Deep breath. Now for that spring in my step

With California off the menu, Anna Hart is enjoying sunsets and sunrises closer to home

This week past saw St Brigid’s Day, which in Ireland marks the (wildly optimistic) start of spring. Technically St Brigid’s Day (also celebrated as the pagan Feast of Imbolg) marks the midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, but I suspect the ancient Celts just really, really needed an excuse for a party. And who can blame them?

One of the most gutsy examples of late-winter revelry I’ve ever witnessed is Shetland’s Up Helly Aa, a Vikingthemed festival that culminates in a torchlit parade and the burning of a lifesize galley ship in Lerwick harbour. My friend Bryan Peterson, of Shetland Arts, argues convincingly that what looks to outsiders like an archaic and debauched event offers islanders a much-needed celebration during a bleak season, on top of the support network that participants (“guizers”) find in their squads in the lead-up to this late-January event. The Swiss chase away winter with Tschäggättu, a parade of fur-clad beasts with oversized carved wooden masks, Bulgaria has the equally alarming Kukeri festivals around the country, and Slovenia also pulls out the sheepskin suits and monster masks for Kurentovanje, in late February. Such festivals might be an unconventional form of therapy, but after the year we’ve all had,

I can’t imagine anything more cathartic, thrilling and necessary than being chased through the streets by jovial monsters during a breathtaking bacchanal. I know, I know – I should probably download Headspace and just try a nice mindfulness meditation session.

These festivals hold such appeal for me because it is this time of year – late winter or early spring, depending on one’s state of mind and calibre of window glazing – I find the most challenging. I know I’m not supposed to feel this way about spring. Spring is meant to be all about hope, positivity, the “green shoots of recovery”. But I grew up in Belfast, and spent my student years in Glasgow, so my enduring impression of spring is day after day of dashed hope, thwarted plans, increasingly manic longing, being told by fashion magazines to dress in floral frocks and picnic in fields – when I’m still dressed in a duvet eating heavily discounted Tesco stollen. T S Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month”, and I certainly find spring’s pernicious gaslighting and enforced positivity tough-going. I prefer the humility and grunting self-deprecation of a British autumn and winter.

So in recent years, out of concern for my family, friends and co-workers, I’ve made February-April the months when I endeavour to travel abroad. I’m content in the UK from May until late January, but spring is the season when I’d try to visit my sister and her family in California. Closer to home, I might take myself on excursions to comparatively sun-kissed and charismatic cities such as Naples, or Seville. But this year, spring and I are stuck with each other. Right now it feels as stilted and passionless as an arranged marriage between two Jane Austen characters. But if I’m to make it through this lockdown with any friends and job prospects, I know I need to learn to love spring.

The lockdown has made it easier for me to find things I find attractive about this incoming spring. When I worked in an office, the extra hour or two of daylight in late afternoon made no material difference to me. I was holding out for the 9pm sunsets of summer, thanks. This year, I’m thrilled I can dash out for a walk with a friend at 4pm without it feeling like an illicit midnight rendezvous. This is quite the lifestyle upgrade. At this time of year, it’s perfectly possible to catch the sunrise and the sunset, a nice way to bookend my day, and punctuate another day of lockdown life.

And since I do the same walk virtually every day, I’ve noticed small changes in my natural surroundings. I’m not a Maasai tracker yet, but I can certainly spot when a nice new yellow or blue flower pops up where back in summer there used to be a pink one! Even if I’m not convinced that spring is all its cracked up to be, Nature certainly is, so perhaps I should stop moaning.

But of course, the reason I find spring hard to love is because I find false hope so exhausting and unrewarded pluck so provoking. It was far easier to run away. This year, on all levels, I’m having to face the music and give nature the respect it deserves. Perhaps, next year, we can get monster costumes involved.

To read more articles by Anna Hart, see telegraph.co.uk/tt-anna-hart