Your Monday mote

Hunkering down

I don’t know about you but my writing changes with the seasons.

This weekend, I did the usual home reset ahead of the winter months. I washed my throws and stacked them neatly on the sofa, cleared and dusted the fireplace ready for the seasonal candles and lights, and most importantly, made sure my electric blanket was working.

Yes, I said electric blanket. In this age of soaring heating bills, let me tell you that this blanket is worth its weight in gold.

It transforms you into something akin to the gooey filling inside a cheese toastie. I recommend everyone try one at least once (because who doesn’t want to cosplay as a comforting bread product throughout the long winter nights?).

The seasons rewire my brain. I’m definitely someone who suffers from a touch of seasonal affective disorder (SAD). I’ve never been one to relish the shorter, darker days, the endless layers and knitwear, and the cold.

I function more effectively when there are blue skies, heat and light (I’m not talking scorchio but liveable warmth) and so I’ve learned to trick myself into believing that the change of seasons from Summer Lovin’ to Bleak House is a ‘good thing’.

Hence the yearly reset and attempt to make this sudden dimming of the lights a positive.

SAD is hard to explain but for those of you who are Star Wars fans - I’m talking OG A New Hope - you’ll remember when Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie got caught in the trash compactor. Well, that’s how I feel. It’s like the walls close in incrementally and I’m thrashing around fighting for my life dodging weird angry squid creatures.

Winter can almost dull the senses, although when you’re writing, a change of mood isn’t always a bad thing.

Writers are often empaths, or at least possess a higher than average sensitivity, and are highly susceptible to the conditions around them; be it the desk they sit at, the room they’re in, the company they keep, events at home or even across the world.

A seasonal change, therefore, is bound to make a difference.

“Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o'clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.” - Thomas de Quincey, from Confessions of an English Opium Eater

I read an article in Psychology Today, about a 2023 study that looked at just this. The article says that: ‘Our cognitive performance, our preference for different colours and different types of music, and the kind of foods we tend to eat all vary over the course of the year’.

The shift in seasons may be a necessary evil (gift?) in that it gives us the chance to vary our writing schedules, subject matter, pace and thinking time.

Winter lends itself to brooding. To mulling. To exploring. We can bury ourselves deeper into our worlds, as if escaping from the howling winds and inhospitable conditions outside.

So that’s what I’m going to do this winter. I will hunker down and allow my writery foibles to surface. I will embrace the grey, dim palettes and revel in my knitwear, cocoa in hand. (Actually, cocoa is yucky but it reads better than hot chocolate).

Are you a scribe with SAD?

If so, how does it affect your writing. I’d love to know.

You’ll find me outside kicking at piles of leaves…

Lisa x

• Check out this most recent - and entertaining - Ten for The TEN with Jeremy Murphy, who talks about his new journalism memoir, Too Good To Fact Check.

• Previous Ten for The TEN interviewee Lizzie Page has just published A Wartime Nursery, the most recent instalment in her Wartime Evacuees series.