Week 1

A fabulous party; tiny shoots; and the ghost pond of Quab Road...

I realise that I always approach the new year with trepidation - how will this gloomy time feel without all of the sparkles and glitter? Without the promise of long nights picking over boxes of chocolates and spreads of crackers and cheese like some idle Roman emperor? And then it arrives and I quite like it. Even its bareness. I like the plainness. Above all I like the sense of the whole year laid ahead of me and the promise it holds, grim as it may be right now. And of course sometimes it isn’t grim at all…

…though sometimes it is, and more of that later. First, welcome to Week 1, in which I tell you the things that have made my last week feel particularly now and of this moment, and you tell me yours. As prewarned, this feature has been renamed for 2023, having previously been called ‘Three Seasonal Things’. Numbering the weeks just feels much easier to keep a hold of.

Now, as regulars will know, every week I do a quick round up of your comments from the week before, and every week they floor me a bit. Here they are:

Little boy falling asleep on a church pew in his Santa pyjamas to a candlelit singing of Silent Night (aw…); bright yellow witch hazel flowers through the gloom; the wind roaring through bare trees; a double rainbow; blue jays in Connecticut pecking at the base of a pine tree; lying in bed listening to a male tawny owl calling, unfortunately with no reply; lighting actual candles on the tree on the 24th; evenings hunkered by the fire knitting and laughing while a storm blows outside; the moon rising above bare winter trees in a navy sky; a sudden snow fall turning the world dreamy and quiet, and then catching the huge snowflakes on tongues; leaves squelching underfoot as they break down; a pie made from turkey, ham, stuffing, pigs in blankets(!), veg and bread sauce; Mars shining golden in the dark, dark night; temporary fords across roads; the wind kept firmly outside the cosy home; geese flying overhead; hens starting to lay again.

Gorgeous!

Here’s mine:

A fabulous party!

This is unlike me. I have had lots of very ordinary New Year’s Eves indeed but this year I had my lovely friends and their teens over and we really had a gorgeous and very funny time, including: a murder mystery game; build-your-own Sundae (black forest themed); limoncello mojitos; the kazoo game; and a kitchen disco until 3am. Somehow I got lucky with the kazoo game and picked out not one but two power ballads, ‘One Moment in Time’ and ‘The Heart Must Go On’. Extremely rousing renditions, I hope you can imagine.

Tiny shoots

We didn’t go for the traditional New Year’s Day walk as we were all a little delicate and we lit the fire and watched ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ instead, but the next day we dragged ourselves out into the glorious wintry sunshine that you see in the top pic and look! Baby snowdrop nubs! To prove that the earth is really turning the right way.

The ghost pond of Quab Road

Now for the grim January bit. Once upon a time our local park, Horfield Common, had a farm on it called Quab Farm. Quab is an old word meaning something like ‘boggy pond’, and Horfield means ‘muddy field’. Are you picking up a theme? The soil is dense clay and the water table is close to the surface and the whole area runs with little springs. This was marvellous in the summer drought. I went to London and was shocked to see how all of the parks had turned to savannahs while at home our common remained green throughout. It becomes less fun in winter though, after a lot of rain. And this week there has been a lot of rain.

When Quab Farm was pulled down in the 1920s and houses erected in its place the road was originally called Quab Road, but apparently the new house owners objected, which suggests that the word was still in common use then. The road was renamed, but after wet weather the ghost pond of Quab Road reappears…

This, by the way, is the result, for those of us that walk our (beautiful, brilliant white, very naughty) dogs there.

So that’s my week, please tell me yours. What things have you noticed that have marked out this week as…this week?