Words don’t come easy for me during the season when it feels nights are forever. In the spring and summer, I am up early, cheered by waking by the dawn’s early light. If it is warm enough, I can walk in our little back garden, lovingly designed, built and maintained by my green-fingered partner and sit in our arbor, next to the garden pond. There is always something to watch as everything comes back to life. One day you find frogspawn has appeared in the pond, the next a newt. I have grounds for optimism. In December, less so.
We put the clocks back in October in order to provide more light in the morning and even less at night. Within a few weeks, the so called benefits are lost. And now we approach the shortest day it’s one long shade of grey.
Most, though not all, of the trees are bare, which means when we do get a rare sight of the sun the light it is less dappled in places. The grass has grown out of control, my steps are accompanied by the crackling of twigs and even the pond is peaceful, the only movement occurring when the rain stops.
I am trying to blog every day, usually with some success, although I don’t feel the quality is there at this time of year. My book project has ground to a complete standstill. The only time I think about it is when I am tucked up in bed, the lights are out and I am a heartbeat away from my crazy dreams.
I try to go out when I can, but my heart isn’t in it. I want to walk to places I know and like, I know I should be golfing, too. As every previous year in my life, the darkness is deeply debilitating. All I am thinking about is 1st March, officially the first day of the meteorological spring, when I can see rebirth with my own eyes.
I know, and have always known, what an waste of life it all is, wishing away my time so we can just get more light. A lot of it is childhood memories and how they still exist in my consciousness. Wintering at home with my mum was a time of stress, of anxiety, of cold, of dark. Then, the whole house, save the living room where we had a coal fire, felt as cold inside as it did outside. There was always ice on the inside of the windows. My house now is warmer, much warmer, but the dark is still there and the days still seems so long, not I should add in a good way.
That said, I would not want to be anywhere else in the world right now. For all its miserable climate, the only place I want to be in December is at home or somewhere near it, somewhere where I can see, touch and embrace my family and my friends. Their presence is, in its own way, some form of light in the dark.
I have no God, yet I adore Christmas. Growing up, Christmas was mostly my mum and me and that, save a few hours with my grandparents, was all I knew. We had no other relatives, my mum had no friends close enough to invite over, or be invited to theirs. As time went by, that was the norm and it shaped the antisocial person I can often be. I needed all the Christmas socks I could get and often wore two pairs at a time, one pair usually having been darned to an inch of its life by my mother as she counted the pennies. We had next to nobody but we had each other. That, sometimes, is enough.
My childhood memories are few and in my head they are framed in black and white, like the old photographs I still keep in boxes. The ones of me, I appear to be smiling, which is strange because I don’t recall them being remotely happy days. My cousin, who I saw today, suggested I was smiling because I was with people who loved me. It rang true, although it didn’t feel that way at the time.
As I write, it is tea time. I am not hungry and I could, quite easily, go to bed now, bury my head in thick pillows and cover myself in the thick, winter quilt and stay there indefinitely, except for the Christmas bit.
Soon, as Christmas draws closer, I shall likely feel, temporarily at least even worse, as I prepare to raise a glass to absent family and friends. It has been such. a grim year, I may need to raise a number of glasses over quite a long period of time. If I add to this year’s list those who have passed before, I won’t have time to do anything else in 2026.
But eventually the dark will slip back and the light will come back in. We will once again feel the power of the sun. And the garden will be alive again. This feels like an age away although it’s only two and a half months. Maybe the words will flow easier and that second difficult book will finally find its way to the pile of rejected works at publishers up and down the land. And hopefully the world will keep turning and I’ll still be on it for a few more years. After 2025, I’ll be happy to just be here.
