Right, Humphreys. Stop procrastinating. You haven’t even started yet!’ I rebuked myself, and stepped out into the rain to begin. As always, solvitur ambulando, I solve things by walking. 

It is the gloom that does for me in winter. Seven of my past eight grid squares had been grey and wet, in a winter where the rain never ended and the sun never shone. I was sagging like a feeble houseplant, pale and etiolated owing to lack of light. If I could hibernate until spring returned, I would. 

I dearly wished to dig out my passport and head somewhere far away where sunlight shone hot on my back. California called. Emigration enticed. Marrakesh, maybe? I find the dark half of the year harder to endure every year. But just when I am about to crack, I recognise tiny changes heralding the approach of spring and the return of all good things. 

So it encouraged me to hear a definite increase in birdsong this morning, a ratcheting up of woodland activity. Perhaps life was 

returning, and perhaps my own life was too. For today was Imbolc, the Gaelic festival celebrating the onset of spring that occurs halfway between the solstice and the equinox.