Winter.

Did I imagine it or did the PM’s advisors tell him that one way to improve the sum of British happiness would be to stop changing the clocks? The clock change has become the starting gun for winter in the collective mind so there will be a multitude of folk waking up this morning feeling more depressed than they need be. As a cog in that collective I would like to support their theory. It takes me months to get used to this change - it’s worse than the Spring forward.

The signs for the onset of winter are so much less poetic than they used to be (sign of the times?) The days shorten and the leaves turn wonderful colours as ever, but there is also the clock change and the ‘flu jab. The jab was Thursday, coffee and biscuits after, and conversation with people I’ve never met before but with whom I was sharing the annual ritual. Then there was a day of feeling a bit shivery. Now it’s all over and hopefully I am fully armed against whatever Mother Nature had in mind for reducing the population overload.

My reading has been a bit haphazard lately, couldn’t settle to anything. Then the autobiography of Kathleen Raine arrived, ordered so long ago I’d almost forgotten about it. She isn’t a favourite poet of mine but she played a major role in the life of Gavin Maxwell who I've always found to be a charismatic and intriguing character. I’ve read his side of their friendship and his biographer’s opinions but wanted to hear hers. I had to wait for that sad tale till very near the end of what is a charting of her inner life rather than a account of the outer mundane events that formed the backdrop to what was more important to her. Her writing style is that of poet of a past era and I’m an impatient reader who doesn’t appreciate too much embroidery so I’m afraid I skipped quite a lot. I might return when I’m in a more tranquil state; she does have some very interesting observations, and the people she was at Cambridge with, like Jacob Bronowski and Malcolm Lowry occasionally get a mention.

Her love for Gavin Maxwell and his inability to love her in return in the way she desperately wanted (not only, I think, because he was homosexual but because he was entangled by his own bipolar condition) was so sad it almost broke my heart. What she saw in him, or as she acknowledged in another context, all the qualities that she endowed him with (as women do) made him everything she wanted in a soul-mate, and though she tried to see the truth of him as a fascinating, gifted, and emotionally flawed human being, she failed to do that, so causing herself the deepest pain she had experienced in her life. Maybe I see too much of myself in her. I certain recognise the intense personal narrative that drowns out any signals from the worlds others are living in.