Week 49

Win a telescope! Plus: bare branches and zoomies

Hello! I hope you have had a beautiful week. Somehow it is week 49! We are really zooming towards the darkest moment in the year now…

This is our weekly post in which I tell you something seasonal I have noticed or done, and you tell me yours, and then I combine them all at the end of the month into a big beautiful poem a bit like this one.

Two pieces of housekeeping this week. The first is that wonderful Waterstones has chosen my 2025 Almanac as one of its Best Books of 2024! is running a competition for one reader of my Almanac 2025 to win a Sky-Watcher Explorer 150P OTA telescope with which to watch the stars throughout the year ahead, in keeping with my 2025 theme of ancient astronomy. You need to become a Waterstones Plus member (which is free) in order to enter, and it would be nice if you bought a copy of The Almanac 2025 too... Good luck!

And yesterday was my day of the month on Scribehound Gardening, in which I wrote - and indeed talked - about the deliciousness of dormancy and the festive soothsaying abilities of the Barbarazweig in the latest instalment of my lunar gardening series. You can read and listen to one article for free so why not make it this one? Click below.

To business:

Bare branches and zoomies

We are staying at my mum’s while we get some work done on the house and so I find myself am a bit arrested in my Christmas preparations. I feel this would normally be a ‘decorations down from the loft’ kind of a week, but no, we are in holiday limbo (please note how studiously I avoided the obvious word that rhymes with limbo there - heroic).

I have instead been getting to know a whole new set of trees. We are doing our daily walks on Bristol Downs now - yeah, aint we fancy - and I notice that it is much more exposed and breezy up there and pretty much every tree is bare. Staying away from home has come with the realisation that I live in a great spot for views of the dawn sky, and I have missed them, however here there is much more open space, and so the dogs do many more zoomies. You win some you lose some.

I have taken a particular liking to this handsome beast, and I like the way he fills the frame. What a shape, what a tree.

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That’s it from me. I would love to hear your seasonal snippets this week - what have you noticed? What have you baked? Have you been counting Christmas trees? Or maybe getting unadvisedly drunk with colleagues? We want to hear all about it.