It’s in the evenings, I think, when I feel the drift of time most keenly. The blind is rolled down in C’s room and the corner lamp is switched on. The first giddy rays of summer evenings stretch their fingers around the room despite our efforts to pretend that night has begun. I remember that it is May, and the colour of the northeasterly skies at the end of summer term when I was an undergraduate. There was always something unstoppably poignant about those evenings: soon, I would be rattling back down the M1 to a summer of zero hours contracts, bombing listlessly along country roads in the car I learned to drive in. For days, hours sometimes, I could hold onto the life I had forged for myself. I suppose it was a kind of thin place, somewhere where I could co-exist as different versions of myself.

I have not seen many of those evenings under open skies. The baby is settled and lifted upstairs to the kitchen floor in his basket, and our hours unfold as he sleeps on the floor. These are among the most tender moments and they are also when I feel the greatest pang for my life before him. To be cycling through the park in the minutes before it shuts, the smell of pollen in the air. To be one drink down and sparking into Soho, the night almost overripe with possibility. Around here, the long weekends have been punctuated by groups of people much younger than me, all in their best small clothes, day-drunk and damp with the rain. I can remember what it was to be that, and yet I’ve never felt more distant from it. I suspect I am almost invisible to them, just another South London millennial with a pram and shoes they’d never wear.

My body catches me off-guard and reminds me that it’s changed. My mind must have too, but I couldn’t tell you how. Turns out I can function better on less sleep than I realised. Turns out I care less about baby vomit on the sofa, or replying to emails. A lady on the bus with an older child tells me she lost sight of who she was with the kind of expression that suggested she was still finding herself. I am here, I am not lost, but I think I am a different shape now.

Seven weeks have passed and the skies tell me summer is on the way. Already so much of it feels a blur. Here are some of the good things - the ones I think I can put into words:...