The City

At the top of Mont Royale, the Lawrence River wraps its arms around the city, which strains away from it, aloof. Shards of water lie broken between the peninsulas until they resolve themselves whole again, smoothed out and gathered blue.

And strangely, it reminded me of Perth; standing in King’s Park above the Swan River. And the streets of Montreal’s Le Plateau made me think of Melbourne, the market in Ottawa was like the corner of Commercial and Fournier streets in London when you’re heading past the music of Rough Trade towards the revelry of Brick Lane.

I don’t think it’s helpful to look at a landscape and impose the known onto it. It’s reductive, colonial. I think it prevents you from seeing the true thing in front of you, from understanding it, connecting with it. And connecting is an essential, non-negotiable thing or humans will just float away. We’re still animals of the planet; this is obviousness is renewed when we know rain by smell, when we recognise autumn coming. So with new landscapes, I feel like I have to sit in that unease of ignorance, the unknown – ‘the horror, the horror’ until it works in, becomes known, and loved for its own sake, rather than the bits I relate to or misinterpret.

Bearing this in mind would probably help us with each other, as well.

Perhaps I can forgive myself for starting with the known, for looking at Montreal and thinking of Perth ten thousand miles away; if I acknowledge it is only the start. Then that familiarity I impose will link up in a great chain to other moments, moving forward and backward through my life; this morning above the Saint Laurence now; that beautiful morning all in red gold in Lightning Ridge, cold, silver mornings all prickling in Torino, frost like a coat – further back to English mornings, running round Startops reservoir in the dark, burning in my chest and cold fingers – and then all the way back here again to these bright red and purple flowers, Montreal below and the blue river.

So, with all that whimsey, what I’m trying to explain is the bizarre cognitive dissonance I felt in Quebec. This wildly northern American landscape, its pavement-less suburbs, enormous, bare roads, forested mountains and lakes like some sort of Swedish idyll, but then with French overlaid. I had no frame of reference. I’ve not read the country’s literature, I don’t know its folklore, I have nothing emotional, cultural, or … dare I say, spiritual, that I can attach to the physical. Which, through sheer coincidence of neural bonds and the accident of consciousness; I need. So, I tried to compare the landscape to things I did know to at least let the love in, which appears to be the necessary thing for me. I’d nailed the morning by successfully purchasing croissants and blowing Jim’s mind with my suave vous avez les assiettes, s’il vous plait, pour les croissants nous avons deja compris to which I understood not a single word of response. In Quebec, I’m on Transmit, I cannot receive, and I will not be held accountable for the Quebecois accent. Or how, mysteriously, they got the French Council together and agreed to call the bill la facteur, now, instead of l’addition. Which made me look not so suave when I asked for it. But panicked humiliations aside, I coped with French, and I’m well practiced at smiling sweetly and nodding enthusiastically when I recognise one word in twelve. For example, in one erudite description, I understood ‘acide’ and ‘citrus’ and I’m quite sure I want those no where near my beer.

We had a jolly time, Jim, Steve and me, tripping through Montreal on a sunny Monday. We ate eggs, digested in Parc Fontaine, then sat in the sun drinking beer, catching up on a significant period of missed time and making up (sometimes disparaging) stories about people walking past. But only if they were speaking English and having a loud mentoring conversation into an earbud while pacing the street in socks and sliders. Fair. The mural/graffiti game is strong in Montreal. The whole town has quite a surreal air. There are high-rise skyscrapers lifting out of the river. The old port is stuffed with stately, classical buildings and cobbled streets, fountains, statues of various men who valiantly lost this or that battle against the English after crushing this or that indigenous group. Along the Plateau, houses are all grand looking double-storeys with sweeping staircases up to the second floor; semi-detached is one on top, not side-by-side. It looks swell, but I had it on good authority that wrestling a toddler, a baby, a pram and shopping up a metal staircase in -25 degrees is national disaster. One of those unseen disasters, because seemingly only women have to do it, so the madness continues. But those houses are something. Long old tree-lined streets of them that look like children’s fantasies. I don’t know how to describe them – they look a bit like houses you see in American films, yet different; not European, but certainly ornate. Excessively so. Gothic little fixtures over windows, implausible balconies. There is something fairy tale about it. And all interspersed with cafes, book shops, great clothes shops, bars, restaurants, sparrows and jasmine. It was all just so … cool.

Wilderness

Having had enough of all that, because old Morris dancing bird watchers find cool a bit hard to sustain, the Gentleman and I hired a car and hit the wilderness. Hired a cabin by Lac Provost in Mont Tremblant north of the river and stayed three nights. What a place. There was a morning. One of those ol’ sacred ones you’ll remember forever, like that red-gold sunrise at Lightening Ridge with its wall of birdsong. We sat on the veranda of our little cabin. That sounds totally made up – a lakeside cabin – I ask you. Sloping down, away from this little central-heated wooden building, we could see the white of the lake between the trees. Screens of silver birch and sugar maple hid the other two cabins between us and the water. In the clusters of trees, American robins, ruffed grouse, chipmunks, red squirrels, chickadees (coal tit, if you ask me) frolicked about and we watched wrapped in blankets, sipping tea, communicating to point at something with widened eyes, a loony face and hisses. Do you think it’s misty? the Gentleman asked three times – none of which I answered; I was caught in the thought of it, dreaming of a white lake and when I came to answer only vapour came from my mouth. So I went to see, wrapped in my blanket, tripping down the slope until I burst through the line of trees to the sand – my legs weakened and shook – I staggered, eyes blinded by silver as the mist marched in pillars across the glass of the lake, strode across it towards the sun and I collapsed, hardly breathing, very dramatic; it was one of the most goddamn beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my fucken life.

We should all have moments when we are dragged to our knees in supplication at something beautiful, shouldn’t we?

The Gentleman saw this more transactionally. When we sat down by the lake on the first evening in the golden silence he shook his head muttering, oh you’re gonna pay. Well, someone has to. Instead of collapsing, he thinks of the child in the cellar of Omelas from Le Guin’s story, paying for everyone else’s joy.

Mont Tremblant was like this pretty much the whole way along. We climbed up La Roche above Lac Monroe, walked along La Coulee and down La Corniche to get a staggering view of a blue dropped and shattered in a valley between the trees. On the way down we saw white tailed deer unconcernedly pottering about between the trees and stopped to watch them with four other people. At one point as we paced downhill, I slammed my arm out in front of the Gentleman – nearly straight into somewhere delicate (the love of tiny women is fraught with such dangers, that and heavy lifting) because there was a tiny frog on the ground and we crouched down to stare at it for fifteen minutes. We hiked up another hill for a lovely view of Lac Provost, went canoeing on Lac des Sables, and on Lac Petit Monroe. At Lac des Sables I dutifully read the information boards about the Common Loon, then after paddling on the water for ten minutes, we saw two of them! Awesome big duck-like divers, with black heads and white chests and black speckled backs. They called to each other with low booms that echoed implausibly off the hills around us, and we lolled around all afternoon in a little boat in the sunshine with dragonflies. Every evening, we went back to our cabin, cooked some beans and vegetables and lit the fire outside and ate there. We heard a Great Horned Owl. I was also convinced we heard a fucken … wolf or something; this horrifying howl that echoed through the mountains had me googling every animal sound listed for the area. I settled on coyote. Turns out it was them ducks – the loons! They howl. Who knew? Certainly not two English idiots, hastily packing up the dinner plates and pounding back inside the cabin to lock the door, panting and sweating, all for … a duck. Cream-faced loons. Us with our goose-looks.

The five or six loves of Quebec City

After three days, we left the mountains and drove to Quebec City. There’s a place! We arrived at our hotel at midday but couldn’t check in till four; I did some staggering French to confirm the carpark was legit (Mais, la voiture sotto, is ok?) then we needed a beer and some lunch to recover from that low key trauma. We stumbled upon a vegan restaurant in Saint Jean Baptiste, managed to order some delicious choux fleur and some very agreeable beer, then sat there for the following hour and a half. Oh, I loved it! The whole street was closed to traffic for the weekend; there were little stalls and tents all up and down it, some kid was selling $2 lemonade and hustling everyone who walked past, it was a joy to watch him. Families sprawled on the road were painting flowers and rainbows onto the black tarmac (now that’s the only spray paint I wanna see), two women with a startled looking cat on a lead walked by, people with fun coloured hair, people speaking French or English, dogs, dogs! everywhere, huge ones! We watched them all, grinning, up the street towards the churches and the flowerbeds of begonia and verbena, down towards the lights and bustle – the blue hills in the distance like Canberra, it was all pretty spectacular. We walked over the Plains of Abraham (that’s a pretty dramatic name), got hot and bothered, made it over to the ridiculous and enormous castle (for real!), then went down to the really old town at the bottom of the fortress that reminded the Gentleman of Torino’s Guardinfanti and wandered around the shops. Here we began the mantra of ‘is this tat? Or not tat?’ which we repeated for the next three days and bought little things for children. Including a little wooden loon. I was feeling in need of fortification, so we took a lovely glass of Quebecois wine, then went for dinner. In contrast to veganism, this time we ate elk. I know I’m #DoingItForDave but vegetarianism doesn’t count on holiday. God, least of all in North America. We finished the night on the upper terrace of a sort of grim pub next to a drag bar where we could see hurrying towards it more joyful people than were sat upstairs with us.

By this point in our trip, I am afraid to say I began falling in love with absolutely everyone. I fell in love with the beautiful young man in La Terroir coffee who spoke softly and reminded me how to say ‘lait du vache’ in French – my god, how to specify the kind of milk you want in your flat white just didn’t come up in GCSE French, and that typifies everything that is wrong with the English Curriculum. We strolled down to the majestically named Museum of Civilization and after commenting, you know, we never do tours, even though we have enjoyed any we’ve ever done, we booked onto a tour of the Canadian cultural exhibition. Here I fell in love with the old tour guide with a gammy hip and thin hair scraped back into a ponytail, listening to her mellifluous voice gently dropping truth bombs over exhibition cases, then smilingly limping on, while we trailed in her wake, stunned, thinking, fuck … am I racist? We strolled about doing more shopping and stopped for strawberry wine and poutine where I fell in love with a golden retriever – and the owner, but mostly the dog. On the Isle d’Orleans, I fell in love with the woman who made maple syrup as she poured sweetness into us both, not least when she kindly said I am sorry, I thought you were French – you said Bonjour so nicely’ and I nearly took her by the wrists to dance with her when she turned up the CD of her little folk band. It was very nearly fatal by the time we got to Vignoble de Bacchus where the vintner said in honour of Bacchus that he brings the pleasure, but we must do the debauchery ourselves, then gave me wine and cheese and I had to go and have a sit down in the shade and concentrate on the soaring turkey vultures, fanning myself vigorously. My god.

The River Trench

This romance ended on the Saguenay river in Tadoussac in one of the most marvellously awkward gites I’ve ever stayed in. Now, I love an awkward BnB – breakfast with total strangers? Bring it! And the devil in me always cackles at how much the poor Gentleman suffers as he cringes into a seat and tries to disappear. But this was sommat else. To begin, we could not enter the building when we arrived at 6pm. There was an A4 piece of paper sellotaped to the door saying, ‘check-in is at 5’ (what, only 5? Do we all arrive on the dot and form a neat queue?) and to ring if there are ‘any problems.’ Well, I didn’t think checking in to a room I have paid for counted as a problem, but there was nothing else to do but ring (oh god, languages on the goddamn phone?!) and after announcing that we had ‘une chambre pour deux nuits’ I understood, of course, absolutely nothing that was said to me beyond ‘tout suite’ which I took to mean the chap would be along shortly. He was – after the most interminably long seven and a half minutes of my goddamn life in which I thought I would have to – the horror – ring again and announced that he spoke no English. Ah. However, I did understand what is probably the most dreaded phrase in any language: you have a shared bathroom. Our little room also opened onto the communal area that forever had someone in it eating yogurt whenever I wanted to pass through to our bathroom; our bathroom sharer liked to brush his teeth in his dressing gown with the door open (a veritable ghost of the corridor), you could hear absolutely everything in every room except the fucken bathroom door opening and closing, so we skulked around outside it, rattling the handle at intervals in front of the yogurt-eaters so I could have my morning constitutional – oh my god it was insupportable, insupportable. Clean, and cute. But not relaxed.

But we saw whales! Beluga, minke, fin and even a baleen bleu! We learned the phrase elle est plongé! We learned the sound of the spouts and that ethereal, half-recognition of it on the cold open water, the silence with just the waves knocking on the hull, then in the back of consciousness, this new sound – before the brain catches up and says, wait! That’s a whale! And you scan the sea until someone shouts là-bas! And you whip round to see. They got no idea how old these whales are. Some they know are over eighty. But they’ve not even been counting for as long as that. Amazing. We also visited the sand dunes above the river, and the most end-of-the-world beautiful little beach that curved around to a rock peninsula covered in red and orange maple trees. Australia had trees coming right down onto the sand – but all the uniformly peridot of eucalyptus. Seeing these flame colours all reflected back from the water was astonishing. I dreamed there, over sea urchins being tumbled gently by waves, thinking of Keats and was very regretful about leaving. We had to spend the next four hours drinking beer in a pub to cure that sorrow.

 After these excesses we made our way back west. We stopped in the high gorges of the Laurentian mountains and did a vigorous walk between the autumn colours. We read about logging and rolled our eyes strenuously at the portrayal of this environmentally damaging, human exploiting and dangerous work as ‘manly,’ or as the Gentleman put it, ‘all that Hemmingway shit.’ Sometimes he is utterly poetic with his precision. We stayed in an adorable old hotel in Charlevoix, which had real Resident Evil vibes, undercooked the food and was not quite clean. We moved on to Sutton where we drank lots more beer at the brewery’s two for one night, then got kicked out for closing at eight pm so retired to watch Jeeves and Wooster in our room on youtube. We went to another vineyard that was so beautiful that, again, the Gentleman felt some sacrifice would need to be made, so we scratched the rental up pretty bad on the way out to even things up a bit. And at last we were back in Montreal, in the garden with Jim and Gen, the chipmunks and the jays, drinking wine, eating pizza and talking about French, about English, about love, gorges, whales, rivers, travelling, Australia, Bali, Vietnam, the everlasting universe of things and I was in love all over again.

Ending

We gate-crashed a birthday party the next night and got drunk enough to dance. I managed to keep a lid on my ‘and aNOTHER thing!’ conversation patterns. We made new friends, we sang loudly, we slept well, we woke badly. We flew home. In our own garden gate, recent rain had set the roses blooming all over again in late September. The fuchsia was covered in white flowers and reached its arms towards us.

We were home.

The Writer in the World

I put off studying this chapter in my course. Turning over the practicalities of publishing has a rather … desiccating effect on me. Is it because I find it so enormous and intimidating – or just stultifying? This is not promising for a writer. I think it’s those words; ‘marketing,’ ‘acquisition,’ ‘schedule’ that make my neck disappear into my shoulders in spasms like I’ve been shot. They are so removed from what I do in the blackness of early morning, at my desk with the window cracked  open to hear the first trills of a robin, with an idea, with an image, something I find beautiful.

That sounds very high and mighty, doesn’t it? We both know that the truth is probably more that if I dismiss the whole publishing process as hyper-commercialised, soulless wank, I can excuse myself from trying – and failing. Which is cowardly.

I liked the interview with Linda McQueen. She said ruefully (in impossibly clipped vowels – which brought me back to Alexa Von Hirschberg’s comments about the industry’s lack of diversity – also spoken in impossibly clipped vowels) that people don’t like copy editors. They come in with their red pen and split hairs over free indirect thought vs speech punctuation. Well. I was a teacher. I am not afraid of the red pen. She talked about being freelance, because her section of the process is often so discreet that she can slot in and out, then buzz off. No conversations for her about events and articles, prizes and shortlists, contracts and edits. Her concern is the work itself.

I like that. All the rest is just noise, isn’t it? I’m not so naïve to not understand that promotion and sales and advertising are important; it is not all mindless selling. They have the vital role of carrying important words further, so they can reach someone sitting alone on a classroom desk, swinging her legs, or on the carpet with his back against a radiator, in a café, on a bus, at a bar, in bed, and fling them up into rarified space. From the interviews with the commissioning editors, that was certainly what they told themselves. Important work. But Linda McQueen, the ‘midwife to other people’s creativity’ as she so beautifully put it, just gets to focus on that flinging.

Travel Writing and the Leisure Gap

Well, then I had to research an author’s journey to writing and their process. Wanting someone up to date (Jean Rhys’ experience is probably not going to be a helpful guide for me), I went for Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path and Landlines.

Her topic is probably better known than her style. She famously hiked the Southwest Coastal Path right after she was made homeless and her husband was diagnosed with a terminal illness in the same week. Lovers of her books enjoy the story of her journey out of adversity, the relationship, the triumph of hope over despair. Relatable stuff. I discussed this with my best friend. We talked about women and male travel writers, and I think there tends to be a difference. My best friend suggested women writers tend to focus on the personal, the inner journey. Male writers might focus more on the landscapes, the history and absent themselves somewhat from the text. It is not about them.

Ah yes. The invisible white man. Invisible because his subject-ness is the given, the standard. While I thought my best friend’s comments certainly applied to Winn and MacFarlane, in all the many travel books I’ve read, male writers (and there are more of them) go off on journeys as a frivolity, or an intellectual passion. MacFarlane hunts down old pathways. Haywood alternates between his narrowboat and Triumph, MacKinnon fancies rowing himself from Wales to Serbia.

When a woman travels, it’s more often out of necessity. Winn certainly wasn’t on a jolly. Here is the disparity, and perhaps the reason for the inner, personal focus of women travellers – or maybe those women writing about a merry trip don’t get published because – I’m getting carried away – perhaps all of a sudden this sort of thing seems too frivolous. And how could she leave her family?

Here we have the leisure gap.

The Commodification of Meaning

Alright, alright, I’m clambering down off me soapbox.

So I researched Winn’s journey to publication. There’s not a lot: she wrote the book, then after being persuaded by her daughter, she sent it off to agents. Then – I don’t know, underpants or something, and: world domination. Or bestseller list domination. But I thought, surely, she can’t live the life of a writer in the professional sense. She looks after her husband, she goes for a walk when he needs it. And it helps. She’s not hunting for things to write, she’s busy caring about nature.

Then I read an interview where she talked about a big project coming up. It was the walk from the book Landlines.

And suddenly I went cold. In the book, the walk is approached in cautious terms, after weeks of watching health deteriorate, then back and forth with guilt and persuasion in equal measures. To talk of it as a project, like it was work, like something to map on a Gant chart, when it was someone’s life, a human life, a person who needed to move so it would genuinely save them – I didn’t know where to put that.

And it frightened me. Because what Raynor Winn’s writing offers her readers is Ideas with a big I. Love, endurance, hope, the enthralling power of nature.

And those ideas are exactly what are for sale.

Branding is a horrific thing. I read Naomi Klein’s No Logo back in the early 2000s – weren’t we all on board with the idea that brands are evil? They’re just made up concepts created to persuade people to part with money. Straining to convince us that this product is not just a radio speaker, a detergent, a drink, but a whole lifestyle that they can have if they just buy this thing. Obvious bullshit. But right after that, social media accelerated and we got into the habit of curating our online image that has eventually warped into a kind of eternal self-branding.

Reviews of Winn’s work celebrate her ‘resilience,’ her observation of landscape, her ‘empathy and integrity,’ her ‘compassion.’ These beautiful notions are what are packed up and sold on the publisher’s memoir/nature writing List. We are building our list of titles about resilience. Send us your manuscripts that have empathy. We are looking for empathy to sell. We are selling integrity and compassion. That’s what our customers expect from us. In the market of ideas, we offer connection-with-nature. It is our niche, our USP.

People aren’t brands. Ideas, feelings, aren’t brands. Wilderness is not a brand. Brands are lies. Brands aren’t real. Trees, rocks, rivers are real. Everything else, and I mean everything else that we have layered and lacquered on top of our forests and mountains are the things that aren’t real, that will all be washed away. Feelings, the ironic anthropomorphisation of nature, love, art, are all ephemeral things, but they are the one thing humans have that is uncomplicatedly pure. And making these experiences, these feelings into commodifiable consumables is … fucked. Really fucked. Selling and buying transcendence is a betrayal of the human spirit. And I am afraid that when Raynor Winn is feeling transcendental on the peaks and thinking about how nature heals, and the imperative connection with our landscapes – she is actually just at work. Turning beauty into neat little packages to sell us on Instagram on her way to the next speaking engagement.

Resist

I am being pretty childish, aren’t I? I’m quite sure I said similar things when I was nineteen. I’m forty soon, but I never did get the hang of the difference between realism and cynicism. But it’s the shock – suddenly having the Beautiful Idea illuminated by a bright torch and there’s the project and the spreadsheet and the timeline – and it’s reduced to project management. And so, while I get over the initial shock, I am having a bit of a sulk. Without publishers, I would not have the luxury of reading transcendental ideas at all. And Raynor does a lot for conservation, and her writing makes people care about it more. That’s essential.

But I do urge us all to resist commodification. Resist the reducing of our selves and lives into brands. Resist the depletion of spirit as we move through the world. If we reach out and make connections, let’s make them meaningful. When we act, let’s act with meaning and intent, act with love. Walking in a forest is an act of love – a painful one. This is also why I am in a sulk. Winn’s book beat me round the head with climate decline and environmental degradation, and darl’ I was already converted. You see, if we’re too busy working on our brands, and buying and selling our experiences; when we turn back to the real world, we’ll find it all gone.

So resist. Resist.

Winter.

It’s in the blood. It’s not so much a season as a state, woven into people; stamped, stained. I know this to be true because I thought this would be harder. Early days, I know, but being plucked from blues and reds of an Australian summer’s sharp outlines and dumped into the moist of England’s winter, I had thought … I had thought I would cry more. But it is something in the body that the cells recognise, they know, they adapt.

It was immediately harder to see. When the pavements, buildings and drab fields are a monochrome grey, smeared with a putrid fog and the sky lingers in bluish twilight for seven hours, I found myself squinting. I rubbed my eyes and cleaned my glasses repeatedly, until I realised the very air is thicker here, and seeing through it is harder – disorientating after the brightness of Australia, where even my myopic eyes seemed buffed clean.

Those were the first impressions. The next, most significant, was that I tested positive for COVID immediately and that fucked up everything.

Thus from isolation, I have had time to contemplate winter. On the narrow, crowded motorways to home, I felt smothered by the very burden of familiarity – a recognition so strong it seemed to supersede the last three beautiful years, to override them like reality asserting after a wonderful dream. Like being crushed by it. It reminded me of walking along Rainham marshes with mum a few years ago, and arriving back in Purfleet, where I grew up. There was a deadening feeling of familiarity, like a weight of inheritance – no matter how far you go, this is you, and this is it, you can’t escape it. My Essex accent asserts immediately over three years of drawling ‘righto,’ bare trees like birch brooms nod, kangaroos and blood red birds evaporate into fantasy and cold is recognised.

And winter. But it was less of a shock than I thought. We arrived in Brentwood, to three sunny days in a row and our invisible, winter-coloured birds of greys and browns singing loud colours I’d forgotten. The sky is a pale blue, the shadows through the white gold light are long like a splendid and forlorn sunset. Light is gentle, moist, fallow. As I spent much of the first day sat on the windowsill I realised I have so rarely passed such a meditative day in winter. Normally I am demoning through mock papers, assessments and trying to think up cool shit for the end of term to try and remind young people that school is not just about being beaten with the exam stick. I don’t look up to breathe – then weekends; even on the boat in the middle of our rural idyll, were frantic all winter with getting water, washing and shopping and then finishing that marking before you lose the light. Or I was drunk, dulling the misery of winter. I can’t think of a time when I have had moments to stare out at the wintry daylight and watch it.

It’s in the blood. You remember what to do. I have lived cosily under a blanket for several days, draped dramatically in scarves. The sunshine is tender and gentle and moisture oozes out the very atmosphere – drink, drink it deep, quench a three year thirst. I’m surprised we don’t all have gills and webbed limbs here; as we swim through a wet cloud that has descended upon us that mutes visibility and the air is wet even though it isn’t raining. My skin feels less scratchy – I will go slimy like an eel. There is no desperate watching of clouds and mapping the hills and rivers to squeeze out every drop. Catchment here means where your kids go to school. So much water. And it is beautiful in its different way. Spiderwebs adorned with drops, that sort of thing; all those cliches. But I can prod these spiderwebs with my fingers without any red-backed vengeance. Yesterday was cloudy and misty so I collected my anthology of vampire tales and sat in the garden, wrapped in more blankets than a Victorian invalid and got my Goth on. It was great. Hot tea, lean into the gothic, blankets, scarves and enjoy the ghostly mists and birds.

Of birds; I miss the cordial friendliness of our cockies and galahs, shuffling over to see what you’re doing. But these bluetits and blackbirds remind me of the importance of stillness. So be still, and watch. Read, write. Stay in, make hot chocolate, get cold so you can get warm again. Winter is not something you screw your eyes up tight to, holding your breath and hoping it’ll be over soon. You have to live it, here. Sit with it.

It’s in the blood.