My lover lives in another part of the country – we met when we were both visiting London a few months ago – so I’ve been travelling up there a few times, visiting other friends too, sometimes – and she’s been down here too. Some visits have been a week or more, yet it’s never felt too long, and we seem to find each other’s company very easy. So we’re both enjoying it as much as possible while it lasts.

Another thing which has given me an enormous amount of pleasure – and, I think, contributed to my general sense of well-being at the moment – has been my garden. This has flourished in recent weeks, and I now have a lovely herb garden with ten or more types of edible herb in it, some lovely lettuce, and tomtatoes on the way. I have a few non-edible plants too, but am far more interested in ones which I can use. This week I made a salad with lettuce, loveage, sage, parsley, thyme, marjoram and coriander. A bit over-the-top, taste-wise, but it was lovely to eat something which I had cultivated – the first ever time for me, if you don’t count mustard and cress seeds on the windowsill when I was a child – and which had food miles totalling less than ten feet.