Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?

Words of Stephen Dedalus as he walked into eternity along Sandymount Strand; from the third chapter of Ulysses. An epiphany is a showing-forth, and James Joyce was very keen on them. They are an attempt to catch those almost infinitesimally brief moments when the ordinary is infiltrated by the sublime. People who look at nature get more than their fair share.

The other morning I left the hut I work in and walked into a snowstorm. Yes, in June. There was a nanosecond in which I genuinely saw snow and felt the dread of winter in my bones, before I realised that I had merely caught a gust of wind and so had the hawthorn by the door. I had encountered a brief but brilliant blizzard of white petals.

And that instant of time — caught, as it were, between snow and blossom — went deeply deep. Despair almost instantly followed by reassurance: it’s all right, it’s spring, you’re warm, you have six hours more daylight than you thought, all around you plants are growing, not dying and in a moment the Cetti’s warbler will warble and the cuckoo will cuckoo.

The moment when I doubted spring made spring all the more vernal. Spring had been shown forth in one of nature’s eternal dramas, played to an audience of one.

Readers are recommended to print these words on green oval leaves. No need to send them to Alexandria just yet.