Wordless Wednesday
Winter
Unseasonal Music
Litanei auf das Fest Aller Seelen – Schubert
May all souls rest in peace;
those whose fearful torment is past;
those whose sweet dreams are over;
those sated with life, those barely born,
who have left this world:
may all souls rest in peace!
The souls of girls in love,
whose tears are without number,
who, abandoned by a faithless lover,
rejected the blind world.
May all who have departed hence,
may all souls rest in peace!
And those who never smiled at the sun,
who lay awake beneath the moon on beds of thorns,
so that they might one day see God face to face
in the pure light of heaven:
may all who have departed hence,
may all souls rest in peace!
Text by Johann Georg Jacobi
Translation by Richard Wigmore
Seasonal Reading
Three books I shall be reading this year and I won’t be in a hurry to finish them
Jenny Uglow has taken the writings of naturalist Gilbert White and selected something from his journals and letters for each day of the year and and expands on them supplementing Gilbert’s words with her own notes, thoughts and background information. The book is illustrated without, sorry that should read the book is beautifully illustrated throughout. I have made the daily reading of this book part of my daily discipline. If ever a book called out for an inserted ribbon to mark your place it is this. Needless to say it has not.
The Blackbird’s Song – is written with the sole purpose of encouraging the reader to engage with nature. It is divided into monthly chapters and within each chapter there is information on what to look out for and suggested activities for the month. So for January one of the activities the author suggests is get to know a tree, choose one local tree and describe it in your journal, (oh yes, that is our first task of all, to keep a nature journal). I think I have decided on a Shakespearean tree.
Nature’s Calendar. This book grew out of a casual meeting on social media of a number of indiviuals whose imaginations were captured by the traditional Japanese calendar which divided the year into 72 brief microseasons, each with their own poetic name. It is often been noted by overseas visitors to the UK that we have all four seasons in one day. The authors wonder if microseasons could offer a way of seeing and experiencing the natural world afresh?
A Meeting with Despair
As evening shaped I found me on a moor
Sight shunned to entertain:
The black lean land, of featureless contour,
Was like a tract in pain.
‘This scene, like my own life,’ I said, ‘is one
Where many glooms abide;
Toned by its fortune to a deadly dun –
Lightless on every side.’
I glanced aloft and halted, pleasure-caught
To see the contrast there:
The ray-lit clouds gleamed glory; and I thought,
‘There’s solace everywhere!’
Then bitter self-reproaches as I stood
I dealt me silently
As one perverse, misrepresenting Good
In graceless mutiny.
Against the horizon’s dim-discernèd wheel
A form rose, strange of mould:
That he was hideous, hopeless, I could feel
Rather than could behold.
‘’Tis a dead spot, where even the light lies spent
To darkness!’ croaked the Thing.
‘Not if you look aloft!’ said I, intent
On my new reasoning.
‘Yea – but await awhile!’ he cried. ‘Ho-ho! –
Now look aloft and see!’
I looked. There, too, sat night: Heaven’s radiant show
Had gone that heartened me
Thomas Hardy
New Year’s Gift
The Eighth Day of Christmas
For most of my working life when I had to write the date on documents, cheques and the like I would usually have to cross out the year I had written and re-write the correct year, and this would be the case for several days to follow. In Tudor times in England the Julian calendar was still being observed, so although the liturgical new year began on January 1st the date did not change until 25th March – Lady Day. In 1582 the Julian calendar was replaced by Papal decree to the Gregorian calendar. Protestant England considered this a load of bull and stuck to the Julian calendar until finally caving in in 1752.
One of the most important aspects of New Years Day in Tudor England was the giving of presents – gifts were exchanged on New Years Day and not on Christmas Day as they are now. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I encouraged this tradition and every courtier and servant were expected to give their monarch a gift. Giving the right gift was fraught with dangers for the Courtiers, it had to be commensurate with the givers’ rank and if the King or Queen accepted your gift you were clearly in favour, but if they rejected it, then look to your head. Gift giving wasn’t all one-sided, there of records of privy purse expenses itemising the cost of rewards given from the crown at this time including a ‘bounty’ of gifts to members of the royal household.
Time out of joint
The Christmas holiday period in England seems to be like we are living in an endless shuffling parade of weekends and we have to stop and pause for a while whenever some poses the question of what day is it; every day feels like tomorrow is Sunday. We are well aware of the date, but what day is it? It is as if we are grieving for something but we are not sure what it is.
What day is this?
“Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”
Christmas is always a bit on an anti-climax. All the build-up for months and months beforehand and it is all over in a flash and we spend the rest of the holiday period wondering what to fill the time with and not knowing what day it is. And before we know what day it is, we are back to work and all the trees, tinsel and lights are taken down for another year. Have we forgotten about the 12 days of Christmas, or that the Christmas season does not officially end until Candlemas on February 2nd?
We have somewhat lost many of the traditions of Christmas, and those that we do follow all seem to be relatively recent inventions. How was Christmas celebrated before Dickens, Disney and Coca-Cola? Whatever happened to the 12 Days of Christmas?
This year I have been reading a book about how Christmas was celebrated in Tudor times, the days before Boxing Day Sales and Elves on shelves, and I have been reading it in time with the season, a chapter a day.
The book – “A Tudor Christmas” by Alison Weir and Siobhan Clarke, begins with a general introduction and a chapter on the traditions of Christmas Eve, and then divides itself into 12 chapters devoted to each of the 12 days of Christmas.
Today is the 31st December – the Seventh Day of Christmas. A day for sport and games.
“Although there is no record from the sixteenth century of people gathering on New Year’s Eve to see the old year out and welcome in the new one at midnight, and most of the old customs associated with New Year’s Eve (such as first-footing) do not pre-date the nineteenth century; the day was one for revelry. Traditionally, the seventh day was an occasion for games and sporting competitions.”
Henry VIII passed a law banning all sports on Christmas Day, except archery. He also decreed that those such as labourers, mariners, servants and apprentices could play cards, dice, football, bowls, tennis, quoits, ninepins and shove groat only at Christmas. So today is a day for sports and games, including card games and what we would later call ‘parlour’ games, such as those played by Scrooge’s nephew in “A Christmas Carol.” Many of the games were variations on ‘blind man’s bluff’ or hide and seek.
One game from the mid-sixteenth-century involved a blindfolded player who groped for one of the players sitting around, placed his or her head in his or her lap, and raised a hand palm upward for the other person to slap it and he had to guess who it was. The game was called ‘hot cockles’.
Snap-dragon of Flap-dragon was a favourite game for Christmas Eve. Raisons, almonds or candied fruit were placed in a bowl of warmed brandy. The brandy was then lit and you had to snatch the fruit out of the bowl without burning your fingers. Do not try this at home.
From “Cairn”
Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist with a distinct, unique, Scottish voice. I first fell in love with that voice when I turned on the radio late one night and heard her reading an essay about whales and her visit to a whale museum. Her spoken voice was undramatic and unmelodic, almost, one might rudely say, monotonous, the melody was in the pared down poetry of her words. I tried to get the name of the speaker as the programme ended but didn’t quite catch it and by the morning it was lost, but not forever. It was quite a few years later that I came across her book “Sightlines” and there was her essay on her visit to Bergen and the whales. That she is a poet is apparent in every word of prose she writes. Each essay, each poem requires time to be still, sit and reflect. Her essays cannot be rushed. Sit down and stay a while.
‘Cairn’ is Kathleen Jamie’s latest collection of, well what exactly? A mixture of notes, micro-essays, thoughts, reflections and poems. Here is the first poem in the collection. Tell me what you think.
The Night Wind
Asleep with the window open
dreaming, you lie awake –
the night breeze slips over the sill,
sails your room like a lake
and sweeps you up, a voyager
exhilarated with youth
then drops you, whispering
the unconsoling truth:
‘Your dead stay dead. Alive
are sky and ocean and land –
bear in mind, though I’m leaving you
cast up on daybreak’s strand
‘I’ll be back ere long to scatter you –
till then, let sunshine bathe your skin:
there’s more days past than ahead of you
– now you can begin.’
Whatever we begin (begin again)
we begin lonely.
Books of 2025
My final written entry in my Journal was to list all of the books I had read in the past year and then to think about what i could remember of them.
So, which of the 48 books I had completed stand out as memorable, which ones would I recommend, which ones would I advice people to avoid and which would I look forward to reading again?
Memorable
Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens
Not one of Dickens’ more popular books, more people are familiar with Oliver Twist, Pickwick, David Copperfield and even Nicholas Nickleby than with the story of Paul Dombey and his family. But even lesser known Dickens makes for a great read and it can make a bigger impact on us when we read it because of the lack of familiarity. It is the story, or stories of different families and particularly on the relationships between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters and brothers and sisters. Dickens excels at creating realistic yet memorable, even sometimes horrifying characters. There is at least one for me shocking episode in the book and at times Dickens seems to be foreshadowing the domestic tragedies of Ibsen and Thomas Hardy. But as always with Dickens, the tragedy and social commentary is tempered or highlighted with comedy, because, well Dickens couldn’t help himself. And on reflection I think this book deserves a second read and it is one that would benefit from rereading.
Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church – Peter Ross
I thought I was buying about someone travelling around Britain and looking at old churches and describing them and that would be interesting enough (probably). Well, it is a bit like that but much, much more so. Firstly Peter Ross is a seasoned journalist who is used to meeting people and getting them to talk and in recording their tales in an entertaining and interesting way. And the people in the churches, abbeys and cathedrals that he meets are both interesting and entertaining.
Waterland – Graham Swift
A book that has been around and floating on the periphery of my awareness for may years. Surely I must have read that by now, at some point and maybe had forgotten I had done so? Set in the unsettling flat landscape of the black fenlands beyond Wisbech, it is a haunting novel of alienation and how the past and present intertwine every bit as much as do the land and the water.
Recommended – Three Books that you really need to read
Raising Hare – Chloe Dalton
A surprising book that yielded up far more than I expected, even if I didn’t get the pun until weeks after I had finished it. A delightful book.
Ghostland: In search of a haunted Country – Edward Parnell
A part-memoir, part travelogue, part exploration of that which haunts us culturally with references to L P Hartley, Walter de la Mare, Alan Garner, Green Knowe, Penda’s Fen and The Wicker Man – this book could have been written for me.
James – Perceval Everett
Late to the party as ever, the book that people had been raving about – the story of Jim from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told in the first person by the slave, Jim or James as he calls himself. It begins as a humorous, picaresque novel in the manner of Huckleberry Finn , and remains so in most of the parts where Huck’s story and James’ story intertwine but in the final section of the books things take a more serious turn.
Avoid
The Man in the Iron Mask – Alexandre Dumas
I had been watching the highly entertaining and salacious TV series about the Sun King, Louis XIV – “Versailles” and this prompted me to seek out the final book in Dumas’ sequence of novels about the Kings Musketeers. I had seen films about The Man in the Iron Mask – most memorably the 1998 film with Leonardo di Caprio, which is great fun and bears almost no relation to the book whatsoever. If you have seen the film and then go to read the book you will be disappointed. Even if you haven’t seen the film and just read the book you will be disappointed. A rambling romantic fantasy of a book that soon looses sight of the mystery of the man in the iron mask and is more concerned in wrapping everything up that took place in the previous two books.
Reread
Adam Bede – George Eliot
A book that failed to yield up it secrets at first read and one that will, I feel, expand on further reading. There are at least four or five main characters at least as important as the eponymous hero – do not expect a David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby type of book. Indeed this book is more about the rural community of Hayslope than it is about the life of the titled character – which is unsettling if you are expecting and biographical type of novel. Perhaps I should have read the editor’s introduction first rather than afterwards – I was concerned about spoilers. I did not engage so much with this book as I did with her other books, but as always with George Eliot’s books you are left with much to ponder over. This is definitely a book I want to read again.
radical rumblings 