After a stretch of purgatorial cold and grey days, the park this week is full of flowers - a carpet of white snowdrops, yellow daffodils and purple crocuses. It’s difficult to overstate how much we needed these blooms to appear, not just for the colours they bring to our eyes, but for what they mean.

Signs are fascinating for how they work. The OED defines a sign as ‘an object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else’. In semiotics - the study of interpreting signs and symbols - a sign communicates a meaning other than what it is. Their symbolic function makes signs metaphorical, though they seem to communicate their meaning directly.

Every year, flowers are the first signs of spring, and somewhat more abstractly, of life beginning again. Such a weighty and wondrous meaning for a little flower to hold.