Three seasonal things #7

Vicks vaporub; Michael's soup; a briefly glimpsed frost

Normally I do quite a lot of stomping around woods, maybe a bit of gardening, possibly a little seasonal cooking, and I have things to tell you about at the end of the week. But this week I got knocked down by Covid and did the sensible thing and stayed down.

So I almost skipped writing this week, but then I thought, well actually this is seasonal too isn’t it, boringly. The cluttered side table of tissues, vitamin C, masks and covid tests; the sharp menthol of Vicks smelling like northern forests and good lungs; my husband’s soup, packed with garlic and vegetables, like mouthfuls of health; some little sliced-up portions of gorgeous sunsets glimpsed from my window, between rooftops. I have no pictures of any of this, you’ll be surprised to hear.

But I also went out this morning, possibly a bit soon, and saw our first hard frost, so here’s that on a garden wall a few doors up.

Apart from that all I can offer you are your own comments from last week, which are as ever just wonderful: evocative, imaginative, poetic and fun. It has really been one of the highlights of making this newsletter that so many of you contribute your observations each week. Thank you. Last week’s had a particularly trans-Atlantic feel. It’s amazing and entirely unexpected that so many of you contribute from around the world. I would love some southern hemisphere comments. Some equatorial ones, perhaps? Go on, make us jealous!

We had: an owl duet in Colorado; trees finally turning colour in Texas (late and brief winters, as you would imagine); Christmas snacks shelves starting to fill up, one with a note that simply reads ‘NO!’; a misty walk to Kate Bush’s ‘50 Words for Snow’; many blue jays in Ohio; a rural French cycle ride broken up by a big piece of gateaux by a log burner in a cafe called ‘Gateaux’; a hawk on a tree and a mug of a holiday blend coffee in North Carolina; acrobatic squirrels on a newly filled bird feeder; bottling up sloe gin, crab-apple vodka and cranberry vodka; a first really cold winter swim (leading to that strange longing for colder ones); bluetits, robins and doves; lighting the advent candle; watery eyes and white fingers; and - a local one to me! - a misty performance of Scrooge around Bristol’s fabulously gothic Arnos Vale Cemetary.

Please do let poor bedbound me know what’s going on out there, and what you’ve noticed or done this week that has felt particularly now, even if it involved lots of honey and lemons and boxes of tissues (I hope it didn’t…)

As ever, it being so near Christmas, I must also add that my book, The Almanac 2023 is out now and makes a wonderful Christmas present, oh and also, while I was stuck indoors here, IT was out in the world getting itself into the Sunday Times Bestseller list for the second week in a row! So it can’t be too rubbish…

Leave me your comments, and have a wonderful and HEALTHY week.