I’ve blown hot and cold on the virtue of Mothering Sunday, but I’m convinced it serves as a meteorological bellwether

I like to uphold my children’s privacy and respect their wishes, the foremost of which is: “Please respect our privacy by not writing about us.” So, let’s imagine I spent Mother’s Day with my nieces, except there were four of them and one of them was a boy.

It cannot have escaped the notice of anyone in south London that Sunday was a beautiful day; the last time the sun happened to coincide with the celebration of the matriarch was, I believe, 2020, on the eve of lockdown. I concluded, as any right-thinking person would, that we were in for a beautiful spring, rolling from one T-shirt to another across days of blue skies and weirdly warm pavements.