On not getting ahead of the season by Sheena Wilkinson

We’re all tired, aren’t we? Locked down and fed up. February teases, as always, with birdsong in the mornings and a grand stretch in the evenings, only to blast us with bitter easterlies and remind us not to get ahead of ourselves, or the season. Covid does the same, with new variants, and new fears daily. 

I am planning an October wedding, with a great deal of disbelief – I am fifty-two and had not so much resigned myself to eternal spinsterhood as embraced it years ago. The fact that we must consider several different scenarios from no guests to a hundred, none of them possible to foresee with accuracy, adds to the sense of the surreal. It’s exciting but exhausting. We can’t not plan – we’d like a jolly nice party, thank you very much, and so will everyone else by October – and yet it seems like tempting fate, like flying too close to the sun or getting above ourselves with the gods. Like welcoming spring in February before waking up to blizzards.

 

I’m sorry, this isn’t really about books, is it? Except that, among everything else, I am trying, like many of you, to write one. With no knowledge of what state the publishing industry will be in by the time I finish, or what people might want to read. Writing a novel without a contract always feels bold, but in 2021, is it crazy? I swither between thinking it’s a great triumph of hope and optimism and that it’s the equivalent of taking my coat off in February. 

 

But my heroine is called April; maybe that’s a sign that spring isn’t as far away as I fear.