I’ve always loved spring mornings, the fresh baked, full of anticipation time of day – time of year. The best mornings are the ones where you drift awake as the day seeps gently from the night through uncurtained windows; the mornings where it’s birdsong, not Breakfast Time, that breaks your dreams; the rare untimetabled mornings. Spring mornings when you can eat breakfast in the garden in your night clothes, wrapped in your winter dressing gown that can be shrugged off as day warms. For years now, at least since the kids left home, mornings have taken an easy rhythm. Freshly baked soda bread, fruit, honey and a pot of hot chocolate on an ash-framed tray, taken outside, and consumed in the sunniest spot in the garden, where pots of spring bulbs surround a single chair and a cast iron table. Such mornings are a time for solitude. Conversation, like alarm clocks or traffic noise, have no place in this sacred space. Nothing, except perhaps the squabbling of sparrows, or the bleating of sheep, should interrupt this morning contemplation.
It is the very seasonality, like samphire in August or May’s wild strawberries, which make me treasure spring breakfasts more than summer picnics or baked potatoes around an autumn bonfire. Clearly lazy mornings are unsuited to the height of summer, dawn is too early and dusk too late, for waking with the sun in July. October rain and September mists are more suited to toast cook on an open fire than sitting under almond scented clematis. Lazy mornings should be treasured and savoured like four-leafed clovers or double yoked eggs; a rare treat, a gift from nature, a small treasure.
And this year, this Year of the Virus, we have more lazy mornings, more birdsong, less traffic, more sunny mornings and fewer places to be. It should have been the perfect spring, but who makes bread when there’s no flour, and who gets up early when there’s nothing to get up for? There is still time. It is still spring. Open the curtains, open the windows and, even if it’s a bowl of cornflakes and a mug of instant coffee, make your breakfast, go outside and listen to the day as it wakes
Bridget is a full time carer who lives in Southampton.
