As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant and observer of what is lovely, less lovely and sometimes, thankfully, absurd in the world.
But Clare has come to fear winter. Recently the season has sapped his emotional and creative energy, masking his joy in living things, rarely in mankind but in everything that might alert him to the vibrancy and beauty of a wintry countryside. He has not always felt this way, but over the past few years, life in the north of England — amid the increasing absence of light, the claustrophobia of the Yorkshire moors and the relentless black rain that ‘makes you feel as if you are living in a tunnel under the sea’ — has led him to wrestle with something more challenging than persistent seasonal affective disorder. For a while now Clare has suffered from an engulfing depression that dominates almost every day of the coldest, darkest months of the year.
Writing this winter journal has become his ‘refuge’. At times expansive, at others paring the language back as if in winter-speak, some of Clare’s daily entries are just a sentence or two long as he tracks the incremental shifts from summer heat and the fading light of autumn to the inevitability of the cold, short winter days, ‘grey as glumness’. This coming season, however, will be different, as Clare pledges to ‘embrace this winter like a summer’. The result is an enthralling book of beauty and pain, tenderness and imaginative absorption.
Clare cannot choose to hibernate during the winter months. He teaches creative writing at John Moores University in Liverpool, to which he commutes from Yorkshire by train several times a week, energising, reassuring and inspiring his students.
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