…Lhude sing cuckoo, and all that.

While it may well only be the very end of April (for another hour and a bit), signs of summer are everywhere already, including some of my favourite things.

Not least…

The air is full of signs of life: pollen, little flies, smells of cooking and wafts of conversation. And Pickle wants to be outside.

The first barbecues of the season are behind us - warm days giving way to not-quite-so-warm evenings; chilly nights spent huddled over glowing embers waiting for the sausages to be done.

Blue feet glaring in sunlight for the first time in ages, wiggling bright with freshly-painted toenails. Not just mine, either - there are a lot of toenails out there at the moment (rather too many that should better be kept under wraps if you ask me…)

Drying clothes outside in a quarter of the time they take to dry indoors. There’s nothing like a breeze fluttering your smalls to make a woman feel good about things.

The need for thicker curtains becomes so pressing that I finally capitulated, headed for Habitat and replaced our cream bedroom curtains with thicker, darker ones - ones which don’t allow the morning sun to stream through onto my sleeping face at increasingly early hours…

In other news, I’ve started my new job, so I’m busy as a very busy thing getting up to speed on everything, while also preparing for a bunch of upcoming speaking engagements in various places. But in contrast, my new commute has put 3 hours of travel into my day, so I’m also getting a chance to read a lot, which is a lovely change. At the moment, I’m averaging a book every other day…