Dear winter,
It seems that you intend to visit us again this year. I just want to make it clear – because researchers have found that expressing “feelings” about you in the form of a “dear winter” letter could make me less miserable at this time of year – that I did not invite you.
Don’t take it personally, but I am sure not many other people are keen on your arrival either, apart from heat pump marketers and pantomime performers. The thing is, winter, 2 million people in the UK experience seasonal affective disorder – and it’s all your fault.
I didn’t always have a problem with you. As a child in Scotland, I remember the sense of exhilaration and excitement at the prospect of frozen lochs, blizzards and the hope that school might be closed. This was only enhanced by the fact that my father, who was born and brought up in Calcutta, now Kolkata, had never seen snow until he was 25 and greeted every fresh dusting with wonder.
But that was then. Now, I see you coming each year, perfumed with bonfire smoke and cinnamon-spiced apples, lulling me into a feeling of cosy optimism.
“Oh, it’s not so bad, this winter malarkey,” I will tell myself. Now, I can enjoy flannel pyjamas, hot chocolate with marshmallows and watch three seasons of Lupin (because there is nothing more comforting than scaring yourself on a dead-of-winter night with a foreign crime thriller). Distracted by luxury Advent calendars stuffed with artisanal cheese and craft gin, I think you are my friend. Until, suddenly, it’s January.
Behold the true depths of your soul – dark, grinch-like, unrelenting, with a side order of guilt, bills and self-assessment tax forms. And you still have one more trick up your sleeve, don’t you, winter? Every year, I think: if I can just get to the end of January, it will be spring. But, like an ultramarathon runner, you have the stamina to keep pace with the shivering gloom until the end of March.
No wonder a team of researchers at the University of Glasgow (whose main building is often mistaken for that fictional wintery paradise Hogwarts) have written a guidebook to help people cope with the season. Light is a Right: A Guide to Wintering Well may not contain magic, but it does make some creative suggestions.
As well as writing a letter to you – strangely, the book doesn’t include your address – it suggests making a cardboard frame to look through and thus focus mindfully on one patch of sky at a time (who needs Netflix?). My favourite suggestion, because of its cinematic vibe, involves visualising a medieval room filled with light, stained glass and mirrors. “Think surfaces, shiny things, mirrors, silver paper, glitter, [a] neon lamp, candles … papercuts on windows … Wish more of the outside world in, happier habits, cosy joys, enjoyable hobbies …. Do the achievable and available, as opposed to the ideal and impossible.”
Similar inspiration is to be found in Katherine May’s excellent book Wintering, which became an unexpected bestseller during lockdown. She mentions that a surprising number of novels and fairytales have winter as a backdrop, but believes acceptance rather than fantasy is the way to maintain wellbeing until spring.
“You’re not going to avoid winter, so you might as well embrace it,” she advises. “I know people who hate it so much they try not to do anything for the whole season. We can invest so much energy in flinching away from things we find unpleasant or don’t want to happen, but acceptance and stepping towards them lessens the pain.”
I think she may be suggesting that I offer you an olive branch, dear winter. How might I do that? The Glasgow research closes with a line from the Edwin Morgan poem Grey, which urges us to see some good in the gloom. “This moment, this day, so grey, so plain, so pleasing in its way!” It’s a big ask, to try to embrace life with only an occasional burst of sunshine. But I will let you in on a secret. The simple act of writing this letter has made me feel a lot less gloomy about the prospect of your arrival.
Yours sincerely,
Anita
• Anita Chaudhuri is a freelance journalist and photographer
