Dear December, nineteen to twenty-two: lumiere.

It's the winter solstice today, so: the shortest day and the longest night of the year. I'm sitting by the window just now and I can tell you: it's pretty dark out there. The solstice also signals that autumn is over and winter is here. It has officially arrived. If it’s anything like last year, I know it’s going to be cold. Cold, and dark, and rainy, and biting. I’ll need to stock up on hand-cream. I should really buy an anorak. The underbellies of my fingernails will no doubt soon be filled with frost from the windscreen, my fingers stinging from the spray of the can, the click and shake and the ice dissolving.

But even so, I can’t help letting out a small sigh at the thought of it: Thank God, that’s it. The worst of the darkness has been now (...right?) Light will be coming back. It might take a while, yes. The sun will continue to disappear mid-afternoon. My breath will turn to cloud on my walk into uni and there will be days where not even steam from the bath will be enough to melt the shiver in my bones. At times, the idea of ‘anything other than this’ will seem impossible. I know that. I know it. It's been like that all autumn. I’m bracing myself. 

But even if it comes slowly, inch by inch, it is coming. The darkness has been: the light is coming back. It will come back. (These are words to repeat on heavy days: It will come back. It will come back. It seems dark now, but light will come back.)

♥

Related to light: these (slightly fuzzy iPhone) pictures are from the Lumiere Festival in Durham back in November which I've been meaning to post for a while.  I was there for a weekend, giving my first ever (joint) conference paper (on 'fostering originality in student writing') at the National Association of Writers in Education conference ...and this quite, quite breathtaking festival of light happened to be taking place in the city at the same time. I’ve never seen anything like it before: both beautiful and eerie. Moving light installations all along the river, projections beamed onto the side of the cathedral and castle walls, double decker buses lit from the inside, street benches glowing. It felt like we’d stumbled into a city under enchantment.

Snatches from the weekend: walking round the streets and along the river in the dark - rain hammering down, seeping through my hat into my hair - but not feeling afraid. My heart in my throat. Moving images – stars, numbers, planets, stained glass figures – sliding up and down and along the sides of the cathedral. Standing on the grass, mud underfoot, eyes wide, and music surrounding us: so loud and drumming and achingly beautiful that I could feel it inside my veins. 

Sitting on a pew inside the cathedral for a few moments, arching my neck back, back, back to stare at the light lines moving, twitching, above our heads. Sitting quiet. Discordant choral music playing underneath the squeaking of boots and wet jeans slapping together as the crowd moved closer, forward, forward, towards the alter with gripped iPhone cameras. (‘How does it make you feel?’ Looking up at the light. Holding my breath, the lines shivering. Unsure how to put it into words. ‘Unsettled, I guess. Uneasy? There’s something kind of unsettling about the movement, isn't there?').

‘Do you want to light a candle?’ Thinking of Paris*, but unsure what to pray. Back outside and following signs for ‘fog this way’. Rain catching in the light, putting on a show itself. Twinkle lights strung up along the water's edge and then: the Fogscape. Fog pouring down the hill on the other side of the river, pushing through the trees, spilling onto the water, stretching closer and closer towards my shivering fingers like a spell had just been whispered. 

(*the conference and Lumiere took place over the weekend of the Paris attacks - and also the weekend my grandfather passed away - which made the rain feel more chilling, and the light seem more important.)  

♥

Song a day 

Saturday’s song: The Wisp Sings by Winter Aid. Sunday: Believe by Mumford and Sons (though I've actually been listening more to Only Love but can't find a good version online. Buy it). Monday: In Dreams by Ben Howard. Today: Allegri's Miserere (part of which was played during the festival.

p.s. // Technical question: I'm testing out changing the font on the blog. What do you think of this? I've been trying to figure out an alternative for 'Courier' for years... but all other fonts seem either too big or small for blogspot (and I can't figure out how to adjust size to anything between 'normal' and 'large' on here). Comments appreciated below or you can send me a note on my facebook page.

goodbye June (and some French pictures)

This little blog has been rather quiet. My head’s been a bit up in the clouds recently. A lot of headspace taken up with wondering and worrying and PhD things. My plan is to root July back in the ordinary details of the here and now, though. Notice this moment. Be in this moment. Here and now. 

I think I'm going to try out something similar to Emily Diana Ruth’s video series ‘Letters to July’ on here next month. Every day in July, for the past two years, she’s made a small (quite lovely) video on something she’s been noticing or thinking about, and I think setting myself a similar project might be a good way to shake myself awake. I won’t make films, but I thought I’d (try to) post something on here most days in July: small things on the ‘something I’ve noticed' theme. Some days a picture or a thought. Other days a sentence from a book I'm reading or a poem (another July goal is to read a poem every morning). It’s going to be a busy month novel-writing-wise. But! I’ll see how I get on.

In the meantime – here are a few pictures from my trip to Chartres (and Paris) earlier in the year. I was there visiting my friend who was in the middle of her year abroad at the time and acted as a lovely host for a few days, allowing me to live out my long-held dream of living in a French attic (...even though, the attic in 'the dream' is actually in Paris where I'd spend my days writing beautiful things by typewriter while being madly in love with... wait? Hang on. I think I might've plagiarised this dream from Moulin Rouge. Anyway...)

I’d planned to write screeds while I was there – about the dusty light and the shuttered windows and the smell of baguettes still hanging in the air late at night, the way the cathedral in Chartres peeks out from little cracks in the buildings and how everyone in France seems to wear black making me, in my red spotty coat, stand out like a sore thumb – but something about airplanes seems to knock the words right out of my head. (The same happened when I went to America last October. I brought notebooks to write in and novels to read, but couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to focus on the shape of the letters.) So, aside from postcards - which I happily scribbled while sitting in various cafés trying to pass for a French person - I hardly wrote a word while I was there and consequently lost a lot of the detail. In the absence of words, I did take quite a lot of pictures though, so here they are. I'll capture it in words another time...

♥ 

Fiona caught this last picture of me reading a Paris map before my train left homewards. Probably one of my favourite pictures. It was a lovely trip, and has made me kind of determined to learn more of the language. Conversation is rather limited when all you know how to say is 'Where's the toilet?', 'I would like one croissant, please' and 'the elephant eats the orange'.

('L'éléphant mange une orange' - in case you were wondering. Cheers, Duolingo.)