Back in the dark ages of the 1970s (quite literally, if you remember power cuts and the three day week), teachers could happily run with a child’s natural curiosity and set open-ended projects as valid educational experiences. My passion of the moment was wild flowers and plants, whilst my desk neighbours were big into beef cattle and rugby. (It was rural Wales, after all). I spent every spare minute for six weeks roaming the lanes and fields, collecting flowers, pressing them, sketching and photographing them on my Kodak Instamatic camera.

As well as the obvious benefits of being able to do independent research on something I loved I remember those weeks in Spring as being a golden time. Was it a case of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles or was something bigger at work there? I’m still a researcher and so I did what comes naturally and found out. It turns out I’m onto something.

Standing in silence with a few others this morning in an ancient churchyard, surrounded by birdsong, primroses and daffodils as the sun rose and the flames flickered in a nearby firepit put me in a thin place. It is easy to imagine many generations doing the same on Easter Day at dawn. It was a moment of connection.

To the Celts ( of which I am one) thin places were those where the presence of a higher being/heaven/creative force is almost tangible. Places where you feel an energy or spirit greater than yourself. Something beyond words, where the ordinary and the extraordinary intermingle. A place where the boundary between the physical world and a mystical or spiritual one is believed to be exceptionally thin, thus facilitating a moment of connection between the two. In thin places you may find your imagination ignited by thoughts of what has been before you.

I'm a fan of pottering about. I've done it all my life, often in the garden or on the allotment - as a child, as a young Mum with three small children and especially in the teaching years as an antidote to the endless doing. Pottering is more akin to being - something we could all do with a larger dose of in a world where being busy is king.

Most of us embraced the pottering habit more when modern ways of doing things came to a halt in the lockdown months. At that time I came across a little book by Anna McGovern about this quintessentially British subject. McGovern suggests that “Pottering is one of a number of coping strategies that you can do when you feel a bit frazzled.