This is the sort of thing toddlers say and then, years on, we can’t remember them. But this one has stuck in my mind all these decades later because it is so eminently logical. If living in the light is our default condition, then turning off the lights is turning on the dark. So it’s no longer a light switch, it’s a dark switch, it’s no longer a light bulb, it’s a dark bulb. This year the dark has been turned on good and proper and I’ve never felt the evenings so long, dusk falling around 3pm on grey drizzly afternoons and then an evening checking the clock to see if it’s reasonable to go to bed yet.
I’m actually missing meetings! Not because I have an agenda fetish and relish a few points of order, but because they occupy the drift from the evening meal to bedtime. TV simply doesn’t do it for me. A lurch from the One Show to the Repair Shop than wake up to a serial killing. Tonight we are set for a cocktail of Strictly Come Dancing followed by a new Icelandic murder drama with enough episodes to keep our knuckles clenched until next summer. I must stay awake enough so I don’t get Tess Daly confused with some macabre mass murderer beneath the Northern Lights. Won’t it be lovely as the last corpse is laid to rest and the champion detective sorts out his or her inevitable relationship problems to go and get vaccinated and emerge into the sunshine?
The evenings should be snug, the enveloping darkness shut out behind curtains, the wireless on for Jimmy Edwards and Arthur Askey. Aunts and Uncles round the upright piano singing old Gracie Fields songs and Grandma, stockings round her ankles, feet up on the pouffe to take the weight off her bunions with her half pint of mild and packet of fags beside her.
In this country vivid Autumn seems to dissolve messily into winter without the boundary being noticed. Somehow crinkled orange leaves underfoot melt into mud without the transition being marked. Sadly our winters are pretty characterless – damp, drizzly, mild and sodden. We rarely get the crisp bright days with the frost on the cobwebs and a clear sky shimmering in the crystal cold. We have to watch Icelandic murder mysteries for that. It means we can’t ritualise it. In America the porches will be decked from Halloween onwards with Autumnal oranges and reds, wreathes of berries and greenery, legions of pumpkins lined up on the stoops like so many decapitated Donald Trumps. The onset of winter will be marked by stacking the logs, removing the fly screens and erecting the heavy shutters, putting on the winter tyres, oiling the hunting rifle and revving up the snowmobile. It’s an exhilarating ceremonial. The fact that everyone will stay indoors, get depressed and by February be shooting themselves and each other should not be allowed to spoil the romance. I think I’ve been reading too much Ann of Green Gables and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Just across the hill from here just above Cromford nearly a century ago Alison Uttley... “would sit by the open fire with my tea of baked apples and cream on a
tiny table.” We have an atavistic yearning for open fires, candle light, simple homely foods and snowscapes, but we’re more familiar with, “Along with the snow came disadvantages, chilblains, colds, and chapped hands, but snow was also the remedy, and I remember my bare feet being rubbed with snow to get rid of chilblains. Our chapped hands were bathed in glycerine, so that we wept with the pain, and we wore woollen mittens to cover up the swollen parts.” I get the chilblains but not the snow.
We have some lovely American friends who live in an old wooden house with the apples stored in the straw and the tomatoes canned in the basement. The log fire roars and outside the blizzards will pile snow up against the walls. In the dim light they will be reading Louise Penny mysteries to each other, wholesome murder thrillers set not far from their home. Sweet classical music will be playing from a public service radio station. Trump v Biden debates do not contaminate these cosy softly lit rooms. It seems such a romantic fiction, so Laura Ingalls Wilder, but with them it was true.
Here I just want to go out somewhere in the evening, back to those 3-4 regular evening commitments per week, which I shall be complaining about when they restart. We’ve not been bred for homely evenings and hibernation, we may want them but we can’t live with them.
Meanwhile I was right in my surmise about the Icelandic thriller in every respect including the blue skies. It also had a mute solicitor.