The next savour session will be taking place online tonight with Jo Thompson, garden designer, glass ceiling-smasher, The Gardening Mind by Jo Thompson creator, at 7pm BST! As with all savour sessions, access is free if you’re a paying subscriber. A Zoom link to join the session will go out at 5pm today. Get your gardening questions ready and we’ll see you later!

There’s been a lot of it lately. The rain has come in showers and spittings, in miserably persistent drizzle and soaked-through-to-your-knickers surprises. Summer’s not turned up in our house: in the hallway, the coat pegs still boast anoraks and winter’s wool. It’s not been hot enough to put them away yet, despite us feeling solstice’s breath on the windowpanes - drawing the curtains against a funny flat grey in the evenings.

There’s been a lot of rain and there’s been a lot of everything else. I think of the words I’d neatly inscribe in the margins of Wuthering Heights as a teenager: “pathetic fallacy!” Perhaps it is happening here. We have been in a kind of perpetual autumn; spring cold and stubborn, winter wet and warm. So hungry for the sunshine we almost forgot what it tasted like.

It’s been a demanding, magical, strange and unwieldy year of joy and upheaval and hard things. And nestled within that, like a shining seed within its protective case, have lain the past few weeks. I’ve witnessed a lot of extraordinary things, but behind the scenes of the standing ovations and the royal visits and the dinners and the signing queues and the laughter has been a relentless juggle and a big deadline. For a while now, I have been fantasising about a stretch of time in which to do very little at all. In those moments where I have run out of the house, caught between adrenaline and perfume and guilt over leaving the baby - again - I have thought about the days when I turn up at the Lido at 8am with a book and stay there until I decide what else to do with my body.

I’ve not been to the Lido because it has been raining and when it has not been raining it has been cold, and because I am out of practice at these things, in truth. The deluge has been long and unrelenting. It is going to take time to learn how to emerge from it. It’s going to take some courage and conviction to unhook the heavier coats from the pegs on the wall and store them away for a few months.

It can’t be stopped all at once. There is too much water to drain away, the ground is too hard. I am learning that one must be gentle in encouraging a body and a mind to rest, especially one that has been so incapable - so fearful - of resting for so long. I feel like a goods train grinding to a halt or a smoking fire. These things take time. I partition them up and I feel my body relent a little with each. Naps on the sofa, early nights, books instead of screen time, a bus into town simply to eat a bowl of pasta by myself and then a bus home. A new notebook; it will sit unopened for several weeks and that is fine.

For months I have been thinking about this summer that I do less. It’s telling that I made mental lists of things to do with it (read Annie Ernaux; go to the local archive; write fiction; go to the ladies’ ponds; find a local art class; frame some pictures). I have done none of these things yet, I might never. I envisaged a summer that was golden and filled with bike rides. Instead we are nearing the longest day and I am in a jumper, and the water butts are full.

I’m noticing other things creeping in. The undulating vowels of the Welsh shop assistant, who sold me blusher before telling me that she was moving back to the Valleys this summer. The small harmony between a quarter-bottle of Pet Nat, the first bowl of cherries and a dishcloth on the dark pink garden table. The crisp shadows made by the late evening sun and the spider plant on the mantel. What it is to walk at the pace defined by my son, so newly on his feet, all of his fingers wrapped around one of mine.

On Saturday, after a day filled with friends, we cleaned the kitchen and went for a walk before bath time. We walked the same paths I walk several times a week. We pushed open the gate to the park and watched our son scale the steps of the climbing frame, then throw himself down the slide face-first. We pushed him on a swing until everyone lost enthusiasm and as I lifted him out I felt the rain on my shoulders. It was coming in heavy, this shower, and so we paused by the cafe and stood in silence and waited for it to pass. And then we walked home, caught between water and light, everything newly wet and newly shining, and it felt like summer.

For the next few weeks I’ll be writing other things. In the meantime, I’ll be removing the paywall from archived pieces to revisit.

savourites, my fortnightly Friday post of recommendations, reads and tasty morsels, will return with a bumper issue at the end of summer.

Thank you so much for your support, community and generosity during this wild and brilliant year. I hope you manage to savour a little this summer.

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For the past few weeks I’ve lusted after an imaginary dress. Sometimes I spot parts of it on other women, and think of myself wafting around in it.

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