I’m not mad keen on it being really hot, and I very much regret mocking my neighbour who spaffed five hundred quid on a portable air-con unit in February. But I’m equally hard to please when it’s cloudy and cool. I’ve always been a huge fan of spring. Were I of a philosophical bent, I might call it the season of hope. A time when the first snowdrops poke through the soil and M&S place buckets of daffodils at their doors. But that’s not the bit that gets me excited. It’s the later part - the sort-of-summer weeks when it’s warm enough to manage without a coat, but not so hot that you’re plagued by sweat-patch shame. I know so many people who wax lyrical about autumn, and I do get the whole season of mists and mellow fruitfulness thing. I really do. But to me it’s just a way of announcing the flowers are dying, the leaves are turning brown, and any day now I’ll return from a dog walk with hands numb from cold.

I love it when my books sell in their hundreds rather than handfuls, even when hundreds is down to the authorial walk of shame. By which I mean the 99p ebook week that tends to follow most every big launch month. When a new book comes out, I enjoy a few delightful weeks where websites and magazines want my words of wisdom and lovely reviews flood my way. The 99p week is always sitting there waiting. And there’s a lot to be said for seeing your latest book break into top 100 lists - even if they tend to be what you might term ‘special interest’ categories (fake engagement workplace romance, anyone?). But each sale earns pennies. Six weeks earlier, each sale went so much further towards paying back the financial faith invested in editing, design, promotion and generally making a show of myself.

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I love ironing. And even just typing that, it feels like a form of coming out. For years I refused to have anything to do with an ironing board, but just this year I’ve found it to be the most relaxing hour or two of my week. I set myself up in a window where I get to see what’s going on in the street - who’s doing what, who’s been shopping where, who’s walking which dog. I listen to the radio, usually something soothing from Radio 3 Unwind, and lose myself. Obviously, I’m still very much a fan of diazepam, but this comes pretty close to the same empty-headed feeling my overheated brain craves.

Turns out, it takes a lot of poking and pushing to get me back into writing after giving birth to a book. For two or three months, my head has to travel back in time to something I wrote a year or more ago and act like I still love it, even if I’d sooner dance around a bonfire of slow-burning copies of the damn thing. It must be like this for artists and musicians too. You finish something, then it sits around getting ready to be seen or heard by strangers, by which time you’re deep into something new. Something you love so much more. Something you know is a million times better than the last thing you did. I’m trying hard to get back into my next book. A coaching session with the wonderful Kate Davies helped, but it’s still a rare day when I turn on my computer, shut off every other distraction and write.

And then there’s the news. I doom scroll like it might somehow change the bad stuff by seeking out something better. It never happens, does it? Why is the world such an angry, selfish place right now? I sort of get that money and social media are the key guilty parties, but we can’t seriously pin all of this shite all on two things. If you took away the money and shut down the internet, would we suddenly become nice again? We’re all doing something wrong, and I wish I knew what.

All things considered, I’m not sure how useful these random discoveries will turn out to be, or how I’ll use them to make anything better. Certainly I’ll turn up to social events in nicely pressed shirts. But beyond that?

It’s a trial, isn’t it. The whole persuading yourself out of bed each morning.

But on we go...

(Shirt - model’s own, think it was from H&M)

Here’s an advert for my latest book anyway. It’s 99p until Friday at midnight. You’ve only yourself to blame if you turn up late to this party.

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