Waking in the midst of a long winter night is, he argues, a form of sleep that would have been entirely normal before light was at our command. I used to worry over these moments, considering them to be insomnia, but A Roger Ekirch’s book, At Day’s Close: a History of Nighttime, convinced me otherwise. Instead, I often wake in the middle of the night and spend an hour or two mulling over my thoughts, sometimes getting up to read, write or meditate, before returning to my bed to sleep until morning. Sleepy as I am in winter, I find that I rarely slumber right through. Before that the winter nights were very long indeed. Our recent ancestors would have known this pattern well after all, electric light has only been with us for just over a century. While summer often wakes me at 4am with dawn, in winter I can sleep for hours, surrendering to my bed shortly after 9pm, and drowsing there until my morning alarm. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept, or a detail of history. Gone are the splashy novels of summer winter urges me towards thoughtful, ambulatory reading, chewed over in lamplight. I want to revisit beloved old films and spend time pottering in the company of the radio. I want to eat cooked food instead of raw, comforting carbs over fresh flavours. It opens up a space in which I can mass my energies, to restore and repair. Winter is a time to enjoy the pleasures of solitude, to dream and contemplate. We humans, having a few more worldly commitments and physical limitations than your average dormouse, are unable to do the same, but we can allow winter to modify the rhythms of our lives.Įverything about me changes in winter – and I let it happen. To get through this long period without food, a dormouse will slow down its metabolism to the extent that it consumes almost no energy at all, waking briefly every 10 days to keep its organs in working order. As I learned when I held one – a perfect ball of amber fur rolling in my palm like a marble – you can leave fingerprints in a sleeping dormouse. In late summer they gorge on fruit, storing the energy as easily accessible liquid fat just beneath the skin. Dormice are one of only three UK mammals to hibernate (alongside hedgehogs and bats) and they do so for half of each year, retreating to their nests with the first frosts in October or November, and only emerging when food is abundant again in April or May. I recently visited hibernating dormice at Wildwood Trust just outside Canterbury. Is it such a bad thing, this desire to hibernate until spring? After all, it feels like a natural response: winter simply demands that we slow down rather than drop out altogether – why can’t we find a way to do this? If only we could suspend the demands of life, just until the sun comes out again, all would be well. We want to batten down the hatches against the treacherous weather outside, preserve our energies, lay on fat. Humans cannot actually hibernate, but in the coldest months of the year, many of us are drawn to something similar.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |