One of my best and favourite things about March is the night the clocks go forward and all of a sudden there is light at the end of the tunnel, and summer slowly emerges from a six-month dormancy.

Despite the fact that given our erratic weather, there is almost as much likelihood of snow as sun in the coming weeks, life feels just a tiny bit easier. I’ve never really been able to work out if I'm a lark or an owl due to the fact I love early mornings and late nights... which may be contributing factor in the arrival of permanent black eyebags that have taken up residence on my face.

In my youth, early was perhaps defined as anytime before 10am and late didn't start until 3am, but in my 20’s I seemed to be able to get away with it. My 30’s went by in a blur of sleepless nights, up with one or more children at any given hour in the night and early mornings redefined as anything before 5am. There have been more than several occasions when I have feigned alertness to unsuspecting patients after a night spent mopping up sick, feeding babies and wishing that I was still childless, sleep-rich and in my 20’s. It’s quite incredible what an under eye concealer and a bronzing brush can do.

Now, in my 40’s and with children whom I now struggle to get out of bed in the morning, I am spoiled with a regular eight hours a night. How ironic that it’s now that I seem to have developed the ability to survive on minimal sleep.

Perhaps it’s the previous 10 years of enforced practice but I love an early morning and the 90 minutes before the rest of the house stirs are the best of the day. For the last five years I’ve been running, and I don’t mean that metaphorically. I’ve run marathons, half marathons, done triathlons and got through more pairs of trainers than the previous 35 years put together, and the absolute best time to run is the morning. Over the winter, it can be tough. Cold, dark mornings are not all that appealing but nothing that a pair of running leggings, gloves and a woolly hat can’t overcome. I don’t think I’ve ever been out on a run that I’ve regretted – it always, without exception, starts off the day positively.

Last weekend, I was away with some of my lovely friends in Devon. A blissful weekend of female converstion, punctuated with copious amounts of alcohol and some bracing walks along the Devon clifftops. I’m not sure whether it is an evolutionary fact that women’s brains actually have developed the ability to maintain speech for hours on end but there seemed to be little that we didn’t talk about. I live in an all male house not renowed for their conversational qualities but put me in a room of women and I can talk for hours.

I’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Add in humour, a friend with a flatulence problem and two sets of bunk beds and it may explain why I spent 48 hours as a giggling teenager with verbal diarrhoea. There’s something about sleeping in bunk beds as an adult that is inherently funny. How amusing it is to re- enact the final scene of The Waltons; ‘night John-boy’, ‘night Mary-Lou’. It’s the warm equivalent of camping and immediately makes you feel 12 again. It was only at 3am, after a marathon eight-hour stint of chatting, laughing and setting the world to rights that we realised the clocks had gone forward.

Suddenly 4am really did seem like a late night and I was cursing the clock change.

This evening, arriving back from work at six, it felt like the middle of the afternoon. Sunny, warm and with the evening ahead. My morning run switched to an evening run and I found myself with three little running partners... aged 10, eight and six. I guess I need to savour these times. It won’t be too long before I’ve reverted back to child induced sleepless nights worrying about where they are and whether they’re safe. Until then, here’s to British Summer Time. What a difference an hour makes...