19 March 2026

Every spring, I break the internet

Four years ago, on a sunny day, I posted about feeling like a big leaf. It’s my most famous work

Morning Sun by Edward Hopper. Image via Alamy

Each spring, when this very specific time of year comes around – late February, early March, the last drag of grey weeks before the clocks change – I get a brief sense of what it must be like to have had a Christmas No 1 (minus the royalties). It is the time when people celebrate my greatest work.

As someone who has recently published a book, on top of countless articles floating around in various bits of the public domain, and even more hundreds of thousands of words lurking in unpublished novels and diaries and stubs of things I never finished, I find it somewhat humbling that my greatest work is not among any of this. No: as democratically decided by the attention economy, my greatest work is a tweet, posted just over four years ago. At 11am on 27 February, 2022, I was lying in bed, hungover in a patch of sun feeling simple, and I took out my phone and posted:

“like to think I lead a complex emotional life but then the sun comes out and I am happy. I am functionally no different from a big leaf”

I was back then a fairly committed poster on what is now X, the everything app. I had had some popular tweets in my time (I’ve since nuked my account, so you’ll have to trust me, or, as I have just done, check in on my “floored by how few kinds of bear there are” post’s healthy afterlife in Facebook groups for animal enthusiasts). On Twitter, it garnered a very respectable number of likes; but its sheer reach, its escape from the containment of that particular microblogging site, is something I only realised as the years passed. It has become architecturally viral, built into the language of the very online. It has its fallow months, but sure enough come spring it pops up again like a crocus. Friends would get in touch to say they had been sent it in their family group chats, or to show me clips of women with long hair reading it out on Instagram reels or TikTok videos. A screengrab of it re-posted on the Instagram page “ocd_and_positivity” last year currently has almost 30,000 likes. People wrote on Bluesky to tell me that their children had ‘big leaf’ poses they did in the sun. A man in Germany got in touch with me to ask if he could put it on his album cover.

I have at times shied from my seasonal fame, from my life as a live-laugh-leaf influencer. For one thing, as someone who generally likes to be paid for their writing, I’ve never made a single red cent from it. I am being plagiarised on LinkedIn by people trying to seem joyful! Those frolicking children and strumming singer-songwriters have benefited my bank balance not at all! I am the victim of patter theft at a grand scale!

For another thing – is the tweet good? Yes, it has a certain zillennial embroidery-kit-as-a-gift charm to it, but does my greatest work have merit? Is it better than Philip Larkin’s “Coming”, as a way of bringing in spring (“On longer evenings/Light, chill and yellow/Bathes the serene/Foreheads of houses” – hell yeah!)? Better than “Here Comes the Sun” or ritual sacrifice? Better than a big go on the Wikipedia page for Newgrange?

I have my doubts (history will be the judge). But over time I’ve put these concerns aside. Winter is long and the fag-end of winter, the slush months that pile up after New Year, are longer still and bitter. You wear tights. You stand at the bus stop. You re-watch The Terror and deem it relatable. Nothing seems worthwhile. But then on some afternoon there is a break in the sky and you see the sun and feel a little bit of its warmth and a whole summer’s worth of potential floods in at once like lockdown lifting. You feel feral. You feel like saluting the people standing on the pavement outside the pub clutching that first outdoor pint. The air smells wonderful. You feel, in short, like a big leaf. It’s a great feeling. I’m happy to be associated with it.