This Joyful Eastertide...

My study, where I'm sitting now, overlooks a Victorian cemetery. The rest of the area is everything one would expect of a blighted northern industrial city, with more than its share of poverty and marginalisation. Regeneration has helped a little, and the glorious mix of people who live here bring a richness that few outside commentators recognise, but there is little of beauty. Even the park is shabby and poorly maintained except for the annual burst of excitement provided by the multicultural festival.

But right in the middle of the area is a 37-acre Victorian cemetery. It was laid out before the dense housing sprang up around it to accommodate steel workers from the Don Valley below, preserving a little bit of countryside for the comfort of the dead and incidentally providing pleasure to the living. A mixed canopy of mature trees throws dappled shade on to the network of paths in the lower parts, where dog walkers and joggers pass each morning, and lovers stroll hand in hand in the evenings. Higher on the hillside, panoramic views of the changing city open up. Wild animals and birds have never left: at 4am on a summer morning, the dawn chorus might wake the dead, and after dark, nightingales and nightjars compete with owls to make sure that if the dead rest in peace, the living must learn to live with the sounds of nature.

Immediately below my window is a flowering cherry. Most of the year, it is an unassuming little thing, but as the weather starts to warm up, the dusting of new greenery gives way to a brooding dark red. And then one morning this modest, moody little tree explodes into a pink, extravagant candy floss of blossom, and for perhaps a week it outshines every other tree, before shaking off its spring fever and reverting to genteel quietness for another year. It's a wasteful, unnecessary adventure: it doesn't even produce cherries. But its sheer profligacy of flower just for show, just for the joy of being lovely, just for a few days every year, makes it my favourite tree in the whole cemetery.

Already the buzz of a new term is brightened by the prospect of teaching my two favourite courses. It's been a cheerful Easter in all sorts of ways. After years of refereeing open warfare between the two youngest sons, I was astonished and delighted to watch them discovering the good in one another and becoming friends. One day I came home from work and caught sight of the two of them through the window, heads together over a computer game, and my rarely exercised maternal pride did a happy somersault.

By Easter weekend, maternal joy notwithstanding, the stress of a long term was starting to take its toll, so on the Thursday of Easter week, I took a day out and went off into Derbyshire. There's a large flat rock where my lover and I laid a very old sorrow to rest, and it is, for me, a place of peace. After walking long enough to build up an appetite, I sat on the rock, took out a book, and enjoyed a sandwich, an apple and a can of beer as I read for hours in the warm sun. It was the kind of day where the quiet and the stillness exert a power to recharge and refresh even the most ragged soul, and I came home peaceful and relaxed.


And as if that wasn't all joy enough for the season, I had a delicious 24 hours with my lover as well... I am a happy woman.