This month, I met Helm

And Inspector Alleyn and Hamnet and William Morris and John Donne and Olive Kitteridge and Deborah Levy and Lucy Mangan and...and...hopefully, you've realised this will be a post about what I've read this wild and woolly March. If, however, you are labouring under the illusion that I've mastered time travel, meteorology and developed a crushing author stalking habit, I can reassure you that I haven't. I have been reading.

Let us begin with the wind.

I've long been a fan of Sarah Hall. Ever since I picked up her book, Wolf Border, I have read everything she's written. Wolf Border remains my favourite but she is a consummate magician with words in everything she writes. But even for her, the question of how to capture Britain's only named wind would, surely, have been a tricky one.

The Helm lives in Cumbria, alongside the Cross Fell range where, when the wind blows steadily and the air can be squeezed as it races over the high ground, rushes down the lee side of the hill and rises up and up again until...there! There is the crest wave of the Helm, the slender rolling bar of cloud that hovers and whirls about, seemingly watching our scurrying movements as we race to bring in the washing, batten down the hatches, shut the chickens away and hide ourselves under the bedclothes.

Hall's genius has been to take Helm out of the purely meteorological and give it its own personality. Her Helm capers and teases and plays: it makes friends, it confuses, it sees off enemies. It defies gender, scientists, description and categorisation. In her book, Helm rolls across the sky like a seal pup while underneath, the humans toil to raise the right stones, to understand it, to dissect and examine it, to love and live freely, to escape. Helm carries them, defeats them, distracts them. It is friend, lover, tormentor and enigma.

Throughout, Hall weaves in folklore and folk terms, imagined lives of lost-and-found-again objects and, at the end, we come to understand that even Helm is not infallible. That humans may bring about its end even as we do our own.

Books I read in March: Things I don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy, Olive Again by Elizabeth Strout, The Reluctant Bride by Lucy Mangan, The Winds from Further West by Alexander McCall Smith, Yellowface by RF Kuang, Murder by Candlelight by Faith Martin, Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, Helm by Sarah Hall, Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell, The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L Sayers, Enter a Murderer by Ngaio Marsh and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland by Lavinia Greenlaw.

Twelve is quite a lot but I do read fast. Super-Infinite and Questions of Travel had been started way back in January and abandoned (I have a terrible habit of losing interest and wandering off to read something else). The Winds...well, no one reads Alexander McCall Smith for some kind of heated political diatribe on woke culture. We read it because - in my case, I listened to it during a particularly tedious train journey to and from York - ultimately, everyone will be fine. The characters will all land safely where they are supposed to land. The wicked will be mildly punshed. The righteous will be gently triumphant. And sometimes that is what you need.

A confession: Yellowface I had to read in short bursts, one hand over my eyes, peeking through my fingers, mouth agape in horror and heart racing with dread. In the end, I read the final chapter before its time. It is brutal. It has the opposite effect of McCall Smith. I couldn't read it before bed or I'd lie there hyperventilating and panic-stricken for hours after.

And now the clocks have leapt forward like evil leprechauns, giggling manically. I do not take well to clock changes but this is my least favourite and I'll spend the rest of this week feeling like I have to run to catch up with myself. There will still be time for books. There is always time for books.

PS If you would like some more Helm content (and I confess I am free falling happily down that rabbit hole), I recommend this little film.