Last week I thought we’d reached peak bleak: a couple of days of sideways rain, paths turned from mud baths to full sludge and swamp, a cycle on repeat of wind, rain, mud, walk because you don’t want to be stuck inside all day, find clean and dry clothes until you run out of them and then there is nothing to do but to stay inside and listen to a rain that finds a way to be heard whatever room you’re in and whatever you’re doing.
And now: a day or two of sunshine and warmth, and a sudden shock of spring, as if a grey curtain has been lifted to reveal a different world of life and colour that’s been there all along. Our plum tree is in full blossom, the grass below covered in a snowy blanket of fallen petals. In the local woods, bluebells seem primed to explode, an arsenal of green replacing the morass of brown from the previous weeks. All over, colours are deeper – the blue of the sky, the green of the grass and new growth, the yellows and purples of daffodils and crocuses.
Wildlife carry the confidence of having beaten winter. On one walk, a huge swan glides into land on the Thames, like a sleek jumbo jet descending on an agreed flight path, webbed feet pulled down like a plane’s landing gear, a hit on the water, and a slam on the brakes to rest quietly again on the river. On another, deeper in the countryside, a pheasant struts on the path ahead of us, like us, out on a Sunday afternoon stroll, in no hurry, with no place to be but there.
In the city, on these warm days, the whole of London appears to be out at lunchtime. I’ve been used to having virtually empty streets these past few months of cold and rain; the sudden crowds are initially disconcerting and I have to work harder to find a quiet pocket to let the sun fall on my face and the warmth sink into my body. Walkers and their dogs spill onto the Thames’ beaches at lower tide; in these conditions, the river feels less imposing, less of a dividing line between north bank and south bank, more an accessible playground and a nod back to a time before it was hemmed in by concrete.
We’re not completely in the clear just yet. Those days or two of sunshine and warmth, followed by a day or two of cloud and cold, and sometimes a day somewhere in between. There’s one in where London is trapped in a low mist: my morning commute is eerily quiet, as if other walkers have been sucked from the streets into the cloud. To the east, the tall towers of the city and Canary Wharf have gone missing; and to the west, there’s a pale orange glow from a desperate sun, creating a cartoonish silhouette of the Houses of Parliament.
It’s a day that encapsulates how I feel at the moment, neither here nor there, able to focus on the small things but somehow the whole picture doesn’t quite form a neat, consistent whole. Maybe there’s something more than normal in the usual drama of life – school worries, work worries, life worries – that means I can’t lose myself in random thoughts in the way I’d like to when out and about. Or maybe it’s just the hard work of slip-sliding on still muddy paths – a few days of dry can’t make up for six weeks of rain.
But there’s more than enough in those small moments to enjoy, whether the ripples of early morning dew on the petals of spring flowers, or the sunsets that my son likes to call piranha skin skies (thinking back to our recent Amazon adventures): smooth brushes of pale blues, oranges and pinks, dotted with dark splodges of cloud.
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