January’s always a beast of a month, but it never helps when all her nice days are also the same the days you’re working. The last few weekends have been literal washouts. The upshot is that life goes on while you’re not looking, and suddenly, BAM, it’s still light at 5pm. Flowers are starting to bloom, primrose being the first to poke through last autumn’s dead leaves.
Luminous violet petals with egg yolk yellow middles, this flower doesn’t go for subtlety and announces itself even hidden behind the forest’s autumn hangover of broken twigs, and hazel and oak leaves. Not the world’s most exotic flower, at any other time of the year the humble primrose might be overlooked in factor of a more classically handsome blossom; yet today, in the lacklustre January mizzle, it’s a sign spring’s on its way.