BOOKS, RADIO AND TV
A warming and poignant reflection on surviving adversity in the coldest months of the year
What to read, watch and listen to.
BOOK WINTERING BY KATHERINE MAY, EBURY PUBLISHING, £9.99 (PB)
After the gruelling experience of lockdown, Katherine May’s gorgeous reflection on the season of darkness, hardship and ghost stories, out now in paperback, feels incredibly poignant.
But Wintering (the title comes from a Sylvia Plath poem) is much more than a study of a few cold, sunlight-deprived months that many of us find difficult. It’s also about how to survive adversity: “Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again,” she writes.
May is frank about her struggles, including work stress and a “chronic sense of unbelonging”, and mixes memoir with insights gained from the rhythms of nature and from other people’s ways of wintering well. Finns begin their winter prep – foraging, pickling, wood-stacking – back in August. A modern druid explains the benefits of breaking the year into shorter chunks like we once did, with four solar festivals linked to the solstices and equinoxes, and four pastoral ones in-between, celebrating key moments in our lived experience.
The resulting epiphanies, extolling the virtues of slowing down, quiet evenings in, long winter sleeps, cold-water swims and frosty walks over crunchy ground, can read like a self-help book. As May says: “We who have wintered have learned some things.” Yet the writing is poetic as well as profound, and as warming and curative as a cuddle.
Ben Hoare, author and naturalist