The morning after the Harvest Moon was full, the pavement was scattered with little discs of confetti. The remnants, I figured, of someone’s twilight adventures. A popped balloon, or a small cone made of flimsy cardboard. They were round and pale and I thought of them as reflections of the greater sphere hanging above.

The night before we’d walked over Waterloo Bridge at midnight. I was clear-eyed and more energetic than I’d felt in weeks, holding my jacket close to my body as we talked about the future. The Thames was swelling on its way to high tide, the sky as dark as it gets here, a soft beam of light rose between us and St Paul’s. Above it all, the moon. Last year’s Harvest Moon fattened in the first hour of my birthday, and I walked over a bridge staring at it then, too. Even with all the lights of the city, all the ones of the cars passing on the embankments and the blinking of the towers, it manages to dominate. I looked at it and wondered what it would light up if we were somewhere darker. Would it pick out our faces, would it make the grey water glow, would it cast shadows that would quiver? Probably. I only ever seem to see a full moon in town.

That morning a friend called while I was still in bed and we spoke about confusion and upheaval. It had been the moon’s doing, we decided. People will dismiss lunacy - the notion of moon-induced madness - as nonsense, but it’s been around since at least Roman times and still we undertake studies and interviews to try and prove, or disprove, it. Six years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on medics’ experience of admissions during the full moon, among them a gynaecologist who had delivered a caul baby - an infant still in its amniotic sac. “Our bodies are 70% water,” explained an X-ray technologist of 40 years, “because the moon moves the oceans, it moves the water in your body - people flip out.” A few months ago I shared writer Philip Hoare’s gentle wisdom: “it's alright: it's the moon, tugging at the sea inside of you.”

When I worked in a newspaper, I would chart the passing of time by the images the picture editor would share with each new moon. The editors would increasingly scoff - at the strange names, at the fact that the “supermoons” occurred with such regularity - but I always remembered these images over and above the grim-faced politicians or natural disasters. Somewhere, someone had stayed up to take them, bathed in moonlight.

When I think of the moon I think of being a child, being somewhere between scared and enjoying it as we walked through the churchyard on the way back from Brownies on an autumn evening, the first rings appearing with the falling temperature. I think about Shakira responding to her lover’s perception of her as a “domesticated girl” with the line: “Darling, it is no joke / this is lycanthropy”. I think of being awake by a tent on a beach in Northumberland, and watching it rise as the sun set. I think of the Nineties Jaffa Cake advert - “total eclipse”.

Most months, the moon will tug rage and fervour out of me. Even so, I remain surprised by it. Things fall apart or come together, but I rarely feel like I have a hold of them. Later, I’ll discover that the sky was full of light. Perhaps we are awash inside, and we are simply searching for solid ground.