There is a particular kind of March where you sit down to write and realise that the last twelve months have been so relentlessly full that you don't quite know where to start, and then find yourself starting with the thing you least expected to be writing about: a house. Specifically, our house. Specifically, the one we've just bought on Stradella Road in Herne Hill, and which we will actually be in by May.

There is a particular kind of late-December lull — the days between Christmas and New Year that don't quite belong to either — where you finally sit down and realise you haven't written anything since the clocks went back. So: October to now, properly, before the year actually closes and I lose the thread of it entirely. A weekend in the Cotswolds in October, which Richard and I had been meaning to do for the better part of three years.