When I was little I remember the November excitement of waiting for the first Christmas decorations to appear. In my small town I knew the likely places for the first sightings – the farming supplies shop on the corner, the house I passed on the way to school with the gnome in the garden – and from the day after Remembrance Sunday I watched them with mounting anticipation. In a time before the John Lewis advert heralded the start of Christmas, the first glimpse of glowing fairy lights (always multi-coloured, in those days) in a window meant that the season had turned and winter had arrived.

These days I still love to see the houses light up, one by one, as Christmas approaches, but I have to admit I’m far more excited now by watching out for signs of spring. Walking into town, I get the same sense of anticipation I used to feel for candle arches and Christmas trees about checking the progress of the buds on the cherry trees by the church and watching out for the first flash of yellow on the swathe of daffodils along the edge of the park. Nothing compares to the thrill of opening the curtains to discover that it’s going to be one of the year’s first really good line drying days, and that the house at the back of ours is gradually disappearing from view behind a hazy veil of green.

I’m pretty sure it’s a sign of middle age, like creaky knees and an interest in good quality bed linen, but it’s one I’m very happy to embrace. I feel quite frustrated at younger me, who judged the change of seasons on the prevailing footwear choices of others and would have looked forward to a day trip to see the new spring stock in the shops, without giving much thought to the new green leaves in the woods. What a waste of all those other Marches, but how brilliant to remember that, in a world obsessed with novelty and selling us the latest shiny stuff, there’s so much delight to be found in things that have quietly been there forever; things which are joyful and surprising in their very predictability.

The days will lengthen. The bluebells will appear. The bare branches of the cherry and the apple tree will soon be blowsy with blossom and the lawn will no longer be more mud than grass. The tulips will open, clouds of forget-me-nots will spread across the borders and the new book will grow beyond this first chapter. (Probably. One of these things is not quite as inevitable as the others.)