Sunday 26th October 2025 feels like such a long time ago, doesn’t it, even though today it’s only Tuesday 18th November 2025. I don’t know about you, but I find the dog end days of autumn to be the very worst days of the year. In the early hours of 26th October, we were forced to put our clocks back an hour in order to ‘enjoy’ an extra hour of daylight. Well, where is it?
Of course, there isn’t extra light. Our trip around the sun – spoiler alert for conspiracy loons: we circle the sun and not the other way round – is shrinking the days at what feels like a rapid rate of knots. Briefly, when the clocks went back, the early mornings did feel lighter, but that was more than wiped out by the darker evenings and, increasingly, darker afternoons. By the time we reach the shortest day, which this year is Sunday 21st December, there will be less than eight hours of daylight. If you really want to feel depressed, this is also the first day of the astronomical winter. Hello darkness my old friend, my arse.
The arrival of the astronomical winter as late as 21st December is one reason why I tend to go by the meteorological seasons, whereby winter officially starts on 1st December and ends on 28th/29th February the following year. It means that something I look forward to, the first day of spring, which arrives slightly sooner than the astronomical one. Having said that, I tend to regard autumn and winter as one of the same seasons. Autumn is the start of death and decay, when everything turns brown, not least the dying and dead leaves.
Not for me long, happy evenings snuggling next to a flaming fire, drinking a hot toddy and chilling out with a good book, although I do some of these things. The dark days blend into the dark nights and no amount of flowery prose can change that, at least for me. It’s the least wonderful time of the year.
While I would happily abandon this nonsensical twice a year clock-changing, shifting an hour of relative light from breakfast time to tea time, I am under no illusion that it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The dank, depressing winter weather, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the dank, depressing summer weather which drives many of us to foreign climes as soon as we can, will always make winter the hell hole it always is. The only redeeming factor for the atheist me is Christmas and time with loved ones. That’s one enormous redeeming factor, to be fair, and the reason why I would never be far from home during the winter holidays. Sunshine’s better than most things, but not family and friends.
Three and a half months to go in this awful autumn/winter, the latter part of which has not even started yet. I have always hated winter and my earliest memories are of being cold, inside and out. I live in a warmer house these days, one with actual central heating and not a lone coal fire, situated in the living room and it’s more bearable. And I know just how lucky I am to wake up these days not needing to scrape the ice off the inside of the house windows.
Whether I find winter literally depressing, which is to say a condition like Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), I have no idea but it’s certainly extremely dispiriting. Darkness isn’t my best friend, far from it. There’s unresolved childhood trauma involved, too, but that’s for another time. Either way, roll on the day after the shortest day and the first day of spring. At least the sun is shining as I end this blog. There is hope, after all.
