1. Lie in bed with the dawn chorus
In spring, you can listen to the majesty of the trilling birds from about 5.45am. By summer they’ll be doing it at 3.30 – bit annoying – so make the most of it now.
2. Rethink your scent
Wouldn’t it be nice to smell like bluebells, citrus or green leaves? Scent is expensive, but for a few quid Fragrance Samples UK will send testers of the fanciest brands for you to try before you invest.
3. Spring clean your soul
You don’t need to be a recovering addict to do a moral inventory, or go and make things right with old friends – pick up the phone and apologise for past mistakes, use the changing of the seasons as an opportunity to rebuild old relationships. You won’t regret it.
4. Wonder wall
Fancy redecorating without the brain-melting boredom of painting a whole room? Easy. Do one wall and stop. Or maybe even a door if you absolutely have to. Small surfaces can carry big colours so go for statement greens, accents of yellow and bold florals, such as Little Greene’s Sage & Onions paint and Citron or Suffield Green from Farrow & Ball. An hour max of work, then soak your brushes (the best bit), sit back and admire your handiwork.
5. Fly a kite
It’s beautiful. It’s meditative. It’s contemplative. There’s only a small chance of it going berserk and injuring a child. For inspiration check out windswept.co.uk.
6. Vacuum pack your old jumpers
Without doubt the greatest thing about spring. Jam your jumpers into a bag and suck the life out of them until they barely even exist any more. Take that, jumpers! Who’s laughing now?
7. Outside training
Numerous studies show that exercising in “natural environments” will help you stick at it for longer and boost feelings of wellbeing afterwards. If you’ve spent the last dark months sweating it out in the gym, now’s the time to get outside and let mother nature give you a helping hand.
8. Load up on mini Easter eggs
Not just because it’s Easter but because small chocolate eggs throughout spring are absolutely fair game. Casual handful of Lindor or Cadbury mini eggs whenever you enter a Tesco Express? Yes please.
9. Adopt cleaning hacks
There’s a reason spring cleaning has become ritualised – we wake from hibernation and suddenly, the sunlight hits the dust. Cleaning hacks are made for now. Balance a bowl of vinegar in your dishwasher to combat hard water! Get rid of garlicky hands by rubbing stainless steel! Use a slice of bread to pick up broken glass! Fabulous.
10. Do your taxes
The financial year is over. If you’re smart, you’ll calculate your turnover now, so you know how much money you’ll need to pay at the end of the year. Nothing is more fun than adhering to the crushing weight of financial responsibility.
11. Banish the floordrobe
There are loads of ways to fold T-shirts elegantly. The pinch method (easily searchable) takes three seconds and makes you feel like an origami master.
12. Ease the central heating down
Rejoice in the feeling of money leaving your bank account at a slightly less harrowing rate.
13. Become a bird detective
Go to the park, sit down and just watch, quietly. Once you get your eye in, you’ll notice the furtive, frantic to and fro of birds building their nests and feeding their babies: it’s addictive. And if you can’t, watch nestcams.
14. Get Bambi-lashed
Sparse and stubby lashes letting you down? Step forward, L’Oréal’s false lash Bambi oversized mascara. Volume! Length! Joy!
15. Bring nature indoors
Who needs a garden when you have an indoor nature oasis? Patchplants.com will recommend the right ones for the light available. Get yourself a comfy cane chair, and you’ve got your nature hotspot right there.
16. Plan your summer holiday
Do you want heat, transcendent vistas, the finest food? Wilderness, or the storied city? Are you looking for adventure, love, healing? The best part of any holiday is planning it.
17. Pick your own
The season starts in May with strawberries, then at the beginning of summer you’ve got gooseberries and blackberries, followed by plums and apples. No need for a garden or green fingers – all you need is a farm, a basket and an empty stomach.
18. Curate a seasonal playlist
Think Max Richter’s Spring, Opening Night by Weezer, Home by Caribou. Romeo’s Tune by Steve Forbert, Flamengo Até Morrer by Marcos Valle. Think words of renewal, peppy bangers, things with strings.
19. Make a bird box
Online videos show you how to turn plywood offcuts into bird boxes. It’s an easy woodworking lesson for kids as well as adults: wildlifetrusts.org/actions/how-build-bird-box.
20. Take a hike, buddy
Carpets of bluebells, trees in blossom and dappled sunshine. Conversation that ranges freely. There is no feeling more alive than a long walk with an old friend.
21. Plant sweetbox
This evergreen shrub, perfect for a shady border, creates sweetly scented, pure white flowers that are just as fragrant as jasmine, but you can smell it in the daytime. Heaven.
22. Red alert
The power of a red lip will put a spring into your walk. Worn with a naked face and a teeny bit of mascara, it is the quickest way to banish winter blues and look like you’ve got your life together – even if you don’t. MAC’s Ruby Woo (£20) is one of the best reds there is.
23. Become an aperitif person
Give up the Finnish “drinking alone in your pants” thing (kalsarikännit) and go Mediterranean with a colourful evening aperitif. It doesn’t need to be alcoholic (Martini Vibrante and Crodino are palatable and pleasingly bright), but dainty snacks are obligatory.
24. See outdoor art
There’s brilliant outside sculpture all over the UK (Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Henry Moore Gardens, the Hepworth Sculpture Garden, St Ives or The Line in east London to name but a few) and now, when the natural world is exploding into life, is the perfect time to enjoy it.
25. Box fresh your washing machine
We are young, we run green, keep our washing machines nice and clean. Take a spray bottle of white vinegar and an old toothbrush to the detergent drawer. Run a cycle with baking soda to deodorise the drum. Mmm, gleaming white goods.
26. Let salads set you free
Tomatoes, baby leaves, ribbons of carrots and quick-vinegared shallots are perfect as they are. Just like you. Chuck on breadcrumbs, cheese and nuts. Get out of the kitchen and into a green space with a cocktail.
27. Your own personal lockdown
Bring back lockdown’s greatest hits: baking, walking, doing one thing a day and calling it good. Post-Brexit food shortages are a chance to embrace weird snack dinners again.
28. Sow your own tomatoes
Cut a tomato in half, spread the seeds on a piece of kitchen roll and leave to dry for a day or two. Then, tear off the seeds, kitchen roll and all, poke them into a tray or pot of compost, cover with a clear plastic bag and leave on a windowsill. In a week or so you’ll have seedlings – pot them on and, this summer, enjoy your free bounty.
29. Think knickers
The elastic on your knickers has gone, the bra doesn’t fit, the boxers are vintage Christmas 2013. You’re a mess. Remind yourself self-care and self-esteem starts with a fancy knicker drawer, as every Frenchwoman (and possibly man) knows. So identify everything you no longer wear. Bag it up and take it to a recycling bank, located via loveyourclothes.org.uk and shake your spring-cleaned booty.
30. Frozen assets
Do you keep supermarket bags of frozen pains au chocolat in your freezer? Ready in 12 minutes? No? Why not?
31. Get on a bike
Finally you don’t need gloves and the wind in your hair doesn’t feel like a precursor to hypothermia. Wheeeeee!
32. Take your morning tea outside
You’ll instantly feel like you’re in the Toast catalogue – but in a good way! Those elegant Toast models are on to something.
33. Remember what Easter is about
Easter harks back to the Germanic myth of the goddess Ostara, who turned a bird into a hare that laid coloured eggs. Celebrate this girlboss by getting a haircut and eating chicken nuggets.
34. Devour The Enchanted April
Elizabeth Von Arnim’s novel about four women who answer an advert for “those who appreciate wisteria and sunshine” and rent an Italian castle for a month is a tonic, perfect for disappointingly grey days.
35. Be an un-wellness guru
Wellness influencers are over – it’s time for you to make your debut as an unwellness guru. Post melted cheese selfies, advise others to play on their phones when they can’t sleep, embrace morning beer and public tantrums.
36. Change to a lighter duvet
Refresh your bed. To switch down a tog is to lift one’s spirits, while floral bedding feels like sleeping in a meadow. Binge on floral bedding at zarahome.com.
37. Experiment with hats
It’s too warm for a woolly one, so how will you choose to protect your head from the elements now? A baseball cap? A bucket hat? A fedora? The choice is yours, but please not a fedora.
38. Enough people pleasing
If you find saying no to favours or extra work is too tricky, set your boundaries by (as life coach Ronan Harrington advises) “slowing down your yes”. Take a breath, say you need to check your diary, ask for a few minutes to think about it. It might just change your life.
39. Buy measuring cups
Only baking and drug dealing require precise gram counts. Measuring cups make cooking so much easier, and unlock American recipes too.
40. Unleash your inner artist
Spring and creativity go hand in hand, so start the season with a Zoom portrait-drawing class. Drawing is Free (Mondays 8am and 5pm) works a bit like online speed dating. Participants take it in turns to be the sitter, and everyone else draws them for the duration of a track of music – between two and six minutes. The intense concentration, together with the music, creates a special kind of magic, says artist and founder Chloe Briggs.
41. Go balmy
Can your sun-deprived complexion look any worse as it drags its sorry sagging self into spring? Your miracle makeover awaits! Jones Road’s Miracle Balm (£36) is a glorious moisturising pick me up for your complexion for instant glow and golden iridescence. What’s not to love?
42. Light a candle
No, not a wellbeing cliche but a perfectly acceptable way to usher in spring. Get over yourself, run a bath and give in to undernotes of neroli, vanilla and mimosa.
43. Cliff walking
It may be too early to start thinking about lying on a beach. But it’s not too soon to go on a sturdy clifftop trek. Wrap up warm, pull on some proper boots, choose a good pub for a halfway lunch and admire the beauty of the sea from on high. For inspiration, go to nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/walking/top-coastal-walks
44. Baby lambs
Where do we start? It’s spring. They’re cute. City farms, country farms, visit one now and watch them frolic.
45. Update your wardrobe
Like salads, you too need simple, light dressing. Spring requires layers, but pack away the puffer coat. Welcome linen trousers, T-shirts and merino jumpers. Bye-bye browns and navys and heavy fabrics; hello pastel optimism.
46. Remind yourself…
You’re a grownup – you can do whatever you want. That includes simmering some cream, adding a couple of chopped-up Mars bars until melted, covering with ice-cream and Coco Pops and eating while dressed in a towel. You’re welcome.
47. Swing out
Start playing tennis now so you are in the swing for summer. Tennis just happens to be great for aerobic fitness, toning and bone density, so bounce to it. Improve your top spin with the virtual coach app swing.tennis or test your tactical knowledge with Tennis World Open 2023.
48. Renegade-garden sunflowers
From mid-April, walk around your neighbourhood shoving sunflower seeds into any stray patches of mud you find. With any luck, come summertime you’ll be inundated with colour.
49. Spring shady
Nothing marks the end of winter more than a new pair of sunnies. See the light through pastel lenses that are as soft as garden blooms. Check out Crap Eyewear’s pale green unisex frames the Anti Matters, Bloobloom’s Optimist frames for men in Marigold or vintage Cool Ray by Polaroid’s primrose bug-eye frames on Etsy’s Youarethebrandlondon.
50. Read all about it
The world of books is currently all a quiver until 13 April when Granta will announce their 20 best British novelists under 40, an exercise they only undertake once a decade, so the stakes are high. Alumni include Kazuo Ishiguro (1983), Zadie Smith (2003) and Kamila Shamsie (2013). But what about great British authors over 40 we hear you cry? Here are three with new novels out this month: A House for Alice by Diana Evans (Chatto & Windus); Shy by Max Porter (Faber) and The Memory of Animals by Claire Fuller (Fig Tree).
51. Seek out some cherry blossom
East Asia is traditionally where you’d go for this, but you can find plenty of cherry blossom in the UK. Try Greenwich Park, Kew, The Stray in Harrogate or The Glen in Dunfermline.
52. Make a 60-second cookie
Cookies are the new Easter eggs. Why? Because we say so. A tablespoon each of flour, brown sugar and melted butter. A splash of milk. Form it into a dough. Add chocolate chips. Flatten it and put it on some baking paper. Sixty seconds in the microwave. Ta-da: perfect cookie.
53. Park life
Swap your winter parlour games for spring park ones. There are lots of casual games that are great fun to play in a green space near you – Frisbee, rounders or why not try Smite, boules, quoits and Spikeball – all small enough to stuff in a rucksack? Grab a tartan rug, a flask and a box of flapjacks and you’re set.
54. Reaffirm your resolutions
A third of the year has now passed, which makes this the perfect time to check up on the promises you made to yourself in January. Are you still snacking less? Are you still walking to work? Have you flossed your teeth even once this year?
55. Face your feet
Time to pumice, moisturise and generally deal with that whole… situation. Alternatively buy a nice varnish to distract: Kure Bazaar’s Juicy nail polish is sunshine in a tiny pot.
56. Locate your sunscreen
Where could it be? In the bathroom? In the cupboard under the stairs? In that one kitchen drawer where you keep Sellotape and batteries? Nobody knows, but you’d better find it soon.
