature and only through the kind of subsequent drafting and e-drafting of the

piece, did it emerge, that what I actually wanted to talk about,

actually wanted to explore was my own personal relationship with tying. I had done two of these

wilderness solos before and thought that I hadn't really explored in sufficient kind of detail,

the profound experience of what happens to you when you're sitting on your own in a forest or,

you know, by a river for 24 hours. And it's not an easy thing to vocalize and there's lots

in the piece that tries to isolate for once a better term. The strange, almost kind of trippy

experience, that extent of reading alone and of being just immersed in nature. And I wanted to

try and get at some of those slightly inescible things. The first thing I suppose that strikes me

...