August brings “the promise of golden sunsets, reminding us to find beauty in every ending.” I’m quite good at endings. It comes with practice I suppose – all those exam classes and drama productions which require your eyes to be fixed firmly on the end of the ‘project’ from the very beginning. Despite being the height of the school summer holiday (except in Scotland), August seems more like a beautiful ending. Harvest is in full swing; the leaves are turning; there’s plenty to forage in the hedgerows; chutney-making starts in earnest and if you’re lucky there’s a trip to a sunflower field, a saunter round a maize maze or a beach sunset to enjoy. This year, more than ever as the drought and high temperatures has brought everything forward. My garden is awash with brown leaves and I’ve been picking blackberries for weeks.

There’s no better way to spend an hour than in taking a glut of produce from the garden and turning it into chutney to fill the pantry for the winter or to pop into Christmas hampers. I don’t follow a recipe but add apple cider or red wine vinegar, brown sugar and a spice mix to whatever gluts we have of fruit. If you’d be happier following instructions, ask friends and family members if they have any heirloom recipes laying about. Chutney-making is the perfect opportunity to keep the past alive.

Three times this week I have been reminded that in times of stress and uncertainty there is a lot to be said for doing something familiar, whether that is the music you choose to play when giving birth, the familiar books you escape into when you’re unwell or the television programmes you rewatch when everything feels difficult. When life is uncertain, even small decisions start to feel heavy. That is exactly why the familiar becomes so valuable.

It's not a distraction from the hard stuff. It's a way of automating some of your choices, so you have more space for the ones that actually matter.

Anyone who has children will recognise their penchant for having the same bedtime story read to them time after time. I must have read Postman Pat’s Difficult Day thousands of times. However much I wanted to break out something new for my little bookworms at bedtime the comfort reading of PP and his exploits was doing sterling service. I like to explore the reasons behind why things work. It’s the teacher in me, honed over many years of coaching students in the most effective ways to learn and manage their mental health. And so here is the neuroscience behind my claim.

Reading a familiar story or rewatching a favourite TV programme calms the amygdala, reduces cognitive overload and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. In this instance familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it provides predictability and soothes an overloaded nervous system.

It’s an anchor, not an escape.

We are now at the business end of the Summer holidays for anyone who sat A Levels and GCSEs this year. I thought now would be an opportune moment to share what wisdom I have gleaned as a veteran teacher and the parent of three students, now through university but who have all waited for results day, seemingly with the sword of Damocles over their heads. So here is my guide to negotiating the potentially choppy waters of the next two weeks, if you are a parent of students.

Don't post your pride online:  If all goes to plan, the results are fabulous and the pathway to the next stage is straight and clear, be rightly proud. Relax! Enjoy! You have done a great job as a parent and your child is secure in the knowledge that they have smashed it. I don't know a parent who isn't proud of their child and who wants to broadcast that to the world and believe me, there are endless opportunities to do it in the world of social media. My advice is don't. These are their results not yours. Tell them you're proud of them; phone up Great Aunt Ethel or your boss or the football coach; buy balloons and fill the house with them but have a heart and look out for your friends, neighbours and strangers whose children may be disappointed. Frankly you'll be doing little more than rubbing their noses in it by clicking share. Why do you need to post it online anyway? Switch off the echo chamber of social media and bond with your child instead. They are the ones who need to know how proud you are of them and how much you love them. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. Trust me on this one.

If you've ever sat down to study, write, or practice a skill and looked up hours later wondering where the time went, you've experienced flow. Psychologists call it a state of complete absorption in an activity and as it happens this idea sits at the heart of one of the most talked-about happiness books of the last decade: Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, which I’ve finally got around to reading

The book explores how the residents of Okinawa, one of the world's "Blue Zones" known for extraordinary longevity, tend to stay engaged, purposeful, and mentally sharp well into old age. One recurring thread throughout their stories is a deep, almost meditative absorption in daily tasks whether it's gardening (my ears pricked up here), martial arts, cooking, or craftsmanship. That absorption is flow, and understanding it can change how students and professionals alike approach their work.

Grief doesn't keep office hours, and it rarely waits for the right moment. That's the thinking behind Open Arms Grief Café, the drop-in bereavement support session now running at The Hub@BA15, the community charity based at the Old Town Hall on Church Street, Bradford on Avon.

A quiet space that's found its footing

Since launching, Open Arms has grown from a small, tentative gathering into a steady fixture in the Hub's calendar. There's no agenda, no need to book, and no pressure to talk if you'd rather just listen. Visitors drop in for tea, coffee, cake and company, and stay for as long, or as short a time as they need.

It’s been a couple of weeks of community and belonging. I've been lucky enough to belong to several quite different communities over the years, and each has taught me something slightly different about what it means to show up for other people, and to let them show up for you. And I celebrated this with a visit to the Archers tribute garden at RHS Badminton. (Yes I am a paid-up member of the Archers Addicts.)

And so I’m reflecting on three communities to which I belong and what they bring to the people who belong to them.

The village gardening club

A new grief cafe in my local town

The professional network I joined when i stopped working full-time in school

The professional network I joined when i stopped working full-time in school

I think it was Roald Dahl who said that if he had his way he would remove January from the calendar and have an extra July instead. I don’t agree. One of the best things about every month is that there is only one of them in the year with all their attendant highs and lows. Whatever the weather, the mood, the state of the garden, it is transitory. There is a natural ebb and flow to every year and I embrace that.

One of the great delights of the garden in July is calendula officinalis (know as Nobody’s flower in Wiltshire apparently). The vivid yellow, orange or burnished gold hues blend beautifully with the purples of lavender, salvia, agastache and the purple clematis I planted to cover next door’s ugly fence and whose name I can never remember. I sowed a few last year as companion plants for my tomatoes and they self-seeded right next to the Hypericum calycinum (Rose of Sharon) and are exactly the same colour. A happy accident. It’s no surprise that its sunshine colour is associated with abundance; they will pop up anywhere where the soil is fertile and free-draining.

On Saturdays (and occasionally in midweek) I conduct weddings. As a legal registrar, sometimes I conduct the ceremony and sometimes I take care of all the legal aspects of the marriage. Invariable every couple or witness remarks on the use of a fountain pen to make any additions to the marriage schedule and sign it. And it isn’t only the use of pen and ink that elicits comments, it’s the fact that people don’t write by hand so much (or at all) any more.

I ran a little unofficial poll recently, and the result pleased me more than it probably should have. The handwritten list is still the favourite. Not an app. A pen, paper, and actual handwriting.

So far, 2026 has been a year of significant change. Even for me, a person who thrives on the variety and busyness of what my daughter calls “a finger in many pies”, this amount of change has left me feeling that I am dropping off only. Never parking up and turning off the engine. Frankly, it all seems a little out of control, much like the garden after the rapid growth of midsummer. What I need is a routine.

At the other end of the busyness spectrum are A Level students who have just finished their exams or graduates struggling to find a permanent job. They now have significant time on their hands after months of high-stakes activity. After much-needed downtime, the state of having nothing to do loses its sparkle. On days when there are no demands, you can feel equally exhausted and out of kilter. The solution is to establish a routine.

Having a routine of sorts, even on lazy days keeps you grounded, creative, connected and productive - four facets of a healthy life. Gently encouraging a sense of purpose and a goal for each day, however small, gives some vital control.

I often use pictures to promote discussion. A creative approach to opening up conversations was bread and butter to me as a teacher and pastoral head but it works just as well in sessions with bereaved clients or individuals thinking about memorial rituals, with couples who are planning their weddings and in coaching A Level students. It’s also a technique I use myself when setting goals for the future. This picture taken by Chris Doel perfectly reflects where I am halfway through the year at the solstice, where day and night are in equal balance, the perfect time to pause and reflect. I’ve come to a crossing point, over one stile and with another to climb, the path ahead clear but for now I’m content to stand in the middle surrounded by wildness, pause, reflect and plan.

“It is the month of June, the month of leaves and roses, when pleasant sights salute the eyes and pleasant scents the noses,” wrote American writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis. Certainly, the roses have had a good year and my garden is at its most fragrant at Midsummer as a result but the scent of June for me is and always has been the Sweet Pea. Not a flower you can find readily in the shops, due to its short shelf-life which makes it all the more special.

There was always a jam jar of sweet peas on the kitchen table in June when I was a girl, sweetly scented and in the most delightful shades of crimson, pink and purple. Picking them from the wigwam in the garden was an almost daily occurrence. The more you pick, the more blooms you have. Like a floral version of the magic porridge pot, without the sticky ending. My mother used to trade a bunch of Sweet Peas for a bag of tomatoes grown in a neighbour’s greenhouse. My job was to walk up the lane in the evening after school and perform the swap.

There’s been a flurry of activity recently both online and locally supporting gardening projects for mental health. GPs and social prescribers are once again looking to community gardens to support recovery for anyone struggling with their mental health, with post-natal depression, with isolation, with bereavement.

I couldn’t be happier to see this happening. I have ‘history’ with therapeutic gardening in the community, with families at the local children’s centre and in many of the schools where I’ve taught and now I’m connected with a new community garden at the nearby hospice where I am developing a cutting patch to work on with clients on Mondays.

There’s no question that some places make you feel like you’ve come home. Wander through them or sit in them and you’ll soon find that breathing slows, muscles relax and all’s right with the world. It’s the spirit of place or ‘genius loci’, as the Romans termed it at work. For me, a Celt now settled in Wiltshire the Avebury landscape (pictured by my friend Ann Slaymaker) has it in spades, the lanes around the village of Holt, which I walked every day with my infant children, the wildflower meadow near Great Chalfield Manor and any number of old, abandoned churches, woodland glades and walled gardens.

I’ve been harnessing the "spirit of place" in my sessions with bereaved clients

My brief foray back to teaching ends tomorrow. The final A Level English Literature exam is in the morning. From the very first lesson I taught back at Goffs School in 1991 to the last one a couple of weeks ago before the current students went on study leave, the subject of motivation is something we have pondered. There is always a gardening analogy to be found and no better place to illustrate how motivation works than in the garden.

My grief counselling days take me into gardens, onto allotments, and into overgrown plots that clients have been meaning to tackle for months. The conversation that happens most reliably, somewhere between pulling the first weed and filling the first trug, is this: “I don't know why I've been putting this off. I actually feel so much better now I've started.”

They're not imagining it. What they're noticing is a real neurochemical shift, and it happens faster than most people expect.

Have you been watching the Chelsea Flower Show this week? Perhaps you fought your way through the crowds on the site itxelf. Several of the good folks who came to our gardening club plant sale yesterday were keen on the idea of naturalistic planting and pops of colour. Planting for pollinators all year roundis much more popular these days. Those of us who grew up with cottage gardens, where veg nestled cheek by jowl with cutting garden flowers would have felt right at home at Chelsea this year. May really is a great time for a flower show and a plant sale.

"May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope" wrote Emily Brontë and that is certainly true in my garden. Whilst the spring bulbs have gone over, everything is lush and green. Perennials are reappearing to fill every available space; there are plenty of seedlings to plant out; the dahlias are underway; paeonies are blooming and, if I’m lucky (or vigilant), the roses are free of blackspot and greenfly for a while. 

I popped into the new Grow for Life garden up at the local hospice on my way back from school this week to scope out the site for my new little cutting patch and got myself stung by the patch of nettles growing at the gateway. It was my own fault - dressed for an exam briefing/motivational speech to year 13 prior to their first A Level exam rather than gardening. This is one week when we should be celebrating nettles and can legitimately pretend that any nettle patch in allotment or garden is by design rather than default.

It’s Be Nice to Nettles Week, a “vibrant annual event that shines a spotlight on the humble nettle plant” and encouraging us “ to appreciate the ecological and health benefits of nettles”. May is all about wildness rather than cultivation with No Mow May as well as this celebration of nettles, so I am leaning into it.

It’s been the best year for our front garden laburnum tree. I planted it not long after we moved into our current home and despite its deserved reputation for being beautiful but poisonous, it was a deliberate choice.

Full disclosure: this was the house I never wanted to move into. There is a particular grief in moving to a house you didn't want. Not the grief of loss exactly; more a persistent ache of resignation, of accepting that life will be different from the one you had planned. There is nothing wrong with our house in purely practical terms. It is absolutely fine. The rooms are fine. The street is fine and not too busy. The neighbours are friendly. It’s a short walk into town and to school when the children were little. Everything is fine. But fineness, when you had wanted something else entirely, can feel gently suffocating. Like living in a a world of pastel shades when you want jewel colours.

My husband is currently researching the Lynmouth Flood, which marks its 75th anniversary next year, using his well- honed genealogical research skills to flesh out the stories of the people who sadly lost their lives. Conversation inevitably turns to the one recovered victim who has not been identified. Why weren't they reported missing? Who did they matter to? Surely we all hope that we matter to someone?

Mooching around Toppings in Bath after work as I do fairly regularly, I picked up a copy of Mattering by Jennifer Breheny Wallace.

The premise of Wallace’s book is simple, and that’s what made it so readable. Feeling that you matter to someone or somehow doesn’t just give you a warm, fuzzy feeling; it's a core human need, as essential as food or sleep. It’s in our DNA. To our ancestors mattering meant being included in the tribe, safety. Literally a matter of life and death.

In April the tulip is centre stage in many gardens. “In my plot no tulips blow” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson and I can relate. Tulips are one of the world’s most recognisable flowers, found in many people’s homes and gardens. So beautiful -  until they are past their best and flop over in the border in the messiest of ways. Who needs that level of stress? But it is hard to resist their beautiful colours and shapes when the bulb catalogues drop onto the doormat in July.

April is one of the best times of year in my garden.

There are weeks when the universe is determined to lead you somewhere. This was one of those weeks. On almost every day and in numerous ways I have been confronted by signposts. They’ve popped up everywhere, quite literally.

It started with a casual remark on the radio by someone about ‘significant signposts’ in their life.