Solstice

Yesterday - near Sand Hall

On the morning of this winter solstice, I lay in bed for an hour after I had woken up. Together, the quilt and the sheets had created a snug cocoon around me and I had no pressing reason to leave it. Over the radio came sweet Christmas songs from Belfast and those monotone perennial readings from "The Bible".

Pulling back the curtains, I looked out on a misty neighborhood. Fog hung like static white smoke and colours had been drained away as if the world outside was fading just as underexposed photographic paper in a dark room is liable to do.

On the morning of the solstice, I came downstairs to boil two eggs which I ate with a single rice cake and a dash of seasoned French sea salt that I bought in 1998 somewhere in the Réserve Naturelle Nationale de la Baie de l'Aiguillon north of La Rochelle, France.

On the morning of the solstice, I thought of yesterday and how I walked in dank river mist down to remote Sand Hall along a bend in The River Ouse, not far from Saltmarshe Hall in East Yorkshire.

Then I drove on to Hull where my beloved Tigers were playing the Birmingham club - West Bromwich Albion. I met up with my old friend Tony and a newer friend - Karl. Both have their own ongoing health issues. Tony had a small stroke earlier this year and because of cancer Karl has had a kidney removed and is beginning a second course of chemotherapy. His prospects are not bright but he is still fighting for the privilege of life.

What a trio! Cancer, Stroke, High Blood Pressure etc.. watching healthy young men battle it out on the pitch. By the way, we won by a single goal - a deft penalty scored just before halftime by Oli McBurnie.

In the early darkness, aboard the "park and ride" bus back to Butch, I sat with a very nice man who lives on the south bank of The Humber. He told me that for forty years he had run his local football club as chairman, secretary, treasurer, bus driver, shirt launderer, counsellor and whatever else might have been required.  At first, he suspected that I was just jossing when I remarked that he deserved a medal but then I explained the huge beneficial impact his unsung work would have had upon the lives of generations of lads and young men. I was being perfectly sincere.

I drank coffee from a flask after I had opened Butch's boot (American: trunk) before driving home to Sheffield on the eve of the winter solstice.

On the morning of the solstice, I sat at this computer keyboard in my study with the anglepoise light shining down as I typed. And I thought of smoky feasts and yule logs burning and dancing and drums and flutes and flagons of cider and holly and ivy and a suckling pig roasting on an iron spit in a bleak midwinter on a day that marked and celebrated the turning of time and the gradual return of light and warmth and snowdrops and tender green leaves and renewal and hope .

Goole Bridge - ten days apart from different banks