What I’m writing, reading or thinking and what other people have written or thought, painted, made or designed: things I would love to have made, in a parallel universe where time is infinite and all things are possible.
In one of the first Proms of this 2025 London Season I heard Samara Joy. I’d never heard her before but she truly is a joy. She’s only twenty-five, her vocal range is amazing and the only sad thing is she’s not planning to come back to Europe for the foreseeable, although she’s got gigs in the States from now till Spring 2026.
You can find videos of her performing on her website here – I especially like the one below, of Billy Strayhorn‘s ‘Lush Life’. It’s so lyrical and so beautifully-timed; her band plays as if they’re all separate streams flowing into and along the same river and they’re recording the song in a studio, so there are no posh performance clothes, no make-up, Joy is even wearing glasses (she didn’t wear them at the Albert Hall – maybe she doesn’t wear them for performances) … and her sound is spectacular: deep, rich, multi-toned and she makes it sound and look so simple. (As Fred Astaire said, ‘If it doesn’t look simple, you’re not working hard enough … .’)
Joy has won all kinds of awards already although she says of herself that she’s, ‘Still a student’. She’s been compared to Sarah Vaughan among others … if you find out she’s singing somewhere near you, go!
For several years I’ve done a talk about Lucy Noël Martha, Countess of Rothes, and Thomas William Jones, the Aristocrat and the Able Seaman who survived Titanic in the same lifeboat. In April, 2026 their stories will be published by The History Press and I’m delighted that the courage of these two people, their kindness, resilience and seafaring knowledge on that terrifying night will soon find a wider audience.
I signed a contract with The History Press last week and ever since Amy Rigg, Commissioning Editor, expressed interest in the story in late March I’ve been busy getting permissions for images and quotes (something I rarely need to do in fiction) and turning the text of my talk into a riveting (I hope) book. On that subject, I’ve discovered that the persistent idea about Titanic’s rivets not being strong enough – that their weakness was partially responsible for her sinking – is one of the many myths that have clung to Titanic since she sank in April, 1912. Generous experts have been reading my manuscript and pointing such things out, so saving me from undermining the story of my hero and heroine by including those myths and the exaggerations that still cling to the Titanic story. I’m indebted to them and my talk will also be the better for their wisdom and knowledge.
Please wish The Aristocrat and the Able Seaman a safe journey towards publication. I promise to update you from time to time about their progress and, should you wish to buy the book next year, I’ll bring you news of where and when you can as soon as I can.
The world asks a great deal of the poppies,
insists they carry the wounds of war
and shoulder the weight of remembrance.
Such flimsy, wavering plants;
we painted their flowers the colour of blood
and punched dark holes in their heads
as if bullets had passed through,
then trimmed them with green sprigs of hope.
And from deep in the seeds we concocted
the essence of sleep and dreams and resting-in-peace.
Almost weightless even in full bloom
we made them souls, the poppies, souls
of those who we lost, and – let it be said –
those who we killed.
Poppies – nursed in darkness, nourished by dirt.
But for all their spindly roots, frail stalks
and papery petals – as easily smudged
as a butterfly wing –
they joggle into existence
again and again, unearthing themselves
in fallow fields and railway sidings,
on roundabouts, verges and no man’s land,
from the brickwork of old chimneys and bridges
and cracks in the pavement.
They nod and they nag,
reminding us not to forget, flagging a red alert
as their crumpled petals unfold.
So, rightly, the poppies ask a great deal of the world.
Simon Armitage
Commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces to mark
the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two in 2025.
This 15th April is the 113th anniversary of the night RMS Titanic sank. My great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, was, ‘One of the lucky ones’, as she wrote three days later. Lucky not only because she survived, but because none of her beloved menfolk had sailed from Southampton with her. If they had, they would have died in the freezing waters of the north Atlantic with so very many others on that fateful night.
T9JXJJ White Star Line. Titanic. Alamy Stock Photo
Titanic lives on in our imaginations all these years later for so many reasons, not least for the mistakes and miscalculations that caused so many to die, even though the White Star Line, Titanic’s owners, advertised her as ‘unsinkable’. If she’d left Southampton with enough lifeboats for every single human being on board, it’s possible no one would have died. They would’ve had a frightening freezing night in tiny lifeboats until rescue arrived, but they might not have died.
This month, until 25 April, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet is playing at Stratford. It’s set on board Titanic. The director, Rupert Goold, and the lead actor, Luke Thallon are quoted in the programme as being interested in:
Setting the action within the context of a catastrophic event where the outcome is already known to the audience; we know that the Titanic sank … [so] how do questions of life, death and human agency resonate within this heightened environment?
I wasn’t at all sure that setting Hamlet on board Titanic heightened the play (although the set tilts and lists more and more worryingly and the red digital clock counting down the days and hours concentrates the mind) but Luke Thallon’s Hamlet is magnificent and would have been if he’d been on a bare set. His performance touched me deeply: I cried several times (I’ve never cried at Hamlet before) but Thallon engaged me so completely that the reality of Hamlet’s grief-fuelled depression and confusion broke my heart. His anguish and his indecision, his hesitations about taking revenge and his externalised soliloquies that became conversations with us, pleas to us for understanding, even for conversation so that when he asked: Am I a coward? I wanted to say, No! You’re brave for wondering if you are … . I was so engaged and absorbed that I forgot I was watching a play. I was just a woman watching a man in great distress, with no agency to help him.
Luke Thallon as Hamlet. Photo by Marc Brenner.
The last performances are sold out … but if you can get a return, do. Or, if Thallon is in the production that’s set to tour the UK in 2026, go.
Nova Reid, producer, author, truthseeker and all-round remarkable Black woman, has made a podcast with Audible about other remarkable and unsung Black women: women who not only survived enslavement and unimaginable racism, but who thrived. It’s called Hidden Historiesand, as Nova says, it explores the lives of:
Pioneers, journalists, and rule-breakers – remarkable figures from the 18th–20th centuries who made vital contributions to civil rights yet have been mythologised, are unknown, or erased from history.
When Nova was writing her first book, The Good Ally (reviewed here) she was, ‘Captivated by recurring themes of resistance from Black women’; women she was never taught about at school; women whose stories, as far as I know, have never been taught at any British school. But now you can discover them. Hidden Histories is published this International Women’s Month.
In the first episode, you’ll discover Queen Nanny of the Maroons, a Jamaican national heroine, who, ‘Instilled the spirit of freedom in her people’. Nanny escaped to the Blue Mountains from a slave ship in Port Antonio and was given refuge by the Taíno, the first Peoples of Jamaica. Nanny was a Priestess who eventually led the Maroons to victory against the British enslavers.
Other remarkable women in the series include Cubah Cornwallis, who healed a future king of England; ground-breaking journalist Barbara Blake-Hannah; the revolutionary activist Olive Morris; Dame Jocelyn Barrow, whose work shaped modern British politics; the poet Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett-Coverley, who gave voice to Jamaican identity; Gertrude Paul, a Yorkshire-based headteacher from St Kitts who fought for racial equality in education. And more.
I’ve deliberatly not searched for sites to link to these remarkable women because Nova tells their stories powerfully and passionately. We need to hear their stories from her. I’ve listened to the first episode, about Queen Nanny, and I’m seriously looking forward to hearing all the others. Here’s a preview. Congratulations Nova!
It’s funny.
It’s optimistic.
It’s heartbreaking.
It doesn’t waste a word.
It’s about becoming very very ill and – possibly – recovering.
It’s desperately sad.
It’s courageous.
It’s honest.
It’s full of love.
The main character, Eve, describes scans as ‘plot twists’.
Did I say it was funny? And darkly funny … .
It’s an essential read. (In a good way.)
And it’s short. A bit like life.
It’s a Valentine to life and a Challenge to death.
Kinsella has written that Eve’s story is her story. But it’s also a universal story. It needs to be read.
On the first evening of the Introduction to Black Studies course Mark showed us how the Mercator Projection – the standard world map for navigation and the one most widely used in Northern Hemisphere classrooms and atlases since 1569 – is inaccurate. The square mileage and relative size of the world’s continents and countries is wrong. For instance, Greenland appears larger than Africa but it’s actually fourteen times smaller. The Mercator Projection looks like this … it’s very familiar. It’s the map we all know, use and recognise.
Image from https://www.theguardian.com/global/gallery/2009/apr/17/world-maps-mercator-goode-robinson-peters-hammer
But it’s wrong.
There are other, different and more accurate, projections. In April 2009, the Guardian printed a series of WorldFactFile booklets which included world maps. The most accurate of which is the Peters Projection, a 1973 projection I’d never heard of until Mark told us about it, but a projection that presents continents and countries in their true proportion, their true relationship to each other. It looks like this:
The North is 18.9 million square miles; the South is 38.6 million square miles, twicethe size. But in the Mercator Projection the North looks bigger. That larger North is a mercatorial and psychological projection that’s informed our knowledge of the relative sizes of the parts of the planet we inhabit. But it’s wrong.
It’s time to think differently. Time to recognise how a map projection can inform our psychological and emotional projections onto the peoples of the world. Time to change our distorted world view. Time to think hard about the (Mercator-projected) lie of the land.
In the Bleak Midwinter – words by Christina Rossetti and music by Gustav Holst (it has to be Holst for me) – is my favourite Christmas carol. I have a memory of singing it as a child beside my father in the gallery of the church we used to walk to. It always makes me cry because it’s so very beautiful – the giving of our hearts – and because of that long-ago memory.
Rossetti called it, simply, A Christmas Carol.
In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter long, long ago.
Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain.
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When he comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter, a stable-place sufficed
Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.
Enough for Him whom Cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay.
Enough for Him whom angels fall down before
The ox and ass and camel, which adore.
Angels and Archangels may have gathered there
Cherubim and Seraphim thronged the air.
But only His mother in her maiden bliss
Worshipped the Beloved, with a kiss.
What can I give him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb.
If I were a wise man, I would do my part.
Yet what I can, I give Him, Give my heart.
By Christina Rossetti
Public Domain. Source: The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine vol. 3 (Scribner & Co., 1872)
Elsewhere Richardson talks about wild and stubborn hope. I love that phrase.
A friend of mine sent Blessing when the World is Ending to me a few days ago. It feels right for our times.
Blessing When the World Is Ending
Look, the world
is always ending
somewhere.
Somewhere
the sun has come
crashing down.
Somewhere
it has gone
completely dark.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the gun,
the knife,
the fist.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the slammed door,
the shattered hope.
Somewhere
it has ended
with the utter quiet
that follows the news
from the phone,
the television,
the hospital room.
Somewhere
it has ended
with a tenderness
that will break
your heart.
But, listen,
this blessing means
to be anything
but morose.
It has not come
to cause despair.
It is simply here
because there is nothing
a blessing
is better suited for
than an ending,
nothing that cries out more
for a blessing
than when a world
is falling apart.
This blessing
will not fix you,
will not mend you,
will not give you
false comfort;
it will not talk to you
about one door opening
when another one closes.
It will simply
sit itself beside you
among the shards
and gently turn your face
toward the direction
from which the light
will come,
gathering itself
about you
as the world begins
again.
October is Black History Month in the UK. But obviously Black History should be taught and celebrated every day of every year in history lessons in our schools, in everyday conversation, in stories, in music and song, in any way at all, everywhere in our lives.
The theme this year is Reclaiming Narratives #reclaimingnarrativesbhm : there are many reclaimed narratives here, including the fact that many many Black people were killed by Hitler and the Nazis during the Jewish Holocaust. It’s written by Charmaine Simpson. She’s the Chief Executive and co-founder, with her husband Mark Simpson, of Black History Studies.
Since 2018 the brilliant and fearless Nova Reid has curated and run her life-changing, heart-and-eye opening anti-racism course, Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid which educated mostly-white folk like me about racism, about becoming anti-racist and about so-often-white-erased Black History and Black Narratives. Recently, and very sadly, she decided to let her course go – unless you’re part of an organisational team. If your team genuinely wants to engage consistently with anti-racism work, see here.
Earlier in the year, Nova asked me to do a series of interviews called Student Confessions with graduates of her anti-racism course. They make inspiring reading. But when she decided to let her anti-racism course go she asked if I’d do one last interview, with her. It’s from her heart. You can read it here. Among many things, including how Black people have had to, Understand you – a collective white you – in order to survive racism (when I asked how come she knew us so well and I, to my shame, knew Black people so little). She also said:
I’ve loved reading about the impact of the course through Student Confessions … it’s been profound and I am very proud – but in that time I also realised this chapter has ended for me. I’ve given so much of me, it’s time to move on, give myself the space do something else. Something more generative. I am excited!
So … you can’t sign up for Nova’s anti-racist course now, but you can sign up for Charmaine and Mark Simpson’s Introduction to Black History Studies Course. To begin to better understand the Black Narrative, and Black History. To bring it out from the shadows that we white people have consigned it to.
You could also read any and all of these:
PS: Added at the end of October: if you’d like to support Black-owned-and-run businesses in Black History Month – or at any time – this list of Black-owned-and-run businesses in the US, the UK and the Netherlands might help.
It’s been an uphill battle to convince policy-makers to act and to convince the public of the truth of human-influenced climate-change since Stott began work at the Hadley Centre in 1996. Along the way, he and his fellow scientists have been ambushed at a conference between Russian scientists and British scientists to discuss climate change. The Russian scientists were marginalised while the British scientists were confronted by climate sceptics who accused them of, among other things, behaving like the scientists in Nazi Germany, who supported eugenics. They’ve been rubbished in the media: in the Daily Mail, David Bellamy wrote that global warming was ‘a load of poppycock’. George Monbiot wrote about that here. And much more denying has been going on.
But since Peter Stott joined the Hadley Centre in 1996 he and his colleagues have looked not only at future weather patterns, but at what has happened in the past. By simulating past temperatures, including all the possible factors that could expain climate change, like El Niño, if they left greenhouse gasses at the concentrations they were in pre-industrial times and took out all human factors, they found they got nothing like the actual observed warming. It was only when human influences were included that global warming could be explained. Still they faced denial. But as Peter Stott listened to the climate deniers he realised they were far better storytellers than the scientists. Climate-change scientists often lost their audiences in a maze of depressing facts and figures, while the climate deniers convinced their audiences with wrong, but entertaining, stories.
So Stott decided to tell stories too. He learned to write popular science – where the story and the characters are just as important as the scientific details – and published a book, Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. He writes about the process of telling the story of climate change here and he and his wife, Pierette Thomet, created Climate Stories where people sing and write poems and make music about the climate and most importantly how they feel about climate change. Stott realised when he set up Climate Stories that scientists also needed to think about how they feel about their science, as well as thinking about the science itself.
The more heartfelt climate-change stories we tell, stories that include the science that explains how we humans have caused climate change (the evidence is incontrovertible now) and how we feel about it, the quicker we’ll understand what we must do to adapt: whether it’s how we travel, what we eat or how we heat our homes. And more. We can make these small changes and make a very large difference.
This, one of the many poems, stories and drawings in the Climate Stories book, made me think and feel about what I can do to help restore our planet. See what it does for you.
If you haven’t seen ORIGIN – Ava DuVernay’s film about Isabel Wilkerson’s life and why and how she came to write CASTE – I urge you to. If you have seen it, I’d love to know how it made you feel, what it made you think and, most importantly, what it made you do or think about doing.
CASTE – in case you don’t know – is about the hidden caste system, the rigid hierarchy of human rankings that underpin any and all forms of human-imposed superiority over other humans, including the demonisation of the Jewish race that led to the holocaust; the dehumanisation of Black people that is racism and the dehumanising Indian caste system. But Wilkerson’s thinking is based on caste (not racism) because, as she says in the film:
Racism as the primary language to understand [the imposition of inferiority / superiority] is insufficient.
When Wilkerson went to India she witnessed the imposition of superiority and inferiority among people whose pigmentation is similar. She witnessed caste.Here’s DuVernay talking about the film, about Wilkerson and how her thoughts and ideas ‘could be formative to us, especially in these [run-up to the US election] times’ and how DuVernay made ORIGIN so more of us would become aware of how Wilkerson is thinking and more of us would ask ourselves ‘What can I do?’
DuVernay suggests – as Nova Reid does – that we use the skills we already have when we’re asking ourselves what we can do about racism, the caste system or any form of human-imposed superiority. DuVernay makes films, so she made ORIGIN to spread Wilkerson’s ideas. I write so I write here about what I’m discovering about my own racism and how to dismantle it (Nova Reid’s course, Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid, and her book, The Good Ally, have been instrumental) and I find ways to stand in solidarity with Black people against racism through organisations like Stand Up to Racism among other things.
A couple of weeks ago some friends suggested we see ENGLISH, by Sanaz Toossi, at the Kiln Theatre. It’s finished its run now, but if you see it advertised anywhere, go.
This is its effect: ENGLISH shows how it feels when you don’t belong; when you feel ashamed you can’t manage another language; when you can’t express yourself easily; when you want to talk to your own family in another language and they stop talking to you, because you can’t speak the other language well enough. ENGLISH shows how humiliating it is when other people laugh at your attempts to speak a new language; how much courage it takes to speak another language; what an omnipresent and potent instrument language is and how small and futile, how useless, how homesick you feel when you can’t speak let alone think fluently in a language different from the one you were born hearing.
Characters in the play speak English always, except at the very end, but when they’re speaking in their native Farsi, their English is fluent and quick, exasperated and funny, natural and we understand who they are; when they’re speaking in English their words are accented and halting, the phrases they learn often have little subtle meaning (they’re in a class to learn basic English) and it’s very difficult to get a sense of who they are.
ENGLISH shows how it feels to be homesick for your own language; how it feels to need to migrate but how the new language alienates you before you even arrive in the new country; how it feels when your name is mangled by people who can’t be bothered to learn to say your name properly (one character says, ‘Our mothers get to name us. Not foreigners’); how the loss of language is also the loss of land and family and culture and jokes and the ability to express yourself easily without being laughed at for the wrong reasons: for making mistakes in a language that you haven’t yet got to grips with, but the people listening to you don’t allow for that. How you forget who you are in a different language; how sad, how infuriated, how helpless you feel when you can’t make yourself understood but you long for connection.
Find ENGLISH. It will break your heart and show you that the person who doesn’t speak the language you speak fluently is just as complex, just as heartbroken, just as loving and lovable, just as funny and full of insight, just as thoughtful and full of longing to communicate as you are.
It takes 25 minutes to watch this video. It takes a lifetime to remain committed to anti-racism. But this person’s journey from white supremacy to anti-racism shows us just how essential it is that we all begin that journey.
Here’s an extract from the book’s blurb: This is a thoughtful, insightful, and moving account of a singular life, with important lessons for our troubled times. R Derek Black can trace a uniquely insider account of the rise of white nationalism [white supremacy], and how a child indoctrinated with hate can become an anti-racist adult. Few … have ever made so profound a change.
But many must. And one of the ways we can begin our anti-racism journey is to sign up for Nova Reid’s wise, compassionate, kind, thoughtful, well-researched and totally transformative Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid.
At this time of year I often post about RMS Titanic.
Last year’s post remembered the Welsh Able Seaman, Thomas Jones, who captained Lifeboat Number 8 – the lifeboat that carried my great-grandmother, Noël Rothes, and twenty-four others to safety on the terrifying night when Titanic sank.
But when I was invited by Fred Olsen Cruise Lines to do my Titanic talk on board the Borealis this month, I didn’t think I’d be posting about it because I didn’t think I’d be doing the talk. If I was a passenger on a ship, I wouldn’t want to hear about another ship that sank with the loss of more than 1,500 lives, while I was sailing.
But I was wrong.
The Borealis’s first port of call was Belfast and many passengers planned to visit Titanic Belfast while they were there. Just as many came to hear my talk the day before we arrived.
It was confirmation of what I’ve realised over the years I’ve done this talk: many other liners have sunk and many people have died as a result, but the reason the Titanic disaster looms so large in our memories and people want to hear about it again and again and again, is that it’s a perfect storm of arrogance (on the part of the White Star Line management, Titanic’s owners, who believed Titanic’s design could withstand collisions and couldn’t sink); complacency (of the White Star Line Chairman, Bruce Ismay, who dismissed a boat-deck design that would have carried enough lifeboats. He said the extra lifeboats would, ‘Clutter up the beautiful open expanse of the upper deck where first-class passengers would want to stroll’); carelessness (with which passengers, particularly third-class passengers, were treated: there was never a safety drill so, after Titanic hit the iceberg, third-class passengers – who’d been kept locked down in their quarters to comply with an American immigration law – didn’t know their way up to the boat deck, and many of them were emigrants so they didn’t speak English well enough to understand what they were being asked to do); and hubris (how dare a shipping line declare its liners unsinkable? And what on earth made other shipping lines, whose ships could have come to Titanic’s rescue, think closing their brand new Marconi (radio) rooms at 11.30pm was a good idea? Titanic hit the iceberg at 11.40pm).
No Titanic passenger was immune from the White-Star-Line-created perfect storm: the unimaginably rich died beside emigrants travelling to America full of hope for a better life; teachers died beside stokers; engineers beside cabin stewards. And the vast majority of the 1,500-plus people who died were men, 1,350-plus of them: men who’d been asked to stand back so that the women and children could board the far-too-few lifeboats first.
‘They were brave men all,’ as my great-grandmother said, ‘who stood back so that the women should have a chance to live. Their memories should be held sacred in the mind of the world forever.’
Titanic had approximately 2,240 people on board and 16 lifeboats that could hold 1,178 human beings. Borealis had around 1,995 people on board and 16 lifeboats that can hold 2,400 human beings. As they say, do the math.
A master mariner commented, after my talk on board Borealis, that the fact that the White Star Line calculated the number of lifeboats Titanic should carry based on the tonnage (10,000 tons) written into law at the time, instead of Titanic’s actual tonnage (46,000 tons) was arrogance personified. If they’d used her actual tonnage they’d have carried enough lifeboats for every single person on board.
I could go on, but I won’t.
The only good thing that emerged from the tragically high and absolutely avoidable number of deaths, was that Maritime Law was changed very soon after Titanic sank. This means that the mortal sins committed by Titanic’s owners (and other shipping lines) can no longer be committed, without breaking the law and facing prosecution.
I took part in Nova Reid’s series of Student Confession Interviews after graduating from her deeply affecting, life-changing course: Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid. The Course altered the way I live my life and transformed my attitudes and my core beliefs about racism. I discovered and dismantled so much both internally and externally, including the fact that racism is invented. White men from Linnaeus to Blumenbach and de Gobineau categorised human beings by their skin colour, and ascribed moral qualities to those colours. But as Nova’s Course shows us, not only is that nonsense, but we’re all descended from the same Black woman:
Mitochondrial Eve lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago in southern Africa. She was not the first human, but every other female lineage eventually had no female offspring, failing to pass on their mitochondrial DNA. As a result, all humans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA back to her.
You can read my Student Confession conversation here, or an introduction to it here on Nova’s Instagram page. There’ll be more of these conversational confessions with graduates of Nova’s Antiracism Course on her Student Confessions journal in the coming weeks.
As I wrote here, for anyone wanting to become an ally to People of Colour, I highly recommend Nova’s book The Good Ally, but even more importantly, for white people who don’t know where to begin with antiracism work, who may even be afraid of beginning antiracism work (I was) Nova’s kind, compassionate, never-shaming, never-blaming, mind-and-heart opening, collectively-healing antiracism course about why the white race wrongly became the default race in so many parts of the world, and why so many of us well-meaning white folk still carry subconscious-but-enduring racism inside us that harms People of Colour, and how to unlearn our subconscious racism, Nova’s Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid is an essential mind- and heart-opener. A collectively-healing course for every single one of us.
Becoming Antiracist with Nova Reid https://novareid.learnworlds.com/
The Good Ally https://www.novareid.com/the-good-ally
I don’t know about you, but I feel Spring begins when it starts to feel a little warmer and when the
are beginning to come out. But according to those who measure these things, it’s not quite that simple.
There’s Astronomical Spring which depends on the tilt of the Earth in relation to its orbit round the sun because, of course, the seasons are connected with temperatures. So, this year, Astronomical Spring begins on 20 March and ends on 20 June. But then wouldn’t you say that mid-June is very close to mid-summer, on 23-24 June?
Is based on the annual temperature cycle and measures the meteorological state, as well as coinciding with the calendar to determine a clear transition between the seasons.
So that’s temperature, forecasting and … calendar. But:
The meteorological seasons consist of … four periods made up of three months each … making it easier for meteorological observing and forecasting to compare seasonal and monthly statistics. By the meteorological calendar, spring will always start on 1 March; ending on 31 May.
But if the dates of the seasons are set, how can they be seasonal?
And then of course there are the Equinoxes (and the Solstices) – which fall on almost but not always exactly the same dates as the Astrological Seasonal dates:
The Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere occurs twice a year around 20 March (the spring equinox) and around 22 September (the autumn equinox).
All the links above are to Meteorological Office websites.
I think I’ll stick with what’s flowering when, and how the weather feels. Don’t you?
There are studies that show what happens to couples on Valentine’s Day: the less attachment-avoidant among us fare better, as you might guess, and some of us break up. But what if the relationship is between a person and an emotion?
My shame and I have been strongly-attached for decades. But now we’re breaking up. I know my shame will always lurk in the shadows, but what shame hates is the spotlight, attention, being talked about, kindness, understanding, empathy and love. Shame doesn’t want to have a reasonable, let alone a kind conversation with the person it’s attached to, it only wants the blaming judgemental kinds of conversations. And shame absolutely doesn’t want a public conversation of any kind. Which is why I’m breaking up with my shame in public.
I didn’t realise shame and I had such a strong attachment until shame began to detach: until I began to feel more clearly, speak more clearly, hear and see more clearly, without shame blurring my focus and making constantly negative judgements. Until I began, as Nova Reid would say, to get curious about the causes of my shame. But because shame and I have been bedfellows for so long, shame’s detachment has been a long time coming.
I have Nova Reid to thank for my recongition of my relationship with shame: in her life-changing antiracism course, Becoming AntiRacist with Nova Reid, and in her book The Good Ally, she addresses shame, because shame and racism, shame and white supremacy, are inextricably bound together. Nova writes, in The Good Ally, in Chapter 6: ‘Moral Monsters: Racism and Shame’:
The relationship between shame and racism is clear. At the root of racism is fear of the other and fear of social rejection. [And later in the chapter]: Are you [white people like me] personally responsible for slavery and what your [white people’s] ancestors did? Absolutely not. However, it is this barbaric history, these acts of dehumanisation and consciously, wilfully and continuously not challenging these events that maintained white supremacy, which remains a social issue. Which you [white people like me] will, by default, because of what you have inherited, continue to benefit from. Without question, this realisation will lead to deep-rooted feelings of individual and collective shame.
Chapter 6 of The Good Ally is also full of ways to acknowledge and face shame, and ways to build shame resilience, including talking to others on their antiracism journey, but with the caveat that I never try to speak about shame with random strangers, or anyone who isn’t safe because they may, in turn, shame me. And that I will never ever speak – without explicit permission and crystal-clear boundaries – to a Black person or a Person of Colour about the shame I feel because of my racism.
Nova got me recognising and talking about my shame. Thank you, Nova. Beginning to talk about shame is the beginning of releasing shame, the beginning of breaking-up with shame. It sounds obvious, but it isn’t easy to talk about shame because shame makes me feel bad so why on earth would I want to talk openly about feeling bad? Shame’s been banking on my silence for a long time. Just as white supremacy has. But my shame for my silence about racism, which is itself racist, got me recognising how shame has kept me silent in so many aspects of my life. But I won’t be silent any longer.
But if, she says, you put shame in a petri dish and dowse it with empathy it can’t survive.
So, on this Valentine’s Day, I’m sending my shame my empathy and my love ? knowing that, for you, my shame, that’s the same as saying, ‘You’ve taught me so much and I thank you for that. And I understand your desire to stay in touch. But ours is a dysfunctional relationship and so, dear shame, I’m breaking up with you. ’
Being kind on a regular basis can also improve happiness and reduce symptoms of anxiety. Mosley said:
Being kind to others has a profound effect on our own health and wellbeing as well as on theirs. In a 2023 study scientists randomly allocated people with mild depression, anxiety or stress to three groups. One group did three acts of kindness for five weeks; another group were asked to be more sociable: a final group did a written form of CBT. The scientists found that doing acts of kindness had the biggest effects on mood, significantly reducing anxiety and depression. They concluded that acts of kindness resulted in greater wellbeing benefits than established CBT techniques.
Brain scans show that when someone decides to be generous or to co-operate with others, an area of the brain called the striatum is activated – the same area that responds when we eat good food or take addictive drugs. Activating your striatum is believed to be the basis of the warm glow we get from being kind … but brain scans also revealed something rather surprising: kindness can relieve pain. Donating blood hurt less than having blood taken for a test, even if the needle was twice as big.
She’s discovered, incredibly that it can reduce chronic inflammation.
In two different studies, Inagaki told Mosley, people who gave help or support or kindness to organisations or family members had their blood drawn to assess an inflammatory marker called interleukin 6 or IL6. The studies found that being kind to more people and organisations – so friends and family but also volunteering – but not receiving kindness from those people or organisations is associated with lower inflammation.
It’s all about giving. It’s not about receiving.
The type of inflammation they looked at, systemic, chronic, inflammation predicts all the commonly-known diseases: cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, type 2 diabetes and even stress and depression. There are also some larger epidemiological studies which show that those who give more live longer.
The things Inagaki’s studies recommend giving are small, and certainly not financial. Things like writing a note to a friend who’s going through a difficult time; baking something for a neighbour and leaving it on their doorstep. The kinds of things you’d like to receive yourself when times are difficult (or even when they’re not). The kinds of things that cheer you up. The kinds of things … .
And certainly not self-sacrificing things. This article, which references Inagaki’s two studies, warns that:
If you are too giving to others and you neglect yourself, then that could actually detract from your well-being.
So don’t sacrifice yourself. And don’t spend lots of money. Give small, and often, to help others. As I’m sure you do. But now we know that our giving, our kindness, helps us as well.
I didn’t realise shame and I had such a strong attachment until shame began to detach: until I began to feel more clearly, speak more clearly, hear and see more clearly, without shame blurring my focus and making constantly negative judgements. Until I began, as 
