Last week, as I left work I saw something amazing in the sky. It happens every year but never fails to get me all excited. It wasn’t the solar eclipse, the alignment of Mars with Venus or a shooting star – it was the gradual lightening of the sky. At 5 o’clock the sky wasn’t the jet black that it has been for, what seems like, living memory. Instead it was blue! Not bright blue, but just blue enough that it said to me ‘hold on in there – the light evenings will be here again soon’.

This is how the sky looked at 5pm in my little corner of London last Thursday. A few more weeks and it will be light enough for me to brave the streets of South London to run home after work. And in nine weeks time (27 March) the clocks will change and British Summer Time will begin – hooray for running in daylight and seeing where you’re putting your feet.

So my message is this: dig deep and stick with it – the nights of wearing neon, stepping in dog poo and tripping over loose paving stones will soon be behind us again! There is light at the end of this wintery tunnel.