Waiting for winter this year has been like expecting an old uncle to arrive any moment with his firewood and warm gloves to tell the party of raging teenagers in T-shirts it’s time to wind things up and go home.
Our Indian summer just hung around until it was looking like the new normal.
Thankfully, temperatures dropped to a sensible level this week, and we can breathe new life into that tired old election campaign slogan — we’re finally back on track.
Annoying as it is for all you endless summer people, the earth and the human soul need winter to slow down, to regenerate, to rest, rebuild and repair the overworked systems that have kept things buzzing during the mad summer months.
We are not machines.
We can’t live permanently switched on to build and produce stuff; we need a rest.
And winter is the time to slow down and move from the outside to the inside.
As the writer Jeanette Winterson so succinctly puts it, winter is a chance to spend “time as a human being as well as a human doing”.
For me, this means moving my life from the verandah to the lounge room and all the consequent rituals of the lounge room fire.
Kindling gathering, wood chopping, the storing of dried gum leaves and paper, the sweeping and scattering of ash, all this connects me to the daily rhythms of a life my parents and their parents and all the generations before them knew.
In my childhood home in Wales, we had a coal bunker at the end of the scullery, which was accessed through a half-swing door, like a horse stable.
My father would walk through the narrow kitchen with a bucket while mum cooked tea; he’d swing open the bunker door and fill the bucket with coal and then tramp back through the kitchen forcing my mother to interrupt her chopping and boiling; then he’d walk through to the tiny lounge room and carefully pack the open fire with coal leaving my mother to damp down all the kitchen surfaces as the swirl of coal dust settled around her.
It was a dirty, laborious chore, but it was done without complaint, even from my mother, because it was a necessary winter routine.
And so it is today.
I gather kindling and chop wood outside and trudge through the kitchen with a bucket spilling gum leaves and splinters and into the lounge room where the ash dust from last night’s fire settles over the hearth and the carpet and the furniture.
Yes, it’s dirty and laborious just like my father’s routine, and I could simply switch on the gas-fired heating and live a trudge-free, cleaner life.
But it’s a physical routine that connects me to my father, to the cycle of the seasons and in a strange way to mythical men’s business.
The reward of all that collecting and chopping and trudging is a real, glowing elemental fire at the centre of our home.
As well as a fire, we also light two lounge room candles during winter.
Candles bring their own soft pre-industrial light into a home.
Electric light is stark and keeps your mind sharp and focused.
It’s good for doing accounts or reading plans.
Candlelight is blurry and allows your mind to slowly sink into the embrace of music or poetry and finally — dreams.
It’s about the closest we can get to the primitive state of hibernation that our mammalian ancestors still use to survive winter.
Anyway, enjoy your winter — it’s not all dreariness and cold.
There’s always Christmas in July.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.
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