Winter is coming

I should love winter – I’m a knitter, after all – and winter is all about hand-knits. I prep for it, making socks, fingerless mittens, shawls and my husband’s annual jumper. In early autumn, I revive my sourdough and start investigating my baking books. The house begins to smell cosily of soup, roasts and bread. But I often feel a little lost in winter, a little melancholy. We sit at the dining table, looking out on the back deck and I think longingly of having breakfast or lunch out there. If I finish teaching at six o’clock, it’s already dark. It’s harder to come down to the studio in the evenings. Forest walks are impossible after rain.

This year I’ll be having two winters – I was lucky enough to spend January in Glasgow, visiting my daughter. Well, mostly in Scotland. We also managed a quick trip to Copenhagen and one to Bergen – we are both knitters, after all! The Scandinavian approach to winter was impressive – candles everywhere, lamps rather than overhead lights, comfy nooks that invited you to settle in for an afternoon of tea, reading and knitting. We ate at GRØD, a cafe dedicated essentially to porridge – or porridge innovations. I had black barley fritters which were delicious and nearly bought the cookbook on the strength of them.

So, on my return, I decided that this year I was going to beat the winter blues. I was going to lean into winter – bring on the candles, the rolled oats and the woollies – roll in fog, blasting wind and pouring rain – I’m ready for you. I bought candles. I tried to ban overhead lights – it’s not been a hugely successful move, but I’ve tried. I’ve emptied the wardrobe of summer clothes and polished my boots. I’ve hung my coat back on the coat-stand. I have a pile of berets, knitted hats and gloves. I’ve paired my socks and mended tights. It’s harder in our open-plan home to create cosy nooks and I miss the fireplace we had in our old house, but last year I made a quilt and some matching cushions which help.

But the big thing I have done is to create a winter reading list. Well, not so much a list as a shelf. I’ve ransacked my bookcases for sixteen or so books which I will read over the next three months. They are books I’ve either been meaning to read or ones I started a while back but didn’t finish. They are an eclectic mix – some memoir, some literary fiction, some genre fiction.

I’ve left poetry out of the mix because I’m intending to begin my memorising project again. This week I’ll choose twelve poems to memorise over the next three months.

So far I’ve read Jhumpa Lahiri’s present-tense novel, Whereabouts, first published in English in 2021. It’s written as a series of essays or vignettes, held together by the device that each is written from an ordinary place or landmark – ‘At the cash register’, ‘In August’. These vignettes offer the reader glimpses into the narrator’s life. Neither she, nor the town in which lives is named – I’d normally find this unsettling and not in a good way. But there’s almost a sense of reading a series of crafted, carefully curated journal entries that would make naming things the narrator takes for granted intrusive. And in the same way, references to ‘the friend’ or ‘his widow’ or ‘a bachelor friend’ seem to preserve the anonymity of the people in the narrator’s life.

What the book made me think about was how often we don’t bother recording the every day. How we can fail to notice things. I finished the book on Thursday evening and found myself, on Friday, recording the day trip that my husband and I had made the day before. It’s something I’ll continue, I think. The meditative chronicling of the ordinary provided a space for other possibilities – a reflection I found surprising, an end-note that nailed something I’d been feeling.

I’ve now started on Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie – a huge contrast! But that’s the other joyful thing about my shelf – it is all about the contrasts and yet, in some strange way, I feel some of the books, at least, will talk with each other. Rushdie’s exuberant first-person narrator could not be more different to Lahiri’s nameless woman, but both narrators are mythologising their lives to some extent. One in her insistence that the every day matters, that the details of life around her that she observes are important. Saleem Sinai is gleefully aware that his narrative is mythic – it’s bound to be as he was born at exactly the same time as his country achieved independence. Midnight’s Children is not a book of the every day although Saleem considers himself something of an everyman. It’s a sprawling, magical ride. No wonder it won the Best of the Booker. I’m loving it.