What’s stopped you writing this week, and what’s kept you going? These are the questions we ask our guests over on In Haste, the new podcast-and-newsletter baby I’ve made with Charlotte Runcie . I’ve been thinking about them this week because it has been that rare thing: a Good Writing Week. When you’re in the slightly preposterous situation of paying your bills with words, you have to turn up at the keyboard and sort of pretend that something good is happening even when you know it isn’t. Keep doing this enough and, by the same strange alchemy that the trees know when to start putting out leaves or egg white gets whipped into perfectly soft peaks, you’ll get to a point where it does something. This week, it did something.

What kept me going? Knowing that M had used a couple of his holiday days to take the baby, and that my work was therefore munching up days we could be using as a family to do Fun Stuff, and therefore mustn’t be piffled away. Punitive but true. What stopped me writing? The perpetual desire to clean the kitchen, as usual.

Still, it is February now. We are out of a rather long and hectic start to the year. The early daffodils have started to bloom and the sink is full of mimosa. It’s light when I go and pick up the baby from nursery and his top teeth are cutting through. Things are growing, the world is turning, it feels a little like spring is possible.

Other good things this week:...