Winter Wandering.
A winter’s day walk for the longest night that turned into a pondering on the passing of time.
Dearest friend,
This time feels so very full doesn’t it? The days before Christmas, almost seeming to exist in their own body with their own life and mind. A fluid and bendy, expanding and shrinking time-scape that seems to defy all that we know of time at any other point on the calendar. Filled, overflowing with joy, wrapping, endless knocks on the door with deliveries of food, or presents or somethings. Films, work - whole weeks worth of it being shrunk down into quantum like spaces, and words. So many words.
It’s my first “end of year” on Substack and everyone seems to have one last thing to say before the year is out, like the world is going out of business and we must all have one last final say before the end of days, which is really just the end of December. People don’t get this way about any other month, but January being the freshest of starts and bringer of newness seems to strike some sort of finality into December.
I wonder if all months are like this now I begin to think of it and I suppose that they probably are. May, with it’s climate change infused heat, swiftly and imposingly putting a stop to the Spring that comes and goes in April. April having laid the dark days of February and March to rest. June bringing some of the hottest heat we seem to have in these parts now, making every day feel like it should be a holiday one with late starts, cold wine with a good lunch (one of the things I most miss since giving up drinking), work until the heat has passed and then an evening cooking and eating outdoors. Or else it rains. Relentlessly. Endlessly. And Glastonbury is the mud pit that has become expected of it.
July is a trickster. Warm, but already the days are on that downward slope of having a bit less sunlight to them with each one that passes. The weather giving out just as the children finish their last days of the school year and land at home for six weeks of holidays.
August is my birth month. It was, apparently, hailing on the day that I was born and I have come to expect nothing less. I’ve been blessed with a couple of “good ones” in recent years, board game pieces that become too hot to touch, beach days playing in the sand, afternoons spent happily indoors at the cinema for the air conditioning and then an evening of food outside with friends. But August also means business in handing over the dog days of summer to the cooling hands of autumn and camping trips invariably involve head torches at this time of year.
September - that bittersweet relief of children going back to school. Another New Year of sorts. Last minute school clothes shopping - refusing to be caught out by the summer growth spurt that is inevitable following the sun and vitamin D infused summer days of the past months. It used to have my favourite festival in it too. Good Life Experience, you really were.
October feels somewhat like a hinterland. Not summer, still warm at times but with notably darker evenings. A gatekeeper to Winter. The whisper of scarf season. A subtle lullaby of early nights in front of the fire with a book or film. Halloween to punctuate the golden days of leaf fall, or in the case of this year, signal that the trees really should give up and let go for another season.
November passes by in a blur of putting the shorts and sandals away for the next six months. Checking through the woollens to see what moth damage has been inflicted upon them during their summer slumbering at the bottom of the wardrobe and starting to panic about the on-coming Christmas season. It also brings glorious beautifully flawless blue skies who look like warm summer days but in fact offer up the first bitingly crisp cold days of Winter.
November is the lie I can’t contend with. It promises slow long nights hunkered down making peace with the darkness and instead brings days that blur by, an echo of the grey mizzle outside that obscures the view across the valley most days.
I started this letter wanting to write to you about a day spent wandering over the moors and the things that I found and instead have found myself wondering out loud (or in writing at least) about the passing of time. Some days are like that aren’t they? Start one thing, attention gets caught by another and runs away with it to a joyful place. The best things happen when we make space for them. I’ll tell you about the time I went to walk on the hillside opposite our campsite in Verona and ended up in Venice another time.
These days, whilst promising joy and magic, can be harsh. It matters not if you burn the roasties, cremate something forgotten in the oven, parts of the presents are exposed by terrible wrapping or else insert your own personal type of Christmas disaster here. There’s joy to find in all of it when you are kind to yourself. Stay kind and curious. With love,
V.V
Still with me? I love writing letters, but even more I love getting them back.
What are your Christmas disasters? I won’t judge, promise. Share them below. X