Bracken unfurling. Snakeshead fritillaries. Chris arrived just before lunch on Saturday, announced by the crunch of his Mini’s wheels on the gravel drive. It was a blustery, rainy May morning, the sunshine, when it came, blindingly bright on the wet roads before the sky darkened and another showe...
Snow you can picture, picture-postcard style, but the sodden, rotting tangle where the brazen nettles were, the once-secret nests now stark in the bare branches and above all the sheer dead silence of the sky – these things are unimaginable for the rest of the year. That year, November shut the l...
Some snow fell in the north of the country, but there wasn’t a great deal anywhere else. Spring arrived unheralded by gales or storms, our landlady got our gutters fixed, and slowly, as the months passed, I stopped worrying each time it rained. My year of getting wet – and...