“It was September, and there was a crackly feeling to the air.”

There’s a nip in the air when I go for an early morning wander around the garden. Spiders’ webs glisten on the hedge; a faint smell of woodsmoke in the air; the borders are a riot of golds, oranges and deep, deep purples; and of course there is foraging to be done. Somewhere nearby lustrous bunches of elderberries hang just within reach. I love them even more than the blackberries and gather them in my basket, carrying them home to make elderberry tincture, surely the easiest of all my elderberry concoctions. I have my eye on a bumper crop of sloes but should wait until the frost has touched them. It’s a race between me and the birds. If I get too impatient, I’ll gather them anyway and pop them in the freezer.

Another September and the start of the school/agricultural/gardening year and I am to be found wandering around a local National Trust landscape. It's a ritual I've been embracing for over thirty years. The early September ramble as a teacher, then a mother, then both has marked the boundary between the lazy days of Summer and the more structured back-to-school life that September introduces. It's bitter sweet but life ought to be full of ebb and flow, ice creams and homemade soup, holidays and workdays, freedom and structure.

Let's be clear. I am queen of spontaneity; I prefer to choose what's for supper on the way home from work rather than to formulate a menu and shopping list for the week ahead.

BUT

I have decades of lived experience to illustrate that when routine and structure disappear out of the window my mood, productivity, positive relationships and general wellbeing go too.