“I love them,” the artist said yesterday, speaking of the worldly-wise and periodically world-weary couple, CC (Australian) and Given (American) O’Hanlon. “In a way they are truly living.” Never one to patronise, she meant her words well.

I’d just shown her CC’s latest written update from Rome. Readers may remember me mentioning CC and Given, including CC’s book that was about to be published in Buenos Aires—for which I’d been invited to write the foreword—before the publisher, a good man, went bust. There is something almost appropriate about a book concerning one kind of precarious life being stranded by another.

Freedom is a cruel place. The artist and I know this. The artist keeps painting, I keep writing—filming when lucky, and the kids keep playing their music. Meanwhile life erupts in truths, among them that poverty and richness are not opposites in quite the way respectable life tells us. One can possess very little and still inhabit an existence. I’ve always believed we are informed best by our sensitivities; they are among the few possessions nobody can repossess.

Or have I been over-reading my Rilke and in particular his well-turned phrase, as translated by Herter Norton: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches…” I suppose there are worse instructions for surviving a life that refuses to become secure.

Here is the beginning of CC’s update: “It has taken us all week to unwind from the stress of packing up our personal belongings aboard Wrack, decommissioning and cleaning the boat, then wrangling eight pieces of luggage between her decks and Cagliari airport.” Eight pieces of luggage: sometimes an entire life submits to being counted.

CC writes like a dream, even if he is the only person who does not believe this. His words seem scratched onto the hull of his existence, these days often in daily Bluesky posts. I wonder whether that curious inheritance—aptitude accompanied by ambivalence—has something to do with being the son of a writer. He has occasionally paid me the considerable compliment of reposting my own work, choosing with meticulous care a passage here or there to introduce it. Coming from a writer I admire as I do him, such attention has always made my own words seem, momentarily at least, a little taller—as though another writer’s attention, as with an editor, can lend them the courage to stand.

CC’s update continued: “A long day of travel ended with us hauling the luggage from a taxi up four flights of stairs to the second-floor walk-up that is now our refuge for the next two months in Rome. At least, it abounds with small luxuries: hot showers, a toilet we don’t have to pump by hand, a comfortable double bed, a large kitchen, a welcoming café downstairs, and a grocery store less than a block away (our nearest in Cagliari was a three-kilometre round trip on foot).” It is one of freedom’s little jokes that, after enough of it, a nearby grocery shop can begin to resemble paradise.

Wrack was the name of their beloved boat. She is now in the process of being transferred to a new custodian: “Our days as sea-dwellers are over. It would be easy to slip back into the wandering purposelessness that shaped our lives during the five years before we bought Wrack, three and a half years ago, but our age and (in my case) an increasing frailty make it urgent to find somewhere, fast, to dig in, resist a fugitive life and embrace fixedness, stillness, if not belonging.” There is an age when setting out takes courage. There may be another when courage consists of finding somewhere to stop.

Though pulsing with a defiant if misleading throb of youthfulness, CC and Given are stateless and in their seventies. “In addition to finding a long-term home, we have to figure out a legal framework (and a jurisdiction) within which we can be employed or employ ourselves, have a bank account and health insurance, and maybe access basic social services. Given and I have been ‘outsiders’ for so long that it’s hard to imagine ourselves as part of a community, but I suspect we’d be enthusiastic contributors to it, given the chance.” After a lifetime of finding ways out, they are confronted by the unexpectedly difficult business of finding a way in.

I remember a mutual friend discussing the two of us visiting CC and Given while Wrack was moored off Morocco, having been sailed there by the couple all the way from England. Just like a line in a song. We never made that journey. Some invitations acquire their poignancy only after the place one meant to visit has disappeared.

“We are trying to make every day ashore count,” writes CC presently. “The last few days have been spent unpacking travel-worn bags, washing clothes that reek of mildew and diesel, and wondering why we brought so much with us instead of simply dumping it in a skip. But as Given says, ‘We’re always in the shadow of “what if…?”’” Perhaps that shadow is what luggage really is: the material weight of all the futures we cannot quite bring ourselves to rule out.

When I first saw photographs of CC and Given, I must confess I felt an echo of times past. It had nothing to do with the fact CC and I had both lived in the walled Italian city of Perugia in Umbria, though we had not known each other then. No, examining their faces I found myself asking the same question I’d asked of a mountain community I once lived with: was it their poetry or aura that reminded me of the so-called freaks I’d briefly hung out with in my mid-teens, bouncing from free festival to free festival? Then again, memory has a habit of recruiting people into tribes they never joined.

Here he is again: “We’re all too aware that without Wrack, we have no fallback if we can’t find somewhere else to live, some way to make a living, when the time comes to give up our temporary apartment here. We might yet find ourselves shelterless at the beginning of a northern winter. Still, we remain, improbably, optimistic.” There are sentences in which a whole life turns on a single word. Here, for me, that word is still.

Brought to mind is Bashō’s extraordinary opening to The Narrow Road to the Deep North, usually translated along the lines of “The months and days are the travellers of eternity.” It connects wandering with age rather than youthful adventure, which is precisely what makes CC and Given so interesting. The young traveller is expected to be going somewhere. The older traveller knows that eventually the road is going somewhere with you.

They enjoy a very loyal following, one that seems to feel their accidental grace as much as their precariousness. Why are others so confused by lives lived off the beaten track? Whoever said we must conform and surrender our true ambitions? Freedom does not exempt anybody from dependence. I know. If anything, CC and Given’s story exposes the fiction that conventional lives are independent. The householder depends on an employer, bank, pension fund, state, insurer and property market. The wanderer merely makes dependence visible. But that need not invalidate freedom. It may instead reveal something more truthful: underneath the paperwork and property deeds, everybody’s life is being held up by somebody else.

“We have no regrets about what we’re doing,” writes CC. I love that. “There’s a new, unmapped path ahead of us, so there is hope—and possibilities—if not yet an end to our long journey.” To have no map is frightening. To discover that you can still imagine a destination may be another name for hope.

I think now of Antonio Machado’s translated “Traveller, there is no path, / the path is made by walking.” It is a beautiful line, though it leaves unspoken the harder question: what happens when the traveller’s legs grow tired?

Perhaps this is what freedom eventually asks of us: not that we wander forever, but that we remain capable of recognising when our wandering has done its work—and brave enough to discover whether stopping might be something other than surrender.

After oceans and borders and diesel and mildew, after all those sea miles in Wrack, the promised land for the moment is wonderfully modest: a hot shower, a bed, a café downstairs, a grocery shop around the corner. Perhaps paradise has always depended upon how far you have travelled to reach the ordinary.

There is something moving to me in that. CC and Given have spent years inhabiting the question most of us postpone: how little certainty can a life withstand and still remain a life freely chosen? Now another question has arrived, and it may be the more difficult one. How does one come ashore without surrendering the freedom that took one—metaphorically, or otherwise—to sea in the first place?

Perhaps this is where the rest of us enter the story. Nobody comes ashore entirely by themselves.

I don’t imagine CC would thank me for turning him and Given into symbols. They are not symbols. They are two people in their seventies, carrying too many bags up too many stairs, looking for somewhere to live and some lawful means of sustaining themselves when their temporary refuge in Rome comes to an end. They have taken the unbeaten track far enough to discover something seldom mentioned in songs about freedom: even unbeaten tracks eventually require a roof.

And yet I return to what the artist said when I showed her CC’s latest words: “In a way they are truly living.” Perhaps what struck her was not the wandering at all, but the refusal—even now, or especially now—to mistake uncertainty for the absence of life.

Yes. I think they are.

And living, truly or otherwise, has never been a solitary undertaking. Eventually every road leads us back to that inconvenient, beautiful fact: we need one another.

If you would like to help CC and Given buy themselves a little time in which to find their next piece of solid ground, their crowdfunding campaign is here: https://gofund.me/3a05c482c