There is a particular quality to the months between October and February in London. The light goes early. The Tube smells of damp wool. People begin saying 'it's the run-up to Christmas' from mid-October as though that explains everything, which, fair enough, it sort of does. I either disappear into a duvet for the whole stretch and emerge in March slightly paler, or I spend it on planes. This year: planes.

It’s late September. The window’s open in the sitting room and there’s that particular West Sussex evening air coming in — cold enough to need a jumper, still carrying something of a summer I barely remember having. A few months ago I was on a cliff path in Cornwall with wind in my hair and Sasha telling me I was circling. Now the plane tree outside is turning and the light goes at six and I’m forty, which I mention not for sympathy but because it’s sitting in the corner of t