DAFFODILS make me cringe. They are garish, hideously yellow and hopelessly ungainly. And yet, this year, like last year, they are everywhere. South Lakeland District Council has lined the Kendal roadsides with thousands of the things.

My relationship with anything that yellow has been warped ever since I was 14 and my parents bought me a bright yellow Millets coat. It was a testing time.

I wanted Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak to hide my clumsy, lanky arms, and the spots and curves that had appeared overnight.

Instead, I had become a veritable puberty lighthouse. It’s hard to be inconspicuous when you look like a human-size highlighter pen. Like a lemon. Like a daffodil.

I quickly decided this coat was the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

I was sure everyone at school had clocked the mac from hell, even though no one said a thing about it. Still, how could they miss it – I could have been used as energy efficient floodlighting for a football team.

My shaky teenage mind might have been permanently scarred, if it hadn’t been for a comment made by my English tutor one Tuesday afternoon.

I was sitting in class with the coat stuffed at the bottom of my bag, writing essays about The Wind Eye by Robert Westall. It was one of the books from school that I loved, in a lesson where I didn’t have to dance, or perform, or run across fields in shorts.

At the lesson’s end my tutor asked me to stay. When the students had shuffled out, he turned to me from his desk and said my essay was good. Then he paused and said: “Helen, I want you to know that I know how it feels to be the only one. You will be okay.”

I was sure he was trying to make me feel better about the coat and it worked, a bit.

It was only when I thought about this encounter, years later, that I realised he was probably trying to encourage the world’s most self-conscious teenager.

So, daffodils make me cringe. But only because I feel so sorry for the fragile, yellow, awkward young things.