Week 39
Equinox candles, brugmansia, The Rains...
Hello!
I hope you have had a good equinox week. Yes, we passed the autumn equinox on Sunday. I would love to say that I spent the moment of equinox - 1.43pm on Sunday 22nd - in meditative contemplation of the fulcrum of light and shade, ruminating on the descent into the dark half of the year, but in fact I was ten minutes up the road sat very nervously in the BBC Radio Bristol office waiting to go on Steve Yabsley’s show to talk about my book, The Almanac 2025. I’ve done quite a bit of live chatting on radio now but it never really gets any less scary. Steve was fabulous but also threw me quite a few googlies so I was kept on my toes throughout, yikes. You can listen to the show here if you like, I appear at 23:20 but there’s lots of lovely other stuff on there including several listener-penned poems about the Somerset village of Cheddar, if that’s something you fancy.
My book of course, as I told Steve, is very much out now, and it can be found…
It is very easy to get gloomy about the equinox, particularly when it arrives as this one did bearing the gift of a week of torrential rains. Ugh how depressing, how grim. My advice is to turn it around and embrace it:
Get out the good knitwear
Fold a pile of blankets and leave them on the sofa armrest, ready for any emergency cosy requirements
Buy lots of basic candles, place them all over, light them at every opportunity
Especially light them during gloomy weekday breakfast times, which creates actual magic. Yes, you heard, it is officially BREAKFAST CANDLES SEASON. Trust me. Join my breakfast candles cult.
Organise a big walk
Buy vitamin D drops and take them religiously until the spring equinox - you will thank me!
Start a crochet project
Pick a series you’ve been meaning to watch and settle in (with the blankets, crochet and candles)
It’ll be lovely, cosy, restful, magical. You’ll see.
Anyway, to business. This is our weekly community post in which we share our thoughts and happenings about the week just passed: what have you seen/done/eaten/smelt/bought that felt particular to this moment in the year? I tell you mine and then you tell me yours, in the comments, and at the end of the month - fast looming - I bundle them all up into a big beautiful poem that is always a glorious trip through the month in tiny, odd moments and minutiae. Look out for it.
Here’s mine:
Brugmansia
The garden is slowing down, the tomatoes stuck at green, leaves beginning to fall, a few teeny orange and purple violas pushed into pots…and then suddenly this tropical beauty bursts into flower. In a normal year this brugmansia wafts its spicy, citrussy sexy scent all over the garden on warm late summer nights. This year it has waited until the cusp of October. It’s a spectacle, anyway, and looks like proper gardening, which to be honest the rest of the garden is failing at right now.
That’s it from me, now over to you: what have you spotted/done/baked this week that felt like it could only happen at this moment in the year? Leave your comments below.
Another gorgeous post full of positive and beautiful thoughts! Good luck with The Almanac - I have every one and I marvel at how there are so many new wonders revealed each year.
Having complained about cold weather for the WHOLE OF MY LIFE, I'm reframing and instead intending embrace the positive this autumn - if it's cold and wet, I won't let that stop me from going outside and getting into the garden and into nature. The tiny bit of daylight, especially early on in the day, is definitely a real boost along with those Vitamin D drops 💚🌱
Good wishes for your 2025 almanac, Lia!
This week I’ve been taking wet weather walks in the countryside. Rivers have broken their banks. Sheep and cattle move to higher ground. Hedgerows offer a final handful of blackberries and rose hips decorate the scene like Christmas baubles. Conkers decide it’s time to drop, and fresh green casings lay on the ground next to those beginning to brown and disintegrate.