It’s been a longish week, as weeks in January are wont to be. There have been the usual dark, early morning bike rides and bus journeys to get to work. So, no change there. But yesterday my boy Silas went off on the travels he’s been planning forever, and although he’s happy, I won’t see …
January is awful. It’s cold. It’s miserable. And above all it’s dark. It’s a month when I don’t see daylight at home between Sunday afternoon and Saturday morning. It’s a month when my students get ill and don’t come to class. It’s a month when the next month is February, which, to be perfectly frank, …
When I was small, I didn’t like the dark. It wasn’t that I thought there were monsters lurking; it was a physical thing. I didn’t like the darkness of it, the thickness, the feeling of it closing around me. I didn’t like the unknown silence of it, the quietness into which my own heartbeat might …
My job is a long way from my home. I consequently spend far too much of my time on public transport. More to the point, I spend far too much of my time on public transport in the dark. Two and a half hours travel at either end of the working day means that for …