It has been raining here since last July – or so it seems. The land is totally saturated, walking on it my boots make sucking noises in the mud; even the farmer’s quad-bikes are getting stuck. As the water table is now just below the surface any rain runs off in sheets from the slightest gradient.

Despite this there have been occasional days when something else is stirring. Stepping out of the back door and sniffing the air like some emerging mole, I sense a renewed energy after months of torpor. A mistle thrush is singing in the top of the larches, although its song is more melancholy than hopeful. Half a dozen crossbills feeding in the next tree along are deep in conversation and a great tit is tuning up. The snowdrops have morphed from sleek spikes spearing through the warming soil into demure bells; some of them have their feet in a puddle of water, but snowdrops thrive on that. Raking off the last of the autumn leaf-fall I expose unfolding celandine leaves, still wrinkled like faces creased from sleep. Looking in the place where we usually find the first celandine flowers I am puzzled to find all the buds have been neatly nibbled off. Discussing this over lunch Gethin suggests that it was probably the work of voles feeding beneath the cover of a brief blanket of snow a fortnight ago. Even on these charmed days there are still no insects stirring, although putting my ear to our beehives I can hear a faint hum. I wonder what pollinates our witch-hazel, which is flowering in defiant magnificence despite the conditions. The elusive promise is only in the air for an hour or two; we (spiders, primroses, me) all sense what is coming, but also that it is ‘not yet’.

Sure enough the next day it is lashing down again; there is a gigantic puddle on my neighbour’s field on which two ducks are spinning happily – which just about sums things up. But this is home. I sometimes hear people say they are thinking of moving to a place with more sunshine, which makes it sound like a tourist destination. For me ‘home’ is a rich broth of relationships, personal history, attitudes, culture, language, landscape, wildlife and even climate, the flavour of which deepens over time. I know in my bones that moving somewhere else is not an option. Come rain or shine this is where I belong now, and it is a relief to be so sure.