I’m writing to you from the flat grey promise of dawn. It’s a Friday, so my childcare has shrunk to the time I can muster before M heads out at 7.30am, and I have this letter to finish. Even though my desk now only sits metres from the back door, sometimes it still feels like a Herculean effort to get out there. This morning, for instance, I had to quietly inspect the garden and remove eight slugs from tulips and the globe flowers I put in the other week (I resent their appetite for novelty and beauty); yesterday I ran around the house wailing ‘I just want to get dressed!’, as this most basic of tasks was interrupted by matters such as: finding a pair of wired headphones; dealing with the basket of laundered smalls that have been ignored for a week; gently spooning Weetabix into a tiny princeling who was rejecting his high chair.

Getting to the Hut, getting to the desk, never feels more pressing than on weeks like the one that has been - ripe with deadlines, so many of the things that everything else including the sanity-inducing things gets thrown by the wayside. And so I get here and I write and my shoulders hunch and the sun moves though the Hut and then it’s nursery pickup and I feel like a weird mollusc, hungry for novelty and beauty.

So yesterday I delayed getting to the Hut and went for a walk around the park, instead. It has a little “wildlife” section in it which sings at this time of year - apple blossom at the right height to sniff and cow parsley and the first of the yellow flag iris getting fat. I stood there and watch a goldfinch (a goldfinch!) eat something, and then a jay flew straight past me. I love jays, clever, mythic birds. Spring has been so stubborn but it passes so quickly. Daft, I’m realising, to spend it fretting over deadlines.

More good things this fortnight:...