Week 2

Old man's beard fairy lights; fungal terraces; the beginning...

A brief break in the clouds…

Ugh, this is bleak. My whole thing, I know…the whole raison d’etre of The Almanacs is to find beauty in every moment of the year, to not just grind through winter and live for summer but to find something to appreciate in every month of the year. But blimey January makes it hard and THIS January…well… If you are not in the UK then you only need to know that it has rained and rained and rained, broken up briefly by a massive thunderstorm (admittedly quite exciting) and then back to rain and drizzle. The park pathways run with water, everything is muddy and slightly damp. It’s a little hard to love.

And then there’s…well…everything else, as neatly summed up by Stephen Collins in his cartoon for The Guardian this week:

But I say this partly to make a mark in the sand. Imagine, in just a few weeks, when the skies are getting lighter and we have a spell of beautiful spring-like weather, and we can look back and say ‘THAT was grim’ and feel smug. So just putting it down for posterity…

Anyway, for newcomers, in these weekly posts I write about three things I have spotted this week that feel particularly of this moment, and then you tell me yours, and we track the changing seasons together in their minutiae, week by week. Here are some highlights from your Week 1 comments:

Packing away the Christmas decorations ahead of Twelfth Night; the sense of calm after the festive storm; an icy New Year’s Day swim followed by steaming hot chocolate; old man’s beard lighting up a hedgerow (more of that below); a branch of willow catkins in a vase; being followed by a wren all along the river; a boggy walk broken up by a flask of ‘new years leftovers’ soup; lying in bed and listening to the storm outside (plus a commenter added a word for this: chrysalism, the tranquillity and peace you feel when you’re indoors during a thunderstorm); painting winter trees; the scent of a pile of (thousands!) of Christmas trees in a Brooklyn park waiting to be mulched for a local children’s playground; a walk to the top of a snowy mountain with lentil soup at the top; celebrating la Fete des Rois in Paris with a frangipani galette; candles lit with breakfast; and various fieldfares, herons and pink and orange sunrises.

Thank you, thank you. Feeling a strong urge to up my ‘soup in a flask’ game this week…

Here’s mine:

Old man’s beard fairy lights

In a brief break in the clouds I got out for a walk and caught this. I love the way old man’s beard catches the light against the dark hedgerows at this time of year, when you’re driving into the sun they really look like fairly lights. This is of course the seed head of Clematis vitalba, which has two common names, the old beardy one for when it is in seed, and ‘travellers’ joy’ for when it is in very joyful bright yellow flower.

Terrace fungi

This is the log that I have vaguely trained my dogs to jump up onto and run along for a bit of sausage at each end, and suddenly it is absolutely covered in this amazing terrace-like fungi, which has clearly been snoozing and waiting not for piffling autumn rains but until the whole entire world is completely sodden. A beauty, anyway. Anyone know what it is?

A beginning…

And this is the week when I began…The Almanac 2024. I know it seems ridiculous while you are just opening your 2023 editions (and if you’re not, you can find links here) but this is how long it takes, in fact a little longer as I have already done a lot of planning, sourcing and back room work to get even to this point. By April my part in it will be mostly completed and it will be handed over to its editor, illustrator, designer, proof reader…and all the rest. And so this week I cleared my desk and set up my Scrivener (Mark Diacono has made a little film about the wonders of scrivener on his substack, if you are not au fait), and I began.

I love this part, when it is all possibilities. Maybe it will be magical. There is always a bit later on when I become downhearted with its reality, and think that I haven’t quite pulled it off this year and that I’m losing my touch, and then (touch wood, so far) it suddenly all pulls together and I love it again.

Anyway, it is now underway proper, and to prove it my desk already looks nothing like this and I am typing from the bottom of a crevasse of books. All as it should be.

Here’s a little extra thing from this week, too. I went on Cerys Matthews’ show on BBC 6 Music to talk about The Almanac 2023. Cerys has been an incredible supporter of the almanacs ever since the very first edition, when she had me in every month to talk about the month ahead. Since then I have been on the show in January of each year and it’s always a big thrill. She makes such creative programmes; it’s like being part of a sound art installation.

You can listen to the show here, and I am on at around 01:10, though the whole show is absolutely gorgeous, with a garden theme and garden writer Miranda Janatka on after me.

Check ME out…

That’s my week. Please leave me your comments and let me know what you have spotted/eaten/smelt/done/made that makes this week this week.