What does March mean to you?
If February is all about the pilgrimage of snowdrops, March is when crocus join the throng. A chorus of crocus: tenor violet shades, the golden mid-tones, alto whites. A trumpetry of daffodils begins its slow march in. The plum tree surprises me by suddenly being dusted with the first white blossom. Still hesitant. The garden is waking up, scruffy and grumpy and demanding attention.
March is daylight. It is when we can no longer deny the lengthening of the days. It is when we look at the clock late in the afternoon and are surprised by the time, because it is still daylight and a week ago (by which we mean three or four) it was still dark.
Later in the month we will ‘change the clocks’, ‘put them forward’, which is to say we will decide that a given ‘hour’ is this morning a different one to what it was yesterday, as we do twice a year in our futile attempt to align clock-time with natural time.
We have tethered ourselves to the clocks. We call the changes Daylight Saving Time, as if without such governmentally imposed measures we would squander all this extra daylight, waste it in non-profitable pursuits – like, maybe, reading for the pleasure of it, or writing (likewise) or walking the streets and lanes looking to see what’s growing or nesting – like maybe we would pointlessly pass an hour outside our door drinking coffee or chatting to our neighbours – all before we get chained to our jobs and desks.
We have lost the ability to regulate our own behaviour by the hours of the sun, and so we pretend by deciding that what would have been seven o’clock this morning, will be eight o’clock tomorrow. We pretend to move the daylight hours into ‘later in the day’ where maybe they are more useful, by which we mean more useful to industry and production. Then six months later we will reverse the pretence because now we want our light earlier.
The trees and the flowers, the birds and all the other mammals escape this ridiculousness. They adjust their behaviour to that of the planet and the universe, rather than trying to bend such things to their will.
This changing of the clocks is designed to reassure us of our place in the universe as being the ones in control which, of course, we are not. The sun rises and sets by a rhythm outside of us.
In the early days of such measures, it may have been that the shifting of clock-time did save – not time, but energy, money – maybe moving productive behaviour to the hours of daylight meant less dependence upon artificial light. In that context, I can see the sense of it. Even so, we could just have a date in the year when the 9 to 5 becomes 8 to 4 and back again.
Even the need for that has gone. These days, for most of the economy, the shift doesn’t matter a jot. Factories are 24/7, the global economy working across time zones accommodates 12-hour differences and more, the agriculturalists have always worked by the sun or the needs of the animals or the weather (in varying combinations). Even office workers now, by and large, work from home or have flexible contracts: they set their own working patterns.
Now it seems that the changing of the clocks, like the changing of the guard, is more a tradition, than a necessity – and every year the debate renews.
Sometimes I think, in Britain at least, we love the change into British Summer Time, because of that word ‘summer’ and because that ‘extra’ hour of evening light allows us to pretend (again) that we live further south than we do. We envy the Mediterranean countries with their long, light evenings, and their café society, and the romance of sitting outside bistros or on promenades watching the world go by and having intellectual conversations.
We want to hurry Summer along. Chivvy it up.
But even when it eventually arrives, the British Summer will never be one of genteel promenades or long intellectual conversations over coffee and brandy after late evening tapas. It is more likely to be fish and chips, and rainy windows. But that is yet to come.
Clock-changes notwithstanding March is not Summer. March is Spring. Often it is a month of morning fog. If the poets claim Autumn as the season of mists, then March is its cousin: morning mists in March are not mellow, not golden. They speak more of Norfolk flint than the Oolitic Jurassic limestone of the Cotswolds. Silver or tin would be their metallic elements, but they have the same softening effect. They drape their veils of mystery over everything, creating ghosts.
I confess to loving a fog-bound morning. There is a romance to it.
The birds may feel differently. Robin and blackbird are both silent today, 1st March 2025. I imagine them hunkered in the trees, feathers soggy with fog, shoulders hunched, tiny breath coalescing in the air, adding to the murk, waiting it out.
For me March is a month free of uncomfortable associations. There are no birthdays or death-days or anniversaries to provoke the harder memories (or indeed the happier ones). It is a straddling month, and one I am happy to go out into without expectation.
The beech is finally letting go of last year’s leaves. It hoards them all through Winter as if unconvinced there will be another Spring. Only when its neighbours start to bud and bloom is it confident enough to finally let go and get back to growing.
Of course, it may know more than we do. “There is still plenty of time for a frost or even snow,” we tell ourselves - and indeed the day after I wrote this was a white-frost morning - but indisputably March tells us that the world is still turning. It is the end of the post-Yule gloom, the two months in which nothing much happens. It is the beginning of a new cycle of celebrations. It gives us permission to start planning Easter or Spring Break, or even for Summer already.
March is the month of the Vernal Equinox, that moment of equity between light and dark, when the northern hemisphere moves into days of more light, less dark. It is both a planting and a flowering season.
It is the time when we realise how far into this new year we are already, two months gone, time continuing to speed up and slip away. The eternal now shrinking as we age, and we older folk facing the knowledge that there is more time behind than there is ahead. It is a time when I have to remind myself that life is not about the length of time, but its depth. The depth of my present is all for me to imagine, create, relish and savour. It never ceases to amaze me that a little more daylight is all that it takes for a lot more hope. A little more warmth. A few more flowers. A few more hours each day spent outside.
I’ve never really thought before about what March means. For a month named for the god of war, it is perhaps surprising what a nurturing, mothering, kind of month it is.
March is when the winter coat gets put away and lighter ones are brought into play. It is when, on the best of days, coats are not needed at all and I can go out wearing my Dad’s old fleece, warm enough with a gilet over and fingerless gloves. An unbundled, still bundled-up kind of look. I can see how he would have laughed at me dressed like this. I can hear him telling me I should be in boots not trainers if I’m going to walk the wet grass, but I’m less fussed by getting wet than I used to be. Happiness is still dry socks, but wet ones dry out quickly enough if there’s a degree of city walking involved.
I take a local map square, which turns out to be a city square, and walk it. My route into it is through a cemetery ablaze with crocus and snowdrops, mauves and whites. Life among the memorials to the dead. It is pathways where the morning mist roosts on birch buds as droplets of water. I spot a goldcrest that refuses to stay still long enough for a portrait, too busy snacking among the pine needles.
The Catholic cathedral still refuses to draw me into its interior, but I walk around the garden, where the cornelian cherry arrests me with its golden flowers, much like witch hazel, and I catch a sudden scent of Chinese Sweet Box, Sarcococca orientalis. I wonder if it’s a thing that the smaller the flower, the more potent the scent. Smooth bright leaves hold onto the morning water. Tiny flowers almost hide away between them.
I wander through Chapelfield Gardens which is not at its best today and seems to be full of people staring at their phones. They’re huddled in groups, so maybe there’s some kind of game in play. I’d like to think they were all tuned into Merlin and trying to identify the birdsong, but their own insistent chatter would have drowned that out. The park is not at its best…but surely it deserves a little more respect than to be ignored? I should have had to courage to go up to one of the groups and ask exactly what they were doing. I didn’t. Until I do, I suppose I should refrain from judgement.
Past the theatre and into the city proper…I love the redesign of Haymarket, with its tiered seating and planting and water features. I do wonder, though, how long they will keep the water flowing. Across The Walk, outside Primark, a young boy and an older man are busking. The youngster doing amazing trumpet work and his father / uncle / friend / teacher (who knows) on a piano accordion. I stood to listen. I wasn't alone. I could have listened to their whole set, and was not surprised to see the amount of coinage in their basket when I dropped my own contribution in. Sweet jazz on a city street on a Saturday morning in Spring. That sounds like the title of something, not yet written.
From there I wandered round the market and the Lanes, window shopping for all the things I’d love to buy but know I do not need. Pretty frocks. Ostentatious shoes. Amber and silver jewellery... when did I fall out of love with gold? Cakes. Tapestries. Ceramics. Oh, to be young and rich, and setting up my first home. There is a carved wooden elephant, that I genuinely covet…but have nowhere to put. I’m in a letting go mood, not an acquiring one and my favourite window of the day was in the secret garden adjacent the Assembly Rooms, possibly one of the Noverre Cinema windows hidden by heavy drapes during performances, reflecting the jungle courtyard well enough to make you think it’s growing inside. A lushness that absolutely was not for sale, and most people would know nothing about.
I do love the secret corners of cities, especially those I'm still discovering in my own.
