What’s the point in migrating to a warmer country for a couple of weeks to push winter away? It’s just delaying the inevitable. I want to winter in the cold, embrace the changes it brings, acclimatise.

you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?

Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin.

That’s what you learn in winter: there is a past, a present, and a future. There is a time after the aftermath.

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a

I had no idea how much these quiet pleasures had retreated from my life while I was rushing around, and now I’m inviting them back in: still, rhythmic work with the hands, the kind of light concentration that allows you to dream, and the sense of a kindness done in the process.

But then, winter is no time to put on a display. I love the separation it brings, the way that people are scarce even during the daylight hours, when you can drink in the dilute light of the low sun, your shadow stretching long at your feet.

We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. Instead we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when

winter is a time when death comes closest—when the cold feels as though it might yet snatch us away, despite our modern comforts. We still perceive the presence of those we’ve lost in the silence of those long evenings and in the depths of darkness that they bring. This is the season of ghosts. Their pale forms are invisible in bright sunlight.