“I had an epiphany in Lidl”, I told M on Monday night. We’re back in the UK and my life has shuddered into the domesticity that I’m still not entirely convinced is my life, even after seven months. Sometimes I feel like I am in a Shirley Hughes illustration. My days are a rhythm of laundry and buying groceries and naps and nappy changes and wiping down surfaces and mashing up food and clearing up mashed-up food and bath time and the deep, bittersweet relief when 7pm arrives and the baby is asleep and yet that is another day of his smallness that I will never get back.

But back to the epiphany - which I suppose used to happen on dance floors and the Tube and, at times, in the shower, only now my showers are observed by a baby and it’s difficult to have epiphanies when you’re having a one-sided conversation. I realised I had to claim back the mornings. I wrote about this in Wednesday’s letter: my brain’s always worked best before everyone else wakes up, but in matrescence, I’ve found it hard to claim that time. Something has finally shifted.

From the morning, then. I’m writing this on Samhain - the Gaelic festival celebrating the beginning of the darker half of the year. The clocks went back at the weekend but these brighter mornings never last long. I can feel the light slipping away.

Traditionally I am not good in the cooler months. I find the short days oppressive, I get restless in the house, I find the preparation for Christmas increasing manic and I’ve come to think of September as more of a new year than January. But this year I won’t be in an office. I won’t have those lunchbreak-free days where I only go outside in the dark. I’ve toyed with getting a winter membership to the Lido. Perhaps, like in January, I will take a train through the dawn and get in the sea. I wonder how it will be different. If you’re a winter person, perhaps leave your favourite things about it in the comments? I think we’d all benefit.

So, to mornings. And to the brightest parts of the darkest months. More good things this week:...