There was an enormous hoo-ha in the literary press last year when Philip Roth, widely considered one of America’s greatest 20th-century novelists, announced in an interview that, at the grand old age of 78, he didn’t read fiction any more. When asked why by the inteviewer, he simply replied ‘I wised up’. And then, back in November, Guardian columnist Zoe Williams wondered whether it was irresponsible to read novels in times of crisis, and whether we shouldn’t all read serious nonfiction instead. Williams says:

‘It’s something that they say a lot in publishing, apparently, that once you turn 40, you start reading biographies. I do remember in my 20s, someone nearing 40 saying, “When a novel says, ‘So-and-so walked into the room,’ I have this voice in my head shouting ‘So? They’re not real! The room isn’t real!’” I thought, what an incredibly weird, sad, unexpected, unattractive side of ageing, like getting cellulite on your nose. Sure enough, though, I’ve found my appetite for fiction has fallen off a cliff.’

And indeed, this seems to be a common enough phenomenon; I’ve grappled with it myself. Though I think that for me part of the disillusionment with fiction is a function of the desperately dull novels that are published – or indeed written – today. Contemporary fiction mostly bores the pants off me. This is appallingly evident to me whenever I go back to a lifechanging novel that I read in my teens or even in my twenties or, very rarely, a little later. Because the older I get, the rarer it gets that I find a new writer who makes that kind of impact on me (the last of them was probably Cormac McCarthy, whose novels were in good part responsible for my wanting to pack up and move to the Outer Hebrides exactly two years ago. Peculiar as that might sound … it’s a long story!) I want to know where the DH Lawrences, the Doris Lessings, the Cormac McCarthies, the Janette Turner Hospitals, the Margaret Atwoods have gone. As a publisher I found it so depressing to receive more and more fiction manuscripts every day - wave after wave of unending manuscripts – that told me nothing new or even particularly interesting about the world, that for a long while we stopped taking fiction submissions altogether.

But where it gets really complicated is when you’re trying to write a novel and you decide you’ve lost faith in fiction. My second novel, The Bee Dancer, was begun what seems like an age ago now. Close to three years ago, to be precise. I started off with the best of intentions, knowing exactly what I had to say and why I was writing a novel to say it. Then, about half way in, we had a joint brainstorm, dismantled our lives (again) and moved here to the Outer Hebrides. A perfect move in all kinds of ways, and it has brought all the things we wanted from it and a few more unexpected joys besides. But there’s no way that the kind of writer I am (must have every pencil in my study thoroughly sharpened, every speck of dust on the floor vacuumed up, every object in the house in its place before I can even begin to contemplate sitting down to write) can combine the kind of chaos that came from a 12-month-long total upheaval process with writing a novel. It’s simply not possible. And so it was necessary to get the house renovated so that it was livable, and the croft vaguely functional, before I could even contemplate finding the time to sit down and finish the novel off.

And that’s where it starts to get even more complicated. Three years at certain stages in a life can be, if you’ll forgive me stating the obvious, a very long time. And so, when I took out my manuscript again three years down the line, I found that my entire world view had changed. What I’d already written needed to be rewritten; what I had yet to write needed to be reconceived. And in the meantime, I’d lost my taste for fiction and developed a major new exciting project (EarthLines magazine) that I wanted to work on very much more.

So began a three-month-long struggle to decide what I’m going to do – whether I even CAN do what I set out originally to do, only better now. And yet … there is clearly something in me that believes in what the novel had to say when I first conceived of it, and believes that I can make the case for it even more clearly now. That still believes it is possible for a novel to transform our view of the world, maybe even to show us a whole new way of being. That isn’t necessarily certain that I have the skill to do all of those things, but that nevertheless feels it important to try. And so, after three separate efforts to put the damn thing in the dustbin and get on with having a life, I have finally come to the conclusion that I can’t. What I can do, though, is stop imposing ridiculous deadlines on myself. When your own publishing house publishes your own work, that’s something that ought to be under your own control. And so I’ve taken the book (originally due to be out in October of this year) off the Two Ravens Press website altogether. It will be finished when it’s finished, and I’ll publish it when I know I’ve said all the things I needed to say, in all the right ways, to the best of my ability to do it. Whether it’s October this year, or next year, I can’t say for sure right now. All I can say for sure is that I can’t seem to write off fiction after all.

Sharon

While the humans struggle each day to keep from regressing into some strange form of winter hibernation (those of us possessing a Y chromosome being rather more prone to such a thing than those of us lacking it …) other large animals on the croft are already planning ahead for spring. And we wait impatiently to see whose mating activities have been successful.

Dulse (left) and Jake (right)

This year is the first year of mating for our new Jacob sheep, and last autumn David took a trip to the mainland to purchase the imaginatively named Jake for that very purpose. Jake was a tup lamb (born early in 2011) rather than a tried and tested tup, and in such cases there’s always a bit of anxiety to know whether he’ll be able to perform or whether the sight of six beautiful young and suddenly available females will be a bit much for him. Jake certainly showed interest in all the right ways, but now we have to wait till April before we know just how successful that particular experiment was. Mr Tuppy, meanwhile, our well-tested Hebridean tup, didn’t seem to mess about, and past experience of his 100% hit-rate makes us hopeful that there’ll be plenty of little black blobs running around the fields in a few months time.

As we wait to see whether Doris and/or Edna the sows are pregnant, we obtained two weaners to grow on who will be ready to kill in March. And that’s the hard part of keeping animals, and one that we struggle with constantly. On the other hand, as we’ve blogged about here in some detail before, if you want to be as self-sufficient in food as is practical, the western wilds of the Outer Hebrides aren’t especially conducive to growing beans and lentils for vegetarian tastes, and we’d rather grow on nice happy weaners ourselves than become sentimentally squeamish and go instead to the butcher or supermarket to buy pork from pigs who’ve had much harder, and usually indoor, lives. So: these two little piggies (one for us and one for a neighbour) have been given a new house, complete with garden, to play in for the next 3 months or so, and we give them as much attention and stimulation as we can.

Two Little Pigs (and hanger-on)

And in a couple of weeks I hope to be blogging about Bridget the Kerry heifer, who is next on our list of crofting acquisitions.

Sharon

In the long winters here our working days are short - because we need daylight to feed animals and walk dogs in, and so the dark winter mornings and evenings shrinks the available time between the morning and afternoon croft chores to hardly anything. And so I look at this blog and find it’s been over a month since I found the time to post anything. Blogs have their seasons too, of course, and it’s probably quite natural and right that from time to time they should rest a little.

To add to the time pressure we have a new blog now that must begin to be maintained, over at EarthLines (http://earthlinesmagazine.wordpress.com/). (Take a look – we’re always interested in guest bloggers on relevant issues.) And so we plan to keep this blog a little more personal, while the pieces of our lives (the natural world, the changing seasons, the landscape) that may be of interest to our wider EarthLines community will shift over there. Who knows whether the split will make sense; all we can do is try it and see.

In the meantime, I’m sharing a beautiful piece of artwork by the enormously talented Rima, over at The Hermitage blog. This, she says, is for all to use. Look at it carefully, and I think you’ll see it’s worth using.

Sharon

Travelling for me has always been as much about leaving somewhere as about going somewhere. When you combine in the same body a strong need for rootedness with a strong pull to explore new places and change, life can end up being little more than an oddly dissatisfying  push-and-pull game if you don’t get to grips with the competing urges and figure out what they’re really all about. The combination of those two opposing forces often manifests itself in a desire not only to visit places I love, but wanting to live in them. Because I need to know those places in the way that you only ever can if you live in them, wake in them every day, grow and change with their seasons, take their influences inside you until those places are a part of you and you in some way belong to them. Living in a large number of places means that there are bits of me scattered around quite a few countries and quite a few places in some of those countries, and I carry some of the energies of those landscapes with me too, wherever I go.

There have really only been two times in this often peripatetic lifestyle when I’ve been completely sure that my feet were in the right place. Once in the mid-90s when I lived in Connemara, and the second time here, in an oddly similar culture and landscape in the Outer Hebrides. Leaving Connemara was a necessity for all kinds of personal reasons, otherwise I suspect I might still be there. And I hope never to leave here.

I know I’m in the right place not only because of how I feel when I’m here, but how I feel when I’m away. If you belong to a place then in some strong sense, when you go away you never completely leave it. A brief trip to Inverness this week confirmed that much: in a crowded room full of around 100 chattering people, some of whom I knew and was happy to see again, the sense of unreality was the most real thing about the experience. It wasn’t a case of daydreaming, of thinking about the sea and the mountains that border this croft. It was simply that the situation, the location, the subject of the meeting, and more - none of it made very much sense. And neither did the streets of Inverness, filled to the brim (in spite of the ‘economic downturn’) with people haunting shops for the many ‘bargains’ that seem to be available right now, and walking away with so many things that I very much doubt they really need. It was only on the long windy, rainy drive back to Uig on Skye that the world began to come back into focus. Only on the ferry to Tarbert in heavily rolling seas in what the captain called ‘severe gales’ that the grainy black and white world started to fade back into colour. And only on the treacherous drive home through Harris and South Lewis that whatever odd internal compass I carry inside me felt that it was pointing in the right direction and steadied its searching flicker.

Sharon

EarthLines

As I’ve said before on this blog, every now and again David set ourselves a bunch of tasks (nothing serious, you know – just things like uprootong and moving house to the far ends of the earth, croft animals and all, renovating a house, reconstructing a croft, building a polytunnel, acquiring pigs and a cow and … all in the space of a year or so, if that’s not too much trouble …) Being the insane perfectionist driven idiots that we are, we half-kill ourselves completing said tasks, talking wistfully always about ‘The Day’ when we won’t have any more new tasks but just the maintenance stemming from the old ones. Then, just as every one of those breathing spaces approaches, one of us (usually me) has some bright idea that starts the whole cycle over again. As a psychologist I perhaps should have learned better by now, but the truth is I suspect that if we didn’t do that we’d sink into some grungy hermit-like cantankerous existence from which we’d never be able to emerge.

Or that’s my excuse, anyway.

So: what new delights have we cooked up for ourselves this week? Well, through our publishing company, Two Ravens Press, we are starting up a new magazine. The focus of the magazine is ‘dedicated to high quality writing which explores the relationship between people and the natural world, and encourages reconnection’. If that interests you, take a look at the blog that we’re using as a temporary stopgap until I can get a new website up and running, hopefully by mid-December. The magazine is called EarthLines, the blog is here http://earthlinesmagazine.wordpress.com/ and you can also find our Facebook page here https://www.facebook.com/pages/EarthLines/302524779765386 and receive regular updates.

Sharon

Exciting days. In the mornings, while walking the dogs, I’m now allowed to play shepherdess for a while, and take Nell the sheepdog to bring our sheep out of the field on the neighbouring croft that we sublet and onto the common grazing. (It might sound like an odd thing to do every day, but it’s temporary and there’s a logic …) Quite an adventure; David is the one who’s always worked with the sheep and moved them around, and Nell was trained by him and is used only to working with him. Happy willing little dog that she is, she tolerates my bumbling attempts to figure out how it works (though not without an occasional stop in mid-flow to turn around and look at me as if to say – you want me to do what? For heaven’s sake, get me someone who knows what they’re doing …) and now I’m beginning to understand that the way I see the sheep isn’t the way she sees the sheep, and that somehow I need to adapt to her view of the world if it’s going to work. And to my delight it does work, helped of course by the fact that the sheep know where they’re going. There’s a great pleasure in making that happen, and increasingly I’m find myself more attached to our sheep than I ever thought I could be.

To be honest, I never much used to like sheep. Not even when my mother married a Welsh sheep farmer while I was in the throes of my PhD at the University of London, and I’d regularly find myself in the hills outside of Machynlleth playing honorary second sheepdog at lambing and other critical times. Oh, I liked the lambs well enough, and the age-old ritual of putting the dodgy ones in a wee cardboard box in the bottom oven of the Rayburn to warm up, but if I had a choice on those odd weekends off and holidays I’d always much rather feed silage to the cattle than run around after sheep.

When I had my first croft, in Lochbroom just outside Ullapool, I never much wanted sheep either. My thoughts about properly using the croft included pigs, polytunnels, geese , even alpacas – anything but sheep. Until I met David, and (being a true Welshman too, I suppose, albeit of the more southerly kind than my stepfather) he inevitably started hankering after a few sheep. Most of the sheep around that area were Cheviots, which are very fine meat producers and hardy enough, but I really don’t find them beautiful. In fact (sorry, all Cheviot sheep farmers) I have been known to call them Cream Blobs. So as far as I was concerned, if we were going to keep sheep they had to be beautiful and preferably rare-breed sheep. I thought about Shetland sheep for a while – but eventually David talked me into buying five beautiful little black Hebridean ewe lambs from a neighbour, and a few weeks afterwards on a fishing trip we added to them with five more from the prizewinning flock of the late Donald Ferguson on North Uist.

Because we had such a small flock, we began to know them very well. We didn’t have common grazings rights on that croft, and so they were on the inbye land year-round for the eighteen months or so that we had them there before we moved to Lewis (and, with a sigh of relief, to common grazings rights - ten ewes and associated hangers-on are far too many for the average sized croft year-round, without the ability to give the land a decent break). They began to acquire names so that we could identify them to each other – mostly derived from the colour and location of the sticky tape that we put around their horns to help that identification: Blue Left, Blue Both etc etc – but a couple of particular characters acquired names based on other aspects of their appearance: Wonky, who managed to break her leg in a galvanised feed trough within a mere few days of being brought home from Uist, and Little Horn – for obvious reasons.

By the time we moved to Lewis I found rather to my surprise that I’d grown incredibly fond of the sheep (which, although I’d happily inject them and help out at lambing, had always been firmly in the category of David’s animals, while I’d managed the growing geese/duck/hen collection, vegetable garden, and hankered after pigs and a cow). So much so that, when we were thinking of expanding the flock by a handful more, I argued for us to have a few Jacob sheep rather than more Hebrideans. So, we now have half a dozen breeding Jacob ewes, and a very fine tup lamb (Jake) who we hope will do the right thing by them in a couple of weeks time. The Jacobs have different sorts of names from the Hebrideans: Pirate, who has a black smear over one side of her mouth; Norma, short for Enormous; Big Sister and Little Sister, a pair of twins; Dulse, for no good reason other than because I always wanted to name a sheep after seaweed, and Just Jacob, because she has no particular distinguishing characteristics at all.

One of the most interesting things, now that I find myself occasionally, like David, staring at them in some sort of odd trance from time to time, is the difference in the two flocks – the different places on the common grazing that they seem to prefer, the different types of grass, the different behaviours (the Hebrideans are very active playful sheep, the Jacobs a little more tame and stately. And stubborn with the dog …). By the time lambing comes along and we hopefully have a few Jacob lambs to add to the annual collection of Hebridean lambs, I rather suspect that, even though I now finally have pigs and will very soon have the milk cow that I’ve always wanted, I’ll be totally smitten.

Sharon

Somewhere in the wildest, windiest depths of Aird Uig is a very special place. Close to the end of a long and winding dirt track, complete with authentic potholes, is a building that your average sow can only dream about. It’s the home of Percy the Pig, and is cleverly constructed to provide fertility services for lady pigs in need of a little … cossetting.

Percy and Doris

As you can see, Percy’s Place has a particularly fine view that brings the sows from far and wide. In Doris’ case it was just a 20-minute drive down the road, but it was a fairly traumatic one (pigs and trailers not always being an ideal combination) and here at the beginning she doesn’t look particularly interested in Percy’s rather … straightforward … approach, but we rather suspect she’ll get the hang of it all in time.

 

This is of course Doris’s first ‘fertility holiday’, and if Percy’s previous performance is anything to go by (see below, with fertility hotel manager Andrew, piglets by Percy and Hyacinth) then with a bit of luck we’ll have piglets of our own in March.

 

Andrew and piglets

Although she looks to be taking the whole thing in her stride, having eleven sharp-toothed little piglets attached to your nipples can’t be the most restful experience in the world.

Hyacinth and piglets

Back at the croft, a very grumpy solitary Edna (number two sow) is running riot around Pig Castle screeching for her friend. David has taken to hisnew role as a pig substitute with worrying glee and I suspect that when Doris gets back in a month she’ll have a fight for territory on her hands.

Meanwhile, the saner inhabitants of the House of the Ravens struggle on through the ongoing wind and rain …

Sharon

Notos, the south wind

“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time. I worship each god, I praise each day splintered down, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk …”

If Annie Dillard is correct, and each day is a god, then many of our recent days have been gods of wind. Today (again) we are living through the god of the south wind, gusting over 50 miles an hour. In Greek mythology Notos, the South Wind, was a dynamic, stormy and dangerous wind – but in Greece of course he was associated with the dessicating winds of summer; we have yet to see such a thing as a dessicating wind on this rainy Outer Hebridean shore. Curiously, given that there’s so much of it here, Celtic mythology personifies weather much less.

I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with wind. There’s nothing finer than a wild winter storm, especially in places like this where you can stand on the beach, point yourself in the direction of the wind, hold your arms out, let yourself fall forward – and still be held up. One of these days I know I’m going to fall flat on my face when the wind drops out suddenly, but nevertheless there’s something exciting and invigorating about it, and about returning home with a salt-encrusted face and a head so light and clean you could float. But when you want to work outside, or just go for a quick walk along the shore, this much wind can be a major deterrent. And not just to humans: the pigs stay in bed, snoring; the hens stay on their perch and can’t be bothered to lay any eggs, and the polytunnel door must remain closed, risking damp and mould. The sheep on the common grazings cluster round the field gates, waiting to be let back in. Most mornings when I take the dogs for a walk I have to fight my way to the headland, and when it’s raining as well the combination is blinding and even the dogs want to turn and run home.

But there is little point living in a place where the dominant weather is wind and rain, and then sitting indoors complaining about it. There’s certainly no point in avoiding it. So we go out anyway, lift our heads up and open ourselves to it, rather than close ourselves off from it. It is the day that we have. A day of rainy gales is the kind of day that personifies the Outer Hebrides, and a day, like any other, to worship, splintered down and wrapped in time like a husk …

Sharon

Many moons ago, we used to have a blog related to our publishing company, Two Ravens Press, instead of this one. We blogged about our thoughts on publishing and books. We were pretty outspoken on it, but it was quite a fine blog, with guest posts from our authors and all kinds of other stuff that we thought was interesting. We’d had a lot of press when we started publishing, partly because of our (then) location on a croft in the remote north-west Highlands, and partly because we were looking for innovative and challenging work, especially fiction. Newspapers like The Herald called us ‘a quiet publishing revolution’; Publishing News called us ‘the most talked-about publisher in Scotland’. Heady days. But finally we stopped writing the blog because, the more we learned about the traditional model of publishing that we’d automatically adopted when we first set up the company, the less we had to say that was positive. Publishing is not the fine business that I’d once naively imagined it to be as someone who had considered books to be sacred all her life. It’s a bizarre, frequently unpleasant business, like so many are – in its own peculiarly idiosyncratic ways. And so the blog ran the risk of turning into an ongoing rant, and for our own sanity we stopped it. And turned to blogging about things that seemed to matter more, like crofting, and finally our lives here and all the things we care about.

Along with the disenchantment with blogging about publishing came a disenchantment with publishing itself. Small publishers always struggle to make a living; in spite of lots of paper successes (plenty of fine reviews in all the major newspapers and literary mags, lots of prize nominations …) we were finding it incredibly hard to sell books – especially fiction. Partly this was because we were intent on publishing challenging and innovative work, rather than the type of stuff that might become bestseller material, and so by definition we had limited our audience, but partly it was because of the general doldrums hitting the publishing business like all other businesses as a consequence of economic challenges throughout the world.

The general disenchantment wasn’t helped by a lot of hype about e-books, and article after article (articles which still appear to this day, still saying the same sort of things, blah-ing away constantly …) about the ‘death of the book’ and why nobody needs publishers anyway because anyone can self-publish now and be done with it. I’m not going to bore you all with one of my best rants about why all that is nonsense, but when you’re struggling day after long day to publish books that you think matter without earning so much as a penny from it all, it for sure doesn’t help your state of mind.

Then, to cap it all, we had a joint midlife crisis (I’d already had a couple before, so was really on a roll by the time I got to my third …) and decided to move away from friends and a croft we loved and head off into the wilds of the Outer Hebrides. That’s a move, as those of you who’ve followed this blog from its beginnings will know, that has been extremely positive for us – but the renovation of the house and reconstruction of the croft was a huge amount of work, and involved a great deal of psychological as well as physical dislocation, and Two Ravens Press had to take a bit of a backseat for a while.

Eighteen months on from that move, and our values (which were never exactly … shall we say … mainstream) have shifted and strengthened, and the land and alternative, meaningful ways of living on it have become even more critical to us. If we were going to continue publishing books, something had to give. There were always aspects of the publishing business that we didn’t like (if you care to know what they are, have a look at an article entitled The Real Story: Publishing, Four and a Half Years on, on our website) and now we find ourselves hardly able to tolerate them at all. It was time for another revolution: maybe just as quiet, maybe not. Who knows.

Anyway: we’ve looked long and hard at ourselves, at the world, at the books we want to inflict on it (there are so many words out there already …) and we’ve decided that we can only bear to publish books that reflect all of that. What are those books? Here’s how we describe it on our website:

Two Ravens Press came into existence in November 2006 and since then has gone on to publish an impressive list of contemporary literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Our focus always has been on work that was challenging, innovative, and full of new ideas. Five years on, in November 2011, we have refocused the company to take into account what we have learnt about publishing, about the power of some books and the impotence of others, and to reflect world events which have seen the dominant narratives of western culture begin to dissolve and lose their relevance. We plan now to publish books – whether fiction, nonfiction or poetry – that face head-on the new certainty that ‘business as usual’, as a society, is not going to hack it. We’re looking for books that are wilder. Books which reflect the fact that the division of the world into the human versus the natural was always a dangerous fiction. Books that explore ways of living and being human outside the paradigm of growth-addicted consumerism. If we have to put a label on it, we’re looking for ‘eco-books’ – ecofiction, ecopoetry, ecophilosophy and ecopsychology. But really we’re looking for something much broader than that. We’re looking for books that are capable of challenging and unpicking the status quo, of shifting the worldview of their readers away from the creed of ‘Progress is Growth is Consumption’.

If you’re interested in all this, take look at the website (the home page, About Us page, Submissions page) and if you care to see how we evolve and are on Facebook, join our Facebook page and you can keep up to date there. We still don’t intend to have a publishing blog! – though that probably won’t stop us talking about the occasional new book from time to time here, if it fits and seems relevant.

Sharon

Somewhat to my surprise, on the spur of the moment last Wednesday I found myself, with a couple of friends, at a basket-making course at An Lanntair in Stornoway. The photograph shows the result: I’m sure there are more regularly shaped, beautiful and competent baskets in the world, but it’s strong, sturdy, and highly functional. The course was one of many regular courses run by Dawn Susan from Great Bernera, whose gorgeous work you can see on her website, Hebridean Baskets. One of the reasons I decided to go along is that Dawn weaves baskets with willow, and grows around sixty different kinds of willow on her croft in Great Bernera. I’ve always loved willows, and planted around ten different varieties on my previous croft at Lochbroom, just outside Ullapool. Here on our croft in Uig we have a large amount of willow (almost certainly some form of goat willow, salix caprea) which seems mostly to withstand the worst of the wind and salt, but because of neglect and sheep grazing over the years most of it hasn’t had the chance to grow much larger than a couple of feet or so high. The eviction of stray sheep from the inbye land of the croft, along with the planting of wooden windbreaks around animal shelters and the garden, has given some of it the chance to really take off this year.

There is something very real about working with willow stems that still have their bark and that have been soaked or steamed to increase their flexibility while you’re using them and so still smell – and feel - fresh and earthy. For me, it’s another way of connecting with a tree that I love, another way of creating something that’s both beautiful and authentic from what grows around us – achieving that same sort of connection, that same sense of meaning, that comes from spinning the fleeces of our own sheep, that we’ve shorn, washed, and carded ourselves.

We hope to have some cuttings from Dawn of good tall windbreak willows, just to see if they will grow as strongly here as they do on her more sheltered croft on Bernera. It’ll be good to plant willows again; to remind myself of all the old connections. Because there are all kinds of old folk stories and myths about the willow tree. Its ability to regrow incredibly quickly after coppicing, the ease with which simple stem cuttings will take, all lead to the willow’s association with rebirth in so many old mythologies. And, through rebirth, with death and the underworld – hence its association with the likes of the Greek goddess Hecate, and the old tradition of planting it on graves. Its affinity with water, its tendency to grow in damp places, leads it also to be associated with the moon: Culpeper, in his Complete Herbal, said ‘The moon owns it’. Closer to home, it is one of the trees associated with the Celtic goddess Brighid, and with the festival of Imbolc – again, a festival relating to rebirth – in this case, the rebirth of the sun, and of light.

Which, stranded as we are here in a long series of dark, stormy, rainy, windy days, seems a long way off.

Sharon