March is when North Wales transforms. This time every year, the rain, mud and snowy mountaintops finally disappear, and I remember that, in a few weeks, it’ll look like a different country. On a sunny summer day in Parc Cenedlaethol Eryri (the Welsh and now official name of what was called Snowdonia National Park), if you squint a bit, you could be in the south of France.

All change in the office too. North Wales Law Centre Steering Group has ditched its somewhat clunky moniker in favour of something that better reflects what we do. We are now officially North Wales Community Law.

I’m back on the recruitment merry-go-round as our housing solicitor is leaving to work nearer home. We all know staffing is a major challenge for the sector. Add in devolved Welsh law, the lack of nearby providers, and our remote location … it’s a tough gig.

Those same factors are precisely why access to good, free legal advice is so desperately needed here. We’ve all been shocked by the stories we’ve heard since opening our doors last year. We’ve met people surviving the winter living in agricultural outbuildings being told they’re not ‘technically homeless’; young families in temporary accommodation who can’t use the bathroom because of their disability; mould so bad a mattress grew an inch of fuzz over a weekend. It can feel bleak, but there’s something about doing this work on your own doorstep that makes it all the more pressing. The possibility of making real, lasting change for the better in a part of the UK that has so much going for it keeps me motivated. Motivated? Doggedly determined? Stubborn? I think a degree of stubbornness in its workforce is one of the things keeping this sector afloat.

While working in Wales has its challenges, I was reminded last week of how fortunate I am to be here (how many other advice agencies can see a castle from their office window?). At an access to justice event in London, people’s weariness at the mention of anything related to politics or policy was striking. I take for granted Wales’s comparatively progressive policymaking. A government that actively wants people to have more rights rather than fewer – I’ll take that. It’s easy to forget that not everyone in Britain can say the same.

The day before my meeting in London, I’d met a local town councillor in Abergele, a small market town that links the rural community with the coast. There’s one café in Abergele, and it wasn’t open late morning on a wet Wednesday, so to the pub on the corner we went. The landlord knows the councillor, as is the way round here. Evidently, it wasn’t the first meeting she’d held there. This time, we were planning an event with residents of some locally renowned ‘run down’ (an understatement) flats. There were a few people chatting at the bar and the landlord put music on so our conversation wouldn’t be easily overheard. This meant I was discussing the Renting Homes (Wales) Act 2016 to a soundtrack of that 90s classic ‘Boom Boom Boom’ by the Outhere Brothers.

Less than 24 hours later, I was at the Legal Services Board’s Reshaping Legal Services conference, listening to eminent academics, solicitors and barristers discussing access to justice in rural areas. In what other job would I find myself in two such contrasting scenarios?

At the same London event, I was lucky enough to hear former sub-postmaster Lee Castleton speak about trying to stand up to the might of the Post Office when he was wrongly convicted over accounting errors linked to the flawed Horizon IT system. His words, ‘money is a door to justice’, brought me right back to people living in those flats near Abergele, the pub on the corner and the Outhere Brothers.

Suddenly, the community we serve in North Wales and London’s legal world didn’t seem too far apart after all.