The world below is green punctured by vast islands of grey. This is England from the perspective of clouds and sparrows, the familiarity of my home made strange by different angles and a miracle playing with my DNA. I’ve been soaring for hours, enjoying topsy-turvy freedom and photo-bombing a young couple’s romantic hot air balloon ride. I’ve never told anyone this, I guess because it sounds a little silly, but I’ve always wanted to fly, ever since I first saw Christopher Reeve catch that helicopter in the first Superman movie. I’m far less dutiful now I’ve been blessed with the power. I called into work pretending to be sick, even as I tried to play with a lone magpie on his own territory. The birds must be getting freaked out if they think we’re even able to trespass all the way up here.

It’s all thanks to the latest pandemic to dance across the globe, its symptoms including a government falling as a journalist suddenly finds she can read the mind of a president, London Fashion Week thrown into chaos as its clothes, along their models, suddenly become invisible. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this, other than occasional outbreaks of pure irony; the conspiracy theories are rife, fuelled by the discovery that whatever-this-is lasts exactly 24 hours, no more, no less, but once the initial fear and confusion passed, most of us learned to enjoy it; if some strange virus is going to rage across the planet, then by all means let it be one that lets me fly, if only for a day.

I’ve flown before, of course, knees pushed against a snoring hulk in front of me, the promise of a glorious overview of a rolling planet trapped behind relentless plexiglass. This is something else; it would be easy to make a lazy comparison with Google Earth, but that doesn’t work in practice. What cheap metaphors lack is life – I can feel the damp of water droplets as the edge of clouds soak into my clothes, air currents roaring in my ears, and beneath my Doc Martens and several hundred feet of air I can see steam rising from industrial chimneys and the stop-start, stop-start of the M6 at rush hour. Maps and photos don’t move, don’t breathe, lacking the dimension of time and movement that turns knowledge into experience.

Well, a limited experience at least. I can stay up here for a few more hours, but that doesn’t press pause on the world. Earth still turns, exerting its gravity, and somewhere among that sea of concrete and roofs is a hospital and pipes, nurses and time running out.

I put those thoughts aside, push against nothing and rise further. I’ll never be able to do this again, based on the latest reports, so I fly northwards. At first I think this is random, until I see the huge half-sphere of the Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope emerging in the distance. Its appearance shocks me, not because I’m anything even approaching an astrophysicist, but because I remember Dad taking me here when I was a kid, looking around the visitor centre and the exhibits, spending a long drive home talking about space and flight and aliens and the occupants of a UFO who had once allegedly stolen mince pies from a lady who lived just a few miles from our home. It’s a happy memory, growing in intensity as I circle the dome. I think about landing, or at least standing on top of the telescope, but I don’t want to cause any damage and I force myself to remember that my day-gift is flight, not time travel. My Dad isn’t down there with an eight-year-old nerd, he’s lying in an NHS bed, wired up and ventilated.

I should be down there. I should be down there, not reminiscing and taking obligatory selfies outside first-storey offices and penthouses. Guilt wells up once again, guilt that I’m running away, guilt that I’m not making the most of this precious gift. Dad wouldn’t want me to squander this, I’m sure, and that makes me feel a little better, but that hope is betrayed by the thought that I could also be squandering the moments we have left. The slipping-away could happen any moment and I’ve never been known for good timing.

But if this flight is a rebellion against the laws of physics, maybe there’s another brief opportunity to fight back, however pointlessly, to rage against the dying of the light with an act of petty but anomalous vandalism. I dig into my thick woollen coat, excavating the detritus of my pockets and pulling out a sharpie. And there, in the sky above Cheshire, I write my initials on this monument to science, my initials, Dad’s initials, the date of that long-ago visit.

We were here, once, and though we’ll never be here again, I’ll leave some trace that we once passed through. The sharpie lid clicks back into its place and I start back towards home, towards that-which-is-to-come, and as the miracle’s time draws to a close, I can’t think of anything else but the beauty of flight and the tears drawn from my cheeks to become a part of the clouds.

I reach out into the dark and let Earth settle on the tip of my finger. I do this a lot, probably more than I should; too much time staring at that speck, an ember that once burned with Shakespeare and Springsteen, blue whales and redwoods, pizza, Curie and Christ. It’s a strange cocktail of homesickness and survivor’s guilt and a longing for something more than endless red dust.

We’ve been here a while now, long enough for the novelty and some of the fear to wear off, and even the strangeness of an extra moon has given way to routine. Our leaders used to spend a crazy amount of time and speeches trying to convince us that this is a new start, that we’re the #NewMartians, but it didn’t take long for us to recognise that really we’re refugees. We may have travelled a lot further than those who once fled the drowning of Miami and London, Osaka and Dhaka, but all the same we landed in a hostile environment with nothing but that we carried, no-one to welcome us, no-one really cheering us from the chaos back home, other than the prayers of desperate parents. Our Exhibition Lead still calls us pioneers, insisting that we left behind relics such as borders and flags, but all our clothes have a logo neatly stitched onto them, and it’s hard to feel pride in that when you know that the textile factory and the branding company that created them are both now underwater.

Still, we survived and that’s no small thing, and as a history teacher I carried the memories of civilisations here with me, some of them at least. For all my heartache, I’m grateful to be here; doubly so, given that I was on the last ship out (the wave of techno-utopianism that flew us here very nearly swept away those of us with specialities in the arts and the humanities, but the Percival Lowell was finished with days to go before that final launch window). But still, I’m nervous; that tiny ember is still there and I hear its echoes every day. This isn’t something I often say out loud, but it’s noticeable that our mistakes stowed away with us; some quarters are substantially larger than others, and the algorithms that help maintain the Habitat seem to have inherited the sins of their fathers, with security cameras resting a little too long on some of us, and decades of data on each colonist being among the first cargo loaded onto the first ship to leave. The promise of a fresh start only extends so far.

But the other day I noticed a rude joke scrawled on the door of a toilet stall. I know that one of the botanists has a homemade still hidden away in her quarters, and only yesterday someone rebelliously threw an old blanket over the solar array powering the mission’s cryptocurrency. On a short term mission, these would be acts of dangerous incompetence, but now we’re here to stay, it feels like something vital has survived despite the glossy brochures and the elitism, the drive to tinker, to hack, to laugh and create in the face of desperate circumstances. And so I smile and let the ember continue on her way as the remnants of humanity gather in the observation lounge, as the last musicians in the universe play their instruments and programmers make drones dance against the Martian sky.

Winter is coming, so they say; the clocks have gone back, the nights draw close, we enter into Allhallowtide, a liminal season where past and present and future and worlds both visible and hidden start to coalesce.

It’s at this time of year, so the ancient whispers go, that the veil between worlds thins. This isn’t a curtain I tend to poke behind, but the winter seems so dark this year; the spectre of old wars and the clatter of lying keyboards haunt the landscape as powerful men rape and pillage their way through their self-declared empires, everyday encounters turning into metaphorical slasher movies. Never mind Halloween, the veil has been thinning apocalyptically for a while now. I can’t say I like it.

But maybe we need to catch a glimpse of another world – not a world of wraiths and abandoned graveyards, a world lit only by flickering pumpkin-light, but a better world, somewhere more peaceful, somewhere more just, somewhere more dynamic and real than the trolls under the bridge, than the strawman scarecrows, than spiders spinning lies. Now is not the time to disguise ourselves as monsters so the monsters cannot break us, now is the time to stare through the tear in the curtain and catch a glimpse of hope instead.

Because as the world slips into the dark, hope’s the only thing that will keep us going, the only trustworthy will o’ the wisp willing to light our way. Stick to that path, lest we put too much trust in ghosts. Stick to that path, and don’t invest your savings with the huckster demon hunters selling burning torches made in sweat shops. People are not demons, no matter what the sales pitch says.

I would say that now is a time for heroes, but maybe that’s not quite right. ‘Hero’ carries a tome-full of implications, images of capes and Campbellian journeys, vampire slayers and giant killers. That’s a lot to live up to, no matter how much a geek like me loves the mythology. There are other things we can do though; we can march, we can write, we can sing protest songs, we can be kind. We can do the human things that ward off monsters. That’s not a Halloween thing – the real spectres live with us and have their own Twitter accounts. Don’t listen to anyone promising an easy exorcism; sometimes good people fall.

But often they rise.

This is the season of all the saints and all our souls, and while we decorate our homes and schools and supermarkets with the dead and the undead, really this is a season that reminds us of a resurrection to come; at least that’s how I’m looking at it. Things may be in retreat at the moment, the hopes and fears of all the years gathering on the streets. That’s what winter’s all about, after all.

Yet spring will emerge one day, just as it always does. And while now we see through a veil, thinly, then we will see in full. That’s what keeps us going; that’s what brings us through the dark.