On Winter

I'm talking both literally and metaphorically

As Britain slips into winter after this, the strangest of meteorological years, I'm feeling a subtle, subterranean kind of grief. Usually I love autumn, with its mellow golden light and bursts of dying warmth, the characteristics of the season captured so memorably by Keats.

But this year it's been hard to tell the difference between the seasons. A grey winter slipped into a rainy, cloudy spring followed by an erratic summer. The few unambiguously sunny days stand out like diamonds in my mind, exceptions to what seems to have become one season of near-perpetual cloud.

The New Weather has a climate I've never experienced before, one I'd describe as 'chilly tropical'. The air seems water-logged no matter what the temperature – there’s an iciness in the air which in warmer times creates a humidity we British call 'muggy'. When outside, familiar sensations from other contexts have struck me unexpectedly: what does that pricking of eyes and throat remind me of? Pollution in Damascus. Why have I suddenly got the feeling of being amid dry ice? Because a light gauze of chilly cloud is covering the blue sky above. In London, formerly sunnier than much of the country, the solid blanket of grey can lie overhead for three or four days.

It's a bit like living in Narnia before the return of Aslan.

'The White Witch? Who is she?’ asked Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. ‘Why, it is she that has got all Narnia under her thumb,' explained Mr Tumnus. 'It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!'

I'm a creature of the weather, body and soul. My earliest memories are of staring at bare winter trees and then, pre-school, getting a rush of energy on a sunny day and asking my mother if I could wash my doll's clothes.

A heightened physical sensitivity to the weather has been an impediment. In adulthood I realised I had Seasonal Affective Disorder plus what the medics call 'non-allergic rhinitis' – a respiratory reaction to changing levels of pressure and humidity, along with sinusitis. In Britain 2024 the almost constant levels of humidity bring congestion and take my sense of taste and smell.

My semi-adopted cat, used to a feral existence outside, spends much of the day on my bed, her paw over her face. And for the first time since my student days, I'm going to the laundrette to use the dryer because otherwise the washing will never, never dry.

These are some of the micro-consequences of the meteorological times, there for the noticing. Then there are the big ones, such as the fact that with so little sun, England has had the second-worst harvest on record. 'It's been an exceptional year,' an eighty-something Devon farmer told me. It had been hard to make hay.

Amid all this, it's important to remember that humans are adaptable and can survive in a vast range of conditions: think of Eskimos, the peoples of Mongolia. So can (some) individuals thrown into difficult conditions: think prisoners, astronauts, oil-rig workers. Even in Narnia, life went on and the animals made themselves cosy at home with a good tea.

Culture is partly an adaption to weather and the conditions created by the local climate but its psycho-social effects tend to be under-recognised. They were striking in Estonia, a country I visited for research for the book-that-never-happened (Covid) and the furthest north I've ever been.

After a couple of weeks, I privately renamed the country 'Elonia' due to the ambient reserve of the people. At the bus stop, people stood three metres away from each other. Casual conversations I would routinely have in Mediterranean countries didn’t happen; it was hard to get eye contact. One interviewee I'd had an agreeable lunch with simply walked off without saying goodbye. When I got talking to an Indian woman in a cafe, we hugged and confessed that we couldn't wait to leave.

Tom Tonks, a Brit who'd been visiting Estonia for a decade, explained to me the relationship between the weather and the national character. When we met for lunch in a midsummer Tallinn, he’d just got through his first full winter, a time of immense cold and dark.

'I'm tempered by that winter experience,’ he told me. ‘This is miraculous still, this greenery and sunshine. In the winter I get frostbite. Pavement turn to sheets of ice, you're doing a penguin walk, the faces you see on the street have a mentality of “let's get through the winter”. I've found that people retreat and get a lot more insular.

'Brits don't like silence. Estonians are the opposite – they wallow in silence. It's easy when you come here to be put out; sometimes it's like getting blood out of a stone. In Estonia it's important not to mistake reserve for coldness – it's not rude here not to speak to somebody, or to not show enthusiasm, or to be slightly closed off. When you're here in the winter you can understand it's not the cold that gets you, it's the darkness. When it's very cold and dark outside, by the time you've used up all that energy, you don't have a lot left.'

In Britain, the well-defined seasons have created a structure which helps us get through the darker months, fostering an almost processional way of moving through the year. 'When spring comes' is part of our lexicon and our planning, 'autumn' brings the fresh start of the new academic year, and our prolonged Christmas season is (in my irreligious opinion) a giant distraction from winter.

By contrast, the British pagan tradition emphasises the usefulness of winter as a time of inwardness, both literal and metaphorical. Over the decades, I've come to appreciate this embracing of the the northern hemisphere’s natural cycles. As we head towards the shortest day in December, I have a sense of travelling towards an ever-diminishing point of light towards a blackness which will subsequently transform into a diffuse, pale first light. A week or two after the turn of the year, I feel the shift in the season, a kind of internal quickening and a sort of excitement in the air outside.

The ancients – by which I mean humans who lived in the early stages of recorded history and before – had a deep acceptance of the changing seasons. It was born of their relationship with the natural world, their sense of being part of nature rather than separate from it. Pre-modern culture also had some very clear wisdom about the danger of interfering with nature. Two stories illustrate how attempts to control the natural world would fail and could backfire, with devastating consequences for us humans.

The myth of Icarus and its accompanying expression of 'flying too close to the sun' is, according to conventional interpretation, about hubris and danger.

But viewed from a contemporary perspective, there's more to it than that. The myth is also a story about technology and experimentation. Icarus' father Daedalus was a craftsman who used his skills to devise a mode of escaping Crete where the pair were imprisoned – a pair of wings made of feathers and wax. He gave his son strict instructions how to use the new contraption, but Icarus' youthful ambition led him to exceed its capacity. When the wax had melted, he fell to earth.

On one reading, the story illustrates the failure to listen, especially the tendency of Youth to ignore the voice of Experience, the son to know better than the father. But Icarus' downfall was not only due to his refusal to heed warnings – he also failed to pay attention. He didn't notice when the first feather fell, or the one after, nor did he make the connection between the heat of the sun and the properties of the wax keeping him in the air. In other words, he lacked a connection to reality, an ability to pay attention to what was going on around him, even though his life depended on it. These days we might say he didn’t have much situational awareness.

Icarus still has a message for us moderns. Are we noticing that the feathers are falling?

Canute is a misunderstood story which also has great relevance now. The popular version, the one I grew up with as a child, is of an arrogant king believing he could stop the tide. As we watch him sitting in his chair shouting at the waves, we join with his courtiers in pitying amazement and wonder how a mortal man could be so foolish.

In fact, as this writer points out, it was the courtiers who believed the king could stop the tide (or at least, in a bout of sycophancy, pretended to). Canute's actions were an attempt to show his subjects that he could not, in fact, command the sea. So the morale of the story has a much wider application: the belief in the human ability to control the natural world is part of a cultural mindset shared by a society or civilisation. We can't put all the blame for this hubris onto a single bad leader.

In Lisbon, in the winter of 2020/21, I had a dream about Britain. Several vivid scenes played out, each rich in symbolism. The last was of an aerial view of the British Isles entirely covered with cloud. Time passed and the cloud continued to hang over the distinctive, beloved shape. Although I understood in the dream that this was not the end of the story, I did not have any sense of when or how things would change.

So here we are.