Week 50

The solstice spiral; silhouettes; clay and the water table

Week 50…gulp. Nearly there. This is our weekly catch up, diving into the minutiae of the week and creating a kind of seasonal poetry from it, together, first with a round up of your previous week’s comments curated by me and rendered extra beautiful by a fancy font, and then with my own three seasonal things I have noticed this week. Everyone can join in by clicking the comment button at the bottom of the post. It’s a beautiful thing and it looks very like we are going to be completing our first full year very soon. Hooray!

Before we start I have realised that I have missed something important. Many of us in this community gather in the ‘chat’ part of the app every Sunday morning to share our seasonal pics of the week, and at the beginning of the year lots of us chose a ‘usual spot’ to photograph at the beginning of the month. We all post these on the 1st Sunday of each month, and it’s been brilliant seeing all of your spots evolve over the year. But shockingly I forgot to do it this month! However I think it gives us a bit of an opportunity for a round up, so mid next week I am going to ask you to post ALL of your 12 pics of your spot in the chat, so that we can all see what each others’ did through the seasons. This might be a horrendous, unmanageable mess or it might be total magic. There’s only one way to find out! So gather those together if you can, and we will aim for Wednesday. You also all need to be thinking about a brand new spot for next year, as we’re going to be doing it all again.

To business, here’s your Week 49:

Opening my first bottle of homemade wild sloe berry vodka which looked like liquid ruby and tasted like a sweet gentle fire

Edward Scissorhands at Sadler’s Wells, a wintry tableau

Standing in line at the Post Office

Reading the first of the Christmas books to my three year old at bedtime

Getting the glitter out for the office Christmas party tonight

Feeling behind on everything

A flurry of snow and the trains are running late: a midwinter confusion of frozen commuters

A card from a cousin in Canada I only hear from at this time of year

A friend making me a St Nikolaus package of oranges, nuts, chocolate and little treats

An elegant, speckled song thrush on my frosted shed roof

Gathering evergreens, seedheads and hips from the garden to weave into a wreath

Wrapping presents whilst listening to the Ffern December podcast

A cold riverside walk where both colour and sound felt flat and thin

Chocolate champagne truffles, stollen and a charming little wooden Christmas tree from the Christmas Market in Düsseldorf

Advent candle lit, gingerbread spice oil in the diffuser, and carols playing softly

Panettone with hot custard

Stepping off the plane in Prague into snow and the scent of mulling

Feeling slightly light-shamed by the neighbours

That creaky sound of walking on new dry snow

Printing Christmas cards with ivy leaves and writing in them with fountain pen and new red ink

A robin accompanying me during a bulb planting session

My husband picking up his guitar while I was cooking last night and strumming out a few Christmas carols, badly

Glögg with raisins and almonds

A flock of various tits and a mistle thrush foraging in fallen leaves

First Christmas movie snuggled on the settee under woollen blankets, candles and the roaring fire, eating the chocolates leftover after filling the advent calendars

A particularly beautiful one this week, little advent windows into multiple Decembers, like parallel worlds. I feel all misty eyed and twinkly.

But hold on a second! I nearly forgot. I’m also delighted to inform you that we have received full ‘Christmas snack table’ info from Cathryn, as requested. She reports that it has recently been replenished (you’ll receive no judgement here, Cathryn) and is currently sporting bowls of: honey roasted peanuts, cheesy biscuits, Quality Street and orange Matchmakers. Inspirational. All the major food groups. Do keep us updated.

Here’s my Week 50:

The solstice spiral

I am indeed a hippy and as such I go to a women’s circle once a month, led by the wonderful Louise Press, who readers of the 2024 Almanac will be getting to know through her monthly guidance. Every December she sets up a solstice spiral for us to walk, and as we do so we think about the descent into the darkness, the fire in our midwinter caves, the re-emergence of light - or whatever we want to, really. I will talk more about this in my December catch up video I think, so I’ll say no more now, but it is a very beautiful and moving, and very much of this moment.

Silhouettes

There are very few leaves left now and so I have been admiring bare bones, and silhouettes, while also being aware with some trepidation of quite how long the trees are going to look like this…

Clay and the water table

The less pretty bit of my morning walk… The soil is clay here and the water table is high and this is how the park is now. It mostly looks ok from afar - nice, green grass - but it squelches with every step and whole mats of apparently well-rooted grass slip beneath your feet. Yuck.

---

That’s it from me, but before I wrap up for this week, a bit of news. In my final push towards Christmas I am going to be touting my Almanac 2024 (buy it here!) and talking about Midwinter on Cerys Matthews’ 6Music Show on Sunday 17th at around midday. I have been been on Cerys’s show many times, and she is just such an interesting and interested woman that it is always an enriching experience. Also terrifying, but y’know…do tune in if you get the chance.

But most importantly, please leave your comments below: what have you been doing/baking/smelling/eating/gazing at this week that made it feel particularly ‘this week’?