Today is the first day of summer.

The world is flooded with bright, yellow sunshine. Not the sharp, low-angled sunlight that runs the eye through with shards of white ice; nor the pale, weakly liquidity of a short-lived winter's day; but the strong, assertive radiance that unwrinkles the puckering of the flesh against the cold, tempts out the more timid of the garden flowers, and encourages all kinds of low-flying insects to criss-cross the lawn in crazy flight-patterns. Sunlight that fills the world like a cup, instead of spilling across its bare surface.

There are other signs too. I left my coat in the car this afternoon when I went to collect the children from school. Other mums were there too, in T-shirts and summer dresses, looking fresh and colourless and self-consciously exposed after their period of purdah. Some stood giggling nervously, in awkward poses, folding and unfolding their arms across their chests and midriffs; others stroked their naked arms unconsciously with the flats of their palms, as if to rub some colour into their pallid flesh. In only a few months time, I thought, we will be at ease with ourselves once again. Our skin will have dusked and freckled, we will have become accustomed to being untrammelled and unaccoutred by hoods and sleeves and collars, and our limbs will move with the carefree languor of late summer weariness. As the kids spilled out the school gates, some were still wrapped dutifully in coats and cagoules, but others were already dragging them like heavy, unwanted burdens in the dust of the playground. Pet dogs fretted restlessly around the ankles of their owners, rearing up on their hind legs and hanging their weight from the ends of their tethers; and, here and there, intercanine skirmishes broke out explosively and unexpectedly, with dogs lunging droolingly at passing bitches and snarlingly at their skulking rivals.

Now, in the time it has taken me to write this, the light has leached slowly back into the sky. It is evening; and the sheep-cropped hills beyond the rooftops have turned from blanched green to olive and ochre, and will soon darken altogether to a black silhouette against the fathomless blue of the night sky. My thoughts turn to the possibility of frost and the vulnerability of the seedlings that sprout eagerly from their pots and boxes. Should I close the cold frame lid tonight or not? Should I send the kids to school tomorrow without their thicker jackets? Will the sky be speckled with stars, or will a mist creep up and water the surface of the earth?

I scan the vastness of the sky for a sign, for the sudden kindling of the evening star. But none is vouchsafed me.

I will just have to play it by ear.