I believe we have all, at some point in our lives, found someone and thought, I want to be you. I would rather fill the small space I occupy in this world with another you, because I think you’re wonderful. For me, that person was always Anne Shirley, the imaginative, misadventurous and red-headed heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. From her accidental adoption as a child, she drinks in the world around her with wide-eyed delight, seeking ‘scope for imagination’ for her wild pretendings, and ‘kindred spirits’ to be swept along with her. As a child, Anne Shirley made me want to rename my local roads something beautiful; as a teenager, she made me want to write letters and learn poetry and fall in love; as an adult, she inspires and refreshes my faith and makes me want to see the best in people. Suffice it to say, my attempts at imitation have varied in success.

“You are sent back to nostalgic goodness, and yet it does not have to be a bitter sign of the good old days being over”

I think reading Anne is like eating strawberries and cream. Let me break down that very cliché metaphor for you. It is sweet, not saccharine, and with its sweetness brings the remembrance of summer, or more specifically, days that you thought felt like summer, and newly mown grass, and feeling golden and knowing you’re lucky. You are sent back to nostalgic goodness, and yet it does not have to be a bitter sign of the good old days being over. After all, the strawberries aren’t just for the children’s table, and not every good thing was left behind in 2016. It is so fresh, so utterly wholesome, that despite the fact that there is rarely a sour note, there is never that stodginess of a pudding, which overpowers you with its morals and sickliness. It is such a personal delight that despite strawberries and cream being loved for generations, you could almost feel like only you really, truly know how good it is.

Last March, after being unceremoniously thrust back to my childhood home from my honest attempt at being an adult, it made sense to revisit Anne. To my delight, she’d grown up with me. Not that I hadn’t read the adult Anne before; I’d always loved that in a particularly anti-Alex Rider way, she hadn’t stayed fourteen for as many books, but had aged and realistically matured, giving me then a life trajectory to work from.

“That essential Anne-ness which makes the people around her glow is no longer an easily burnt-out firelighter, but a rich and enduring coal”

When I reached Anne of the Island, the third book in the series, I panicked. It’s the one where she goes to university. This had always been my favourite book, my favourite Anne; now I was that age, and goodness knows I wasn’t her. Anne by now has tempered the spring tide emotions of her youth, learning to laugh at insults which would have caused her to do real damage to her offender with a writing slate only a few years previously. She no longer envies the girls who have that raven black hair which she so longed for, in her Tennysonian dreams. That essential Anne-ness which makes the people around her glow is no longer an easily burnt-out firelighter, but a rich and enduring coal.

I am finally accepting that I can never be Anne, but she’s a good companion right now. She, too, delayed her university education and had to stay home for a year, though for different reasons. I think what I’m nervous for in the coming years is getting used to change again. Moving away from home, I might get third time lucky, and change will be more permanent. To my great comfort Anne, for all her perfections, messes this up a little. Not realising that she is holding on too dearly to her childhood, she almost fails to see the good things that can come from change. Fortunately, she had gone wrong enough as a child to know a beautiful truth.

“Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” she says to her adoptive mother, after a disastrous baking incident. What a delicious thought. What makes it even better is that directly before this, in a very Anne-like fashion, she had been in the depths of despair. She cries, “I’m disgraced forever. I shall never be able to live this down”. She is brought round by a kind word from a woman she respects, reminding her that not every day is for wallowing. We’ve all burnt a few cakes during lockdown and being so isolated might mean that we forget that there is a new day around the bend in the road. Let Anne remind you that there is, and to give yourself a little grace in the meantime.