We had all been waiting for so long. Barely 10am and I’d received three voicenotes about the good weather, the flash of sunshine that looked to stay. I was in Bath and it was yet to burn through the mist, my head thick with cold and the strange novelty of waking late. We had all been waiting for so long and now it was here, sunshine and warmth. Something carved between spring and summer.

I’m writing this on a patch of grass around a decrepit church, the river still beyond the surrounding cycle path. I’m in Bristol, a city that’s largely a stranger to me - bar a weekend trip and the futile ranking on a UCAS form - and it’s funny to be somewhere unfamiliar with a head full of cold on the first promise of summer of the year. Everyone seems young and intentionally scruffy: the fashions of my own youth are back in vogue again, and it’s impossible for me to see them - the low-slung jeans and the coin belts and the rah-rah skirts and the chunky trainers - without thinking of what it was to be 14 and longing in a provincial shopping centre.

And perhaps it’s because of all the young people, the couples lying on the grass on a Tuesday afternoon, water bottle tucked into a walking boot, or perhaps because it is warm and early May and we had all been waiting so long, but I’m thinking of those three spring-summers I spent as a student. Weeks when the north east skies never seemed to properly darken and the birdsong was as loud, walking home from the clubs, as the dubstep was. A kind of liminal time. We knew that term was ending, that the strange fantasy that was university time would soon be on pause. Another academic year done, back to the retail jobs and the unbearable weight of the future beyond. For now, though, there were shonky barbecues and day drinking and exams to be considered.

It’s a nostalgia that’s heightened by my current state, I suppose. This time yesterday I held the baby close before giving him back to his father and walking out of our friend’s house, knowing that I would not see either of them for two more mornings, or two more nights. I am away to talk about Why Women Grow in various places around the country, a rich and heady privilege. We have known this has been coming for some time, these days and nights away from the baby, and we have prepared as best we can. But if I am not busy enough then I still find it dislocating, this phantom tug between our bodies, the fact that he does not know where I am or that I will not be there again tonight. It exists as an unsettled restlessness, a puzzle with a piece missing.

And so I have been floating around these cities - first Bath, and then Bristol - with a sense of great freedom and also slight alarm. I can, and I have, taken myself out for little dinners and good lunches, sitting alone with a book and occupying space in cafes and sleeping a little later and signing books and talking to people about them. And I have sat and thought about the baby, whether he also feels that something is amiss and how that has coloured his day.

We have known that May - a month in which I am away most weeks with one bookish thing or another, a month in which I have many words to write and matter to simplify - is coming. And we had all been waiting for so long. Now it is here, and it’s not as I had imagined it; both more glorious and more humdrum. Somewhere between spring and summer, somewhere between home and not, somewhere between freedom and absence.

Why Women Grow is out in paperback now. There are some tickets left for the events taking place over this month and next - details here.