I have been spending perhaps more time than is healthy studying images of the tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine. This most powerful of medieval women — Queen Consort of France (1137–1152) and of England (1154–1189) and Duchess of Aquitaine as her birthright(1137–1204) - lived an incredibly long life, dying at 82 in the place of her choice, Fontevraud Abbey in the Loire Valley.

Sunday morning and Liam squelched back down the lane at the end of a solo dog walk looking like a sodden assassin, sealed head to foot in black waterproofs with his beanie and two hoods pulled low over his eyes. Even Bruno - who loves all things water - shivered by the back door, clearly fed up of rain being blown into his ears by the gusty wind.

I absolutely love this line of illuminated laundry by the artist Sergey Kim. Here it glows in Amsterdam as part of the 2021 Light Festival and another washing line hangs along Liverpool’s Castle Street as part of the city’s River of Light Trail.

I have been very slow to read this dynamic, robust meditation on creativity of all kinds. It was first published in the UK in 2015 and I have trudged towards it, largely - I am ashamed to admit, because I was suspicious of the explosively joyful cover and the front and centre recommendation by the Mail on Sunday. But thank goodness I finally surmounted these superficial obstacles because this is the pep talk that all creative folk need in times of doldrum or imaginative paralysis.

At the first hint of autumn, as the dews grew heavier in late August, I ordered a selection of tulip bulbs. I chose crimson, black-red and scarlet tulips with a few varieties in apricot and peach tones to highlight the others’ dark glamour. The bulbs were delivered in October, neatly packaged in brown paper bags rolled closed at the top, and I stored them in the cool of the garage until it was time to layer the blubs in pots to make a dramatic display in the spring.

I have Michelle Obama to thank for chartreuse. I don’t recall ever knowing that it existed as a colour until I watched the 2009 inauguration and heard the pundits describe Michelle Obama’s coat and dress as felted wool lace in chartreuse.

My teaching equipment has evolved over the years. In my very first job, I carried my essential bits and pieces in a battered leather satchel that my parents gave me when I started Big School aged eleven. At that stage, my kit involved tissues for tearful students or my own runny nose, a tube of lip balm, various biros, my A4 teaching planner and assorted whiteboard markers.

Today is Chinese New Year and, for me, the festivities began with a dawn raid on Marks and Spencer to liberate food for our celebration-for-two. Rural Cumbria does have Chinese takeaways but our nearest Chinatown is in Manchester, which is not only a hefty drive away but is also well beyond lockdown reach.

I am in disgrace at the farm. Again. Despite my best efforts to be just a little bit useful during these cold and soggy winter months, I keep getting it wrong. As it turns out, the most helpful thing that I can do as a volunteer labourer is to labour, in silence.

My five-year old friend, Gabriel, has been designing a super-hero as a Year 1 literacy project. His image - drawn on a great big piece of paper - was the same size as him with distinguishing features made from carefully-cut pieces of orange paper.

It feels to me as if this Covid year has brought us face to face with our identities. While we have been locked down and regulated by tiers, our movements governed by fear and social responsibility, our longings have revealed what matters most in our lives and therefore who we are. I am conscious that we have all learnt what we most cherish by its absence.

This strikingly visual noun phrase from Alice Oswald’s poem ‘Dart’ kept me company on my walk this morning. Nearly forty-eight hours into Storm Christoph, the river ran huge and fast and the ground oozed sponge-saturated beneath my wellies.

My sister tells me that I am a fixer. And she is right. I am the daughter of a fixer and I am pretty sure that one of the nucleotides in the spiral helix of my DNA is named ‘Fixing’.

I had a 3.30pm appointment with Wilfred (aged 6 and 49 weeks). Usually he is too busy with after school club and his in-between lunch and dinner snack to meet at this time. Lockdown #3, however, has put the kibosh on after school club and Wilf had delegated the making of his afternoon snack to his mum, my sister, so I was granted a rare chat slot.

Drinking lovely coffee is the easiest way for me to pretend that I live a much more sophisticated life. The reality is that I spend great chunks of my days slithering around the lanes and the river bank with Bruno, our labrador.

Two years ago, I received a thank you card from Nina, one of my Year 11 students, when she finished her GCSE exams. In this beautifully written, neat and thoughtful card Nina thanked me, among other things, for teaching her humility. I have thought about this card often in a rather rueful manner because lovely, high achieving Nina was thanking me for a conversation that we had about failure.

By Catrina Davies (Riverrun, 2019)

I have read a great deal of non-fiction this year because, I think, the Covid-19 pandemic has felt such a shocking twist in our collective narrative that I have not wanted to absorb myself in make-believe.  Instead, I’ve wanted to anchor myself in real people and real events.

If press reports are right then tonight Boris Johnson will announce to the nation that the Covid-19 slogan ‘Stay at home. Save lives” will change to “Stay alert, control the virus and save lives.” As an English teacher…

There is a baby sparrow our garden fence. It has been there for more than an hour and I keep going to check on it. It inches a few steps one way and then back and it is alternately cheeping and twisting its head to look up into the sky.