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Journal






16 Feb 2024 — Wintering 

To live on this side of the world is to begin the year in the dark. The short days are, admittedly, lengthening as January slowly plods on. Slow. Languid. Sluggish. It’s been a lot and not much. Really crisp cold bright days. And wet and wind so strong I panicked I’d wake to nothing at the plot but bare earth, all apparatus lost to the creek.

I intended to sit with the quiet this winter. Plenty of quiet tasks to do. But I also wanted to enable plenty of space. I envisioned days spent reading, evenings too. Enough flexibility to drop one tool (laptop) and pick up another (bolt cutters) should the sun emerge. Around two winters ago, Jo Hawley recommended I read Wintering by Katherine May, and I finally listened to it as the darkness was settling into place late last year. I was prepared. I would read, bake, stretch and sleep my way through this period of rest, restlessness, and repair.


Plants and animals don’t fight the winter. They don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

— Katherine May, Wintering


But January had other ideas. My digestion has been off-kilter and in mysterious ways. After decades of being allergic to everything, I can often swiftly identify the culprit. But this was new. Perhaps it’s not food, but environmental — allergic to London; allergic to London in winter. My sleep was so interrupted that I stopped. Not sleeping became a pattern. I saw a sunrise (unheard of). I saw another. And yet I was so tired I couldn’t function. I was neither awake nor asleep. I reduced food to rice and kale. And bought dried pineapple and mango from distant lands to bring the tropics to me. This is my fourth London winter (though I escaped for two months last year), and still, I don’t know how to look after myself in this climate, in these conditions.


Stonehenge, January 2024


Despite the ailments, I have read. I read some books I wished were longer (Death by Landscape). And some books that I couldn’t wait to exit their worlds (Boy Parts). The discomfort, usually something I lean towards and want to explore, this time too much for my porous state. The potency of the narratives leaked beyond the page, so I didn’t know if I was in Newcastle upon Tyne chopping up bodies (Boy Parts) or in Norway watching/witching men dissolve into forests (Girls Against God). Time, space, fact, and fiction folded. Everything everywhere all at once.

There’s a line in Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (the Japanese title is 君たちはどう生きるか How Do You Live?) that goes ‘He read too many books and went mad’. Perhaps that’s me too. Yet I haven’t quite slipped into the otherworld, I’m still in the wasteland (If Women Rose Rooted). At least there are starlings in the wasteland. Starlings were steady songful companions in January, along with parakeets, magpies, robins, and blue tits. And worms — emerging as I’ve been clearing the rubbish from the literal wasteland I’ve revealed by removing the old fence at the plot. The worms forgot how to sleep too.


Cheddar Gorge, January 2024



Further reading
Wintering by Katherine May
Death by Landscape by Elvia Wilk
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
Girls Against God by Jenny Hval
If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie
Mark