It is finally March, almost spring, and my life is one giant daffodil right now. The more I discover, the more there is to love. There\u2019s the obvious ones of course (being Welsh and all that) on the St David\u2019s Day outfits, and the giant foam ones on the heads of home-grown rugby fans nationwide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s the roadside ones and the supermarket ones, the window-sill ones and the wild Sunday walk ones. Even my kids can\u2019t escape the glory of those luminescent, banana-coloured beauties swaying in the sunny breeze \u2013 which are \u2018just so beautiful Mummy\u2019, according to my five-year-old on our recent weekend stroll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Teary eyed, I swallowed a golf ball and strode on, endlessly thankful that the optimism and promise of new life the spring brings each year remains intact for another generation. This year, of all years, I needed to feel it too \u2013 the greys beginning to green, the mercury ever so slowly beginning to rise, the promise of less night and more day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because this month, on March 23rd<\/sup>, it will be a whole year since our first lockdown and \u2018new life\u2019 phrases, which have so quickly become commonplace, were introduced. 12 months since alien routines we have swiftly became well accustomed to were first brought in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Self-isolation. Quarantining. Socially distancing. Shielding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A whole year of missed diagnoses, of medical treatments being waylaid and delayed, of suicides, of ventilators and of PPE. A year of grieving husbands and wives, of children big and small losing parents, of mourners unable to properly mourn. A year where the dying died alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And at the end of it all, thank God, came the inevitability of spring and its many, many daffodils. Kerbside, hillside and tillside, try as I might, I cannot escape their optimism or, indeed, their significance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Through my little obsession with these yellow beauties I have discovered that a modern-day philosopher once said \u2018you normally have to be bashed about a bit by life to see the point in daffodils\u2019, which is just bob on the money for spring 2021 isn\u2019t it? And, of course, we already know Wordsworth found that lying on his couch in pensive mood was best remedied by picturing \u2018ten thousand\u2019 of them swaying in the breeze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n