Week 48
Dawns and dusks, wet and stormy weather, and twinkly festive London
Hello! I hope you have had a beautiful week. Here it has been stormy and wild, festive and cultured. Get me. I love to go to London at this time of year, all glittering lights reflecting off of wet pavements, and this week was the Garden Media Guild Awards, my chance to dress up fancy each year. I made a big weekend of it with a special celebratory lunch with my step sister at Honey & Co (OMG…) and a magical evening at the Royal Albert Hall with my son seeing Joe Hisaishi (composer of this, and this) conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. I feel full up. A slow and stormy train ride home through wet fields and it all feels very late November, tipping into December.
Before we begin, some quick housekeeping. 1) Scribehound Gardening, to which I am contributing a monthly lunar gardening column, is currently half price for an annual subscription. It’s great over there, with one really entertaining columnist per day. 2) The Almanac 2025 has had its price slashed on Amazon - I don’t normally mention Amazon but at the time of writing they have it on a Black Friday deal for £7 and it has climbed to number 38 in ALL BOOKS - delightfully leapfrogging over Boris Johnson’s. If you wanted a stack this might be your moment. Click here.
And 3) Sunday is, unbelievably, the first Sunday in December and that means that not only is it Usual Spot time on the chat part of the app, but it’s Usual Spot Annual Round Up time! The idea is that you gather up all of your images of your usual spot from all through the year and post them so that we can see the changes. It’s a bit of an administrative feat so no worries if you just post your usual spot for December (or indeed anything else you fancy), but we LOVE it if you can manage it and those that do are lauded and paraded through the virtual Lia’s Living Almanac streets. We found last year that it works best if everyone essentially starts their own ‘chat’ and then posts each of their images underneath it, otherwise it all gets a bit messy. I will prompt on Sunday morning. It’s a real annual highlight and kind of sums up the point of this whole enterprise, noting and celebrating the seasons as they change, and I can’t wait.
Now to business: this is our weekly community post in which we mark the seasons in their minutiae. I tell you something I have noticed that felt seasonal about this week, and then you tell me yours.
Here’s mine:
Dawns and dusks
It is the time of beautiful dawns when many of us are out walking just as the sun rises, but I also seem to be hitting the beautiful dusks. This one fell in between storms, so peachy-clouded against a deep blue sky that faded down to the same colour peach as the clouds, all silhouetting the lime trees on the common. Making me not mind winter really.
That’s it from me. What have you noticed/done/eaten this week that felt particularly seasonal? I can’t wait to hear.
And P.S. Look out tomorrow for the Big Beautiful November Poem…coming your way!
The first sighting of Venus as an evening star, hovering in the dusk
Clear nights, frosty roofs, iced grass crunching underfoot, despite the cold it is utterly still with hardly a breeze, and there’s a parade of stars…Jupiter like a beacon, Orion watching the sleeping world, and a meteor blinks across the dark.
All very inspirational for my forthcoming astronomy advent calendar Substack project!
Floods cutting the town in half. Subsequent school closure, a couple of lazy mornings and a birthday treat -late afternoon coffee and cardamon buns at the Nordik cafe within sight of a beautifully lit Bath Abbey. Twinkly lights on the tree, a violinist busker and ALL the huts in various states of readiness for the Christmas market madness.