In November
Season of strange feasts and rain, plus book-club news
On Saturday, I cooked my annual Eyeball Banquet, a pretty normal platter of snacks and sandwiches really, except for the addition of googly sugar eyes on everything. I am not in the business of doling out life hacks, but should you also have a teen who likes Halloween more than any other moment in the year, this is as close as I’ll get: a pretzel with sugar eyes = a zombie. An Oreo with two sugar eyes = soot sprite; an Oreo with eight sugar eyes = spider. A bowl of macaroni cheese, dyed green and strewn with sugar eyes = I don’t know what, but otherwise taciturn 13 year olds rave about it. And so on. You get the picture.
While we’re on the subject, sugarsnap peas, cut along the coronal plane, make excellent green smiles, particularly as several teeth tend to fall out in the process. Radishes can be carved into adorable little fly agarics with a bit of patience and a good podcast. Satsumas, peeled and de-pithed, look like pumpkins, and allow you to believe that someone might accidentally consume some vitamins. On Saturday morning, I resorted to tweezers to remove all the white bits, a devotion I enjoyed more than I’d like to admit.
We are entering the season of feasts, even if they are a little dislocated in my family this year. Halloween was held a day late to make sure all the right people could come. Christmas lunch, meanwhile, is happening this weekend, while my mother is in the country. That means that Boxing Day is happening on Sunday, with friends coming over for festive leftovers. I’m quite pleased with this arrangement. It’s somehow more fun than doing it on the actual day. In November, the pressure is off. And my midwinter will be free for the deep root-tending that I yearn to do in the wastes of the year.
It feels vital to breathe life into the drear of November. It is a month of rain. Each morning, I find damp pavements, not the December glamour of frost. The weeks that come are a pageant of loss, the days darkening, the air cooling, the trees clinging to the last, desperate leaves. I will miss the pumpkins, when they go, with their joyful orange zing.
I’ll install the outdoor lights this week. It is time. I want to mark out a runway for winter, to beckon it in to land. Rarely has a year so bitterly needed a good, sharp cold snap.
My recent Substack posts
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An Alternative Guide to Halloween Reading - there’s a linked reading list with lots of extra books here.
Journaling prompt - On Time - exercises for exploring your personal perception of time.
Wintering, Five Years On - with an exclusive excerpt from the new Afterword.
Join my WhatsApp group, which is just so much more soothing than social media. You can also scan the QR code below on your phone.
Coming up at The Clearing on Substack
This month’s book group pick will be Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature - a book we meant to read together earlier in the year, but which got delayed. We’re finally back on track! A diary that charts the creation of Jarman’s iconic Dungeness garden, and a memoir of coming to terms with an AIDs diagnosis, it’s a classic read that subverts the nature-writing genre before it even took hold.
I’ll be posting in more detail about the book and the schedule next week, but this is your signal to dust down your copy or get hold of a new one. We’ll be taking it nice and slowly!
Silent Sit 9th November
On Sunday at 5-6pm UK time we’ll be hosting the year’s final Silent Sit for full subscribers to The Clearing. Expect an hour of companionable, communal silence for those who would relish some extra contemplative space. This will be hosted by Rebecca Armstrong, my newsletter elf, as it will be Boxing Day for me! A link to join will be sent out later this week.
Appearances
22nd & 23rd November: Ryedale Festival has commissioned a Community Song Cycle based on Wintering! I’ll be discussing my book with Jeffry Boakye on 22nd November, and then I can’t wait to be there for the performance, led by Roderick Williams (baritone) and Ethan Loch (piano) on 23rd November.
November Essentials:
Trying to use up a lot of leftover pumpkin. Last year’s chutney was disappointing. Soup, anyone?
Togging up for the weather. I can currently be found in a combination of Rainkiss waterproof poncho and Merry People boots. I will not be deterred.
Cardiography, Ben Lerner’s extraordinary essay on recovering from heart surgery.
Looking out for migrating geese and murmurating starlings.
Mushroom safaris. You don’t have to pick anything, just go into the woods and look.
The Eighteen Letters Project by Jeanne Durst - Durst secretly wrote a letter to her son on his birthday each year; for his 18th, she had them bound into a book and presented them to him.
The delicious detail of Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books.
The Missing Post Office, a beautiful short documentary about an abandoned post office in Japan, which harbours undelivered mail.
Emergence Magazine in print. Gorgeous.
Reading in the darkness of the early morning. Lamplight. Tea.
