Lydia Howells

Portrait of Lydia Howells

Lydia Howells

Nurse, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh
Haven: Outside

There’s the new royal mile that takes you around the hospital site. We’re really rich in Lothian and I think at the Royal as well, we’ve got quote a lot of green spaces. So I try and get out and do a loop, depending how long my break is, how long I’ve got, but it’ll take you across a little river and down across like the trees and through the greenery and then back through a different part of the hospital. So it’s really nice – by the time you’ve done it, you just feel like you’ve completely reset.

“I sit outside by the bikes, or I go and sit on the grass as if I’m having a picnic so I get some outdoors because the shifts can be so long that you can go a whole shift and you don’t really know what the weather is. Because you come in and it’s dark and you leave and it’s dark – some of the places that I work haven’t got windows, so if you don’t come out, then you actually don’t know what kind of day it’s been.”

Diptych image of Lydia Howells and their haven

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