A few days before my summer holiday, I caught up with a friend and, over coffee, she asked me where I was going.

‘Saltburn-by-the-sea,’ I announced proudly.

She replaced her mocha in its saucer, looking uneasy.

‘That sounds great,’ she said.

‘But,’ I said, ‘there’s a but, isn’t there?’

‘It’s just…..it’s a bit quiet there,’ she said, ‘what will you do for a week?’

‘Well, what did you do when you were there?’ I asked.

‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘I got drunk quite a lot.’

Amongst the dreamy history paintings and luscious colours at the Tate Britain’s Radical Romantics exhibition, a small pen and ink illustration caught my eye. The picture shows a woman in a heavy dress sitting on a windowsill. Her head lolls to one side, her hands rest in her lap and her long hair falls over one side of her face. Her shadow is stark on the blank wall to her right. The decorative lattice windows are open behind the sill to show, in the far background, the outlines of a city. In the near background, a set of shadowy figures crowd about the open window, gazing in at the woman. The image is framed in ink and surrounded by a rose pink wash. The title ‘The Sleeper’ appears below the image and the initials ‘EA Poe’ and DG Rosetti,’ are placed to either side of the window frame, indicating that the image is an illustration by Dante Gabriel Rosetti of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Sleeper.’

Like many other people I’ve always struggled to enjoy summer. In recent years, soaring temperatures have made summers uncomfortable and have brought climate anxiety to the forefront of my mind. However, even as a child, summer was an anxious season for me. Maybe it’s the boisterous and frenetic energy which seems to accompany the warm weather – summer always seems too extroverted a season to be enjoyable. Maybe it’s the existential dread which seems to accompany lying still on the beach or the pool. Maybe it’s the pressure to have a wonderful time and the niggling sensation that everyone else is doing summer better, taking advantage of sunsoaked possibilities for travel and adventure. Maybe it’s just the prospect of wearing shorts. There are too many crowds, weddings and there’s too much noise. If I sound like the Summertime Grinch right now, it’s because I am!

I suspect that I am not the only person to have been taken by surprise by the arrival of spring this year, much as we all might have longed for it after a dull April. I feel as though Spring always comes this way though. One day you’re shivering and scraping your windscreen under sleet and the next, the whole world has bloomed unexpectedly and the air is full of lilac perfume. Last weekend, spring seemed to have finally turned up in my corner of the world and I took advantage of a beautiful evening go out and enjoy it.

This particular post will not be original content. After all, there have been so many thousands of words poured out in praise of libraries; lost libraries, favourite libraries and the importance of libraries in general, that it’s impossible to improve on what other people have already written. For instance, Jorges Luis Borges gives all of us hope when he writes ‘I always imagined that paradise would be some kind of library, ‘ (I fervently hope he is right!) Albert Einstein said ‘he only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.’ The children’s laureate, Michael Morpurgo noted that ‘libraries are how people fall in love with books.’ Looking at my haul from the library this week, I can only agree with him, but I would add that I think libraries also give people the chance to fall back in love with books, which is what has happened to me recently.

A few months back, I found myself in an awkward situation. You know the kind – you buy a birthday gift for a friend from Etsy, and, when the thing arrives, you inconveniently fall headlong in love with it yourself? Then you have to decide whether or not to painfully part from your new beloved (largely because your friend has already seen a picture of the gift) or to claim that the item simply never arrived, and keep it forever?! This kind of situation. In my case, the thing in question was a mid-century coffee pot, designed by Ulla Procope as part of the Ruska line for the Finnish-based Arabia house and produced continuously between 1962 – 1999.

In October of last year, I decided to go a month without spending money on anything I didn’t need. My Buddhist group were fundraising for a new centre by each stopping or giving up something for a month and it seemed like a good idea to pause and examine my spending habits. I was in the bad habit of picking up something small each time I went out and I wanted to recognise where that impulse came from as well as try and save money.

Like many other people, I suspect, something I’ve struggled with in the last year has been reading. More specifically, I’ve struggled with what to read. In a time when I thought I would get through so many of the books sitting unread on my shelves, the irony is that I haven’t wanted to read any of them. I haven’t wanted to read the classic novels I thought I’d get to when I had ‘time,’ and I haven’t wanted to read frothy romance novels either (although, of course, I still LOVE them!) What I’ve been after is that most eluive of beasts, the ideal ‘comfort read.’