Summer Solstice, and recent days continue to be processed by Disney: a run to the river finds a deer cropping the grass among the geese; working in the garden I’m distracted by a drone above, and look up to discover a nearby tree is briefly full of bees in swarm; an after-school swim feels like half the town is there, along with dragonflies skimming the surface and birds of prey regarding us from afar; the river this morning is lit through with a pink and green warm mist as we climb in for a festive swim.

I keep listening to (and watching) this Orla Gartland song, because it’s great and because she’s right, none of us are special. Gartland sings: Find the ones that get you/Stick to them like hot glue - I am filled with love for those women willing to climb out of bed in the middle of the night for swims year-round, because who knows when any swim is our last, so maybe love is all that can be a constant? Before death, other things get in the way, and none of us are getting any more nimble as we splash in and out of the water, so instead I stick like hot glue to the fact that it’s been years of this, now, and I’m still amazed to have found such serendipitously aquatic and life-savouring women.

I miss those other moments of serendipity that seem impossible in 2022, moments like pulling up beside a car at traffic lights and seeing them mouth along to the same song you’re listening to on the car radio. Do we have enough moments of connection to make up for those lost ones? Crossed telephone lines and unexpected meet-ups in another country and second-hand books that have a recognised name inked on the first page? I know I’m caught up in the nostalgia trap humans have been prey to since we became humans, so I can only wander so far down this path and still claim any self-awareness. I miss a great deal that’s gone, but I’ve tried to train myself to feel it as love, not loss: it’s love I feel for the range of books we had as children — while we’ve now got a much-improved diversity of authors, the capitalist necessities of the publishing business mean the books released now still seem to fit into three or four narrow and rigid types. Where is the skin-crawling weirdness of Oz? The everyday literary cleverness of Geraldine McCaughrean? The present-day devastation of Robert Westall? The respect for the reader’s intelligence/nerdiness of Leon Garfield? Where is the wonderfully spooky quality of Margaret Mahy, or the humour — the humour, goddammit! — of Sue Limb and Sue Townsend? Where do teenagers get wit on the page? (Obviously, all these types of books must still be being published. I just wish Waterstone’s would stop making tables of forty books that are different in title but identical in jacket, because they’ve demanded the publishers do it that way.) So I feel love for those old books, and love for the new books I haven’t discovered yet, and love for the friends I might not see these days, and love for the ease and misery of our shared teenage years as I watch how teens now have everything against them but still show up with wit and hope, cleverness and competence. A summer solstice with sun and nature, and a breakfast of brioche makes it easy to shape all those feelings into love.

The wheel continues to turn. I was talking to someone recently about the difference between feeling we’re stuck in a circle and recognising everything is cyclical — my bad habits aren’t a washing machine I’m trapped in, they’re a habit I have daily opportunities to change, etc etc. So the days begin to shorten again, and I don’t like the dark evenings or this dark reality we’re in, but! If I’m lucky, I’ll see at least another cycle, and I’ve discovered a v easy recipe for cheese-stuffed garlic naan which is out of this world, I’m rereading the great Lord of the Flies, I’ve got Harry Styles/Taylor Swift mash-ups on repeat, and I tell myself that even the darkest timeline has jokes, and bread, and people with whom we want to find real connection.