Io Saturnalia! Happy Solstice! and almost Merry Christmas! Are you ready – wi
These significant festivals begin this week with the official start of winter. It marks a time of ending and beginning, launches a time of taking stock, counting our blessings if you will, and being grateful – all of which done positively is good for our wellbeing. [Don’t take my word for it but the work of psychologists including Emmons ,McCullough, Kilpatrick, Larson, Wood, Froh, & Geraghty, who have all researched and written on the connection.]
As headlines make for gloomy reading and fear of disease seems pervasive once more we all need to feel good about something – to make time and space to consciously recognise the positives (however small) in any aspect of our lives.
It’s seems easy in this floating life we have made for ourselves to feel gratitude in many ways – grateful for having made the choice – grateful when the winter sun shines, warming us with its soft rays and charging our solar panels! Grateful for the unfolding beauty of nature around us from sunrise to sunsets. I can even be grateful for the mud settling in around us on towpaths – because without it I wouldn’t feel the utter joy when summer comes and it’s all gone! I’m also grateful for the respite from mud created by the old paved sections of towpath worn smooth by the hooves of horses and feet of working boatmen in whose footsteps we travel.
But this week particularly I’ve been grateful for something I have feared and dreaded for decades – the dark. Talking to colleagues and friends, it appears I have a gendered approach to the dark. It’s not the dark per se but what cover it gives to the human dangers that can lurk within it. As Elise Dowling puts it in her searingly honest and funny book Coasting: Running Round the Coast of Britain – Life, Love and (Very) Loose Plans, it’s the fear that a serial rapist lurks behind every bush. Surely more the product of an overactive imagination rather than proven crime statistics?
This winter I am grateful for the dark as we approach the longest night and the shortest day. Without this time living afloat, surrounded by nature and its inhabitants I would have continued my gendered approach to the dark. I would never have seen it as a calm and beautiful time recharging but fearful, alarming, potentially dangerous. I will always remain grateful for this remarkable opportunity to discover the wonder of what seems like a whole new world – utterly fascinating and astonishingly freely available to us all.
We’ve had several moorings here on the Staffordshire and Worceshireshire canal which have been idyllic in terms of silence and seclusion. There’s been no need to sleep with curtains drawn on the waterside of the boat, the bed side as we are currently moored. From the window we can see the stars and moon gleaming above us and just raising up on an elbow doubles them in number as they’re reflected in the water outside.
Once your eyes accustom, it isn’t actually pitch black dark. Light pollution has changed how we view the night, and that’s partly through fear, the desire to banish dark with light which merely casts more shadows. There are places though where it’s possible to experience the stars with dark skies – a fantastic winter treat if you can find some on the map near you.
We think of night as a quiet time, but I’m gratefully discovering that’s far from the case! Eavesdropping on those around us makes that very apparent. From the brown tawny owls breathily asking “Who whoo?” from the trees on the far side of the water to the ever-vocal Canada Geese. Even when on water they remind me of portly parsons with their thick white dog collars.
There’s no harsh alarms or strident calls like they make when flying in formation. For most of the night, just the voices of individuals can be heard, chuntering away like children muttering in their sleep as they toss and turn on the water.
It’s a companionable dark, a comforting dark, a normality into which we are lucky to get a glimpse and to share. From the side opposite the water come other occasional sounds, the shrill “kaak kaak kaak” alarm of a startled pheasant, perhaps warning of a prowling fox, and the heavy snuffling of a badger digging up tasty roots and slugs by the towpath.
Then it’s a sunrise awaking us, a new day, a new dawn promising yet another sunset and comforting dark night to come.
This week all is lit by a waxing gibbous moon (isn’t that just a glorious phrase?), leading us up to a Cold Moon which we should be able to see on Sunday night this week before the Solstice on Tuesday.
The moon gives us extra working time outside too. Winter on a boat means more work – inside cleaning the floor of mud more often as paws and boots pad it in – outside collecting twigs for kindling, foraging and sawing wood for the fire. We’ve got our Yule (Juul) log ready to burn on Tuesday night to keep us warm on the longest night. The winter solstice is the seasonal time to honour the light and darkness within ourselves – a tradition in many countries is to write on scraps of paper the things you wish to let go of, to shake of. As they are flung into the fire they create a blaze of light illuminating us as we speak out aloud those things we want to bring into our lives.
We’ve also been hugely grateful this week for the sight of coal boat Bargus beaming through the darkness – festive lights aglow. Jay, Kat and Lulu brought us our order of 200 kg of smokeless fuel which will keep our stove glowing for a month or so. We’ve never let our stocks get as low as they have this year, all empty baskets on the roof and alarmingly down to our last bucket of coal before they chugged into sight!
So we’re grateful for coal boats working at this time of year, delivering to us with a smile and keeping us cosy. On the hot stove as the dark of the Solstice descends we will be grateful for a warming wassail. Wassail or Ves Heill in Old Norse means ‘be in good health’ – a good toast to use this year particularly.
This year I’m going to try the National Trust’s Petworth Wassail recipe. They make it using 3.8 litres of cider which could be a bit much for the two of us so I’m going to reduce that quantity! It’s effectively a mulled cider with orange juice, cloves, nutmeg, and brandy. Over a glass (or two) I shall be happily grateful for time away from work to refresh and relax over Christmas to get ready for 2022. I hope you too manage to relax and reset yourself for the coming year – a process which should be invigorating in its introspection, as well as positive and productive.
Pickingupducks 