My abiding memory of February is of the wind. Wind howling in the lime trees beyond our street, wind rattling the windows and lashing about the house, wailing down the chimney and sending garden furniture and plant pots scudding across the yard.
Read MoreI don’t remember my first swimming lesson, but it has attained almost monumental status in our family folklore. According to legend, whilst the other three year-olds in my class got into the water with no fuss , I refused to follow them and remained on the side of the learner pool, the picture of anguish and fear in Pink Panther armbands. In the end, my mum was obliged to borrow a swimming costume from another mother and accompany me into the water for the rest of the lesson (sorry, Mum!) From this ignoble beginning however, I must have decided I quite liked swimming, because going to the pool became a twice-weekly fixture in my life for the next twenty years.
Read MoreDecember was a strange and wonderful month - four weeks spent rushing about and at the same time, being extremely still. It was a month full of the very new and different and also the very old and familiar.
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