On the way back up

The winter solstice is behind us! We’re on the way back up. 

Well, we’re on the way up here in the Northern Hemisphere. I say that with all sympathy to my friends at the other end of the world, who are just heading into winter as we start our long climb out of it. I suppose that’s just turn and turn about. My sympathy for the South won’t hold back my pleasure in the North.

It was quite a solstice, as it happens. It was the night of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, which Danielle and I went out into the countryside to watch. With binoculars, we could see how close together the two planets were, which was impressive. Close, that is, in appearance. They remain 730 million km apart. But, hey, plenty of people go for appearance not substance (Trump or Boris Johnson supporters, for instance) so I felt I was entitled to my own flirtation with illusion. 

At least mine was brief.

The conjunction visible on my phone
Well, just visible

That conjunction was an important one. For the last couple of centuries, they have been mostly happening in constellations associated with Earth signs. The next two hundred years will be an Air period which, I’m told, will favour “the renovation of hierarchies, decentralization, shifting orders, rapid translation, mass mobility, trade networks, and rampant spirituality”.

It may just be me, but I’m not sure that the last two hundred years haven’t seen the renovation of hierarchies, shifting orders, mass mobility or trade networks. And spirituality seems to have been pretty rampant, too. Still, who am I to question the validity of astrology in a world where people believe that Covid vaccinations will give Bill Gates control over their minds?

The big deal about getting past the winter solstice is that we’re on the way back towards spring again. That’s not to say that the weather will get warmer straight away. On the contrary, I always remember the words attributed to a Russian general who was asked, at the time of Napoleon’s invasion, which general would defeat the French. He replied “generals Janvier and Février”. Yep. January and February are the merciless months.

Still, there is a compensation. Which is that the days are now starting to get longer again. It’s irritating to be caught out if I’m just a tad slow in the afternoons – and, you know, we pensioners can be slow – and discover that it’s already dark when I take the dogs out for their pre-dinner walk.

So it completely alters my mood to know that the days are lengthening again. It just feels hopeful. It’s the main reason I like to get past that shortest day. 

The best explanation I’ve ever heard of why Christmas is celebrated on 25 December came from a Swiss pastor I once listened to at a midnight mass. It’s obvious Christ wasn’t born that day –there were lambs in the fields, for pity’s sake – so the priest maintained that the midwinter date was the right one for symbolic reasons: it’s the darkest point of the year when we celebrate a light that pierces through it, and that, he reckoned, was the core of the Christian message.

Yes. It does feel right to celebrate that rebirth of hope. Which is no doubt why the Romans held the pagan rite of the Saturnalia on – oh, what a coincidence – the 25th of December…

The temperature is a factor for me too. Not perhaps in the obvious way, not here in Valencia, with its weather made still milder by global warming. Temperatures have dropped below 20 Celsius several times in December, but what’s most surprising is how often they’ve been above that level, at least in the afternoons.

Toffee and Luci coping with the winter temperatures in Valencia
Down, drastically, to the low twenties

Even so, the air’s no longer warm. So I have to dress a little for winter. No coat, most of the time, perhaps. But still more clothes than in the summer. I just love being able to dress in about 30 seconds – pants, shorts, tee shirt, done. But now it’s socks as well, fiddly things for each foot separately. Proper shirts, which need buttoning up, including at the cuffs since I now have to use long sleeves.

All rather tedious.

“Why bother with shirts that need buttoning?” you might ask.

It’s a good question. The answer is that while I’m enormously enjoying being retired, my entry into retirement wasn’t voluntary. Propelled by redundancy, in fact. So I have lots and lots of work clothes left.

That includes shirts with buttons. And I’m going to wear them till they’re worn out. Then I’ll switch to the kind of shirts that don’t need buttoning. 

In the meantime, the buttons, like the socks, are a daily reminder of why winter’s annoying. Which underlines my delight at being on the way back up again at last. 

So, to all of us in the Northern Hemisphere – Season’s Greetings! Have fun!