Week 2

Snow, thaw, fun

Hello! I hope you have had a good wintery week. Here the highlights have been: brief snow, stew with friends by candlelight, and the most stunning drive to Lyme Regis with hoar frost coating every twig of every hedgerow and the low sun backlighting it all. Proper Narnia weather.

This is our weekly community post in which I tell you something that I did, saw, ate or smelt (etc…) this week that felt particularly ‘this week in the year’, and then you tell me yours, and at the end of the month I weave them all into a big, beautiful poem, of sorts, a few dozen glimpses into different January worlds.

Before that I must tell you that I was on Cerys Matthews’ 6 Music show on Sunday morning. It was a beautiful show in which she wove a story of the sky, going higher and higher through the morning with her three guests: a weather woman who talked about clouds, an astrophysicist who talked about the layers of the atmosphere, and me, talking about the stars and planets and reading ‘Nanurjuk and Ullaktut’, one of my constellation myths from The Almanac 2025, all of it interspersed with music. My bits were pre recorded and I am mostly in the final half hour but if you have a few hours in which you would like to listen to something magical I can highly recommend it. Cerys makes wonderfully unusual radio programmes. Listen here.

Also this week I heard the amazing news that The Almanac 2025 was a Sunday Times Bestseller for the two final weeks of 2024! Thank you so much to all of you who bought it, for yourselves and for others. I am completely thrilled.

To business:

Snow, thaw, fun

It properly snowed the other night, just as night was falling, and it was cold enough that the snow lay, which it often doesn’t in Bristol. We went out into the back garden and threw a few snowballs around and marvelled at it, but even then I could hear the drip, drip, drip of the thaw beginning.

By the morning it was all but gone, but when I got to the park with the dogs there were all these little outposts of surviving snow where it had been gathered into snowmen. I loved this evidence of people so DETERMINED on fun. The snow was barely there, but in the time that it was multiple people gathered family members or friends, got everyone cosily dressed, and headed to the park, and made the most of the brief moment. It really made me smile. Humans are alright sometimes.

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That’s it from me. Now over to you. please let us know what you have done, eaten, bought or noticed this week that felt particularly ‘this week of the year’.