Dark time

Keep awake, urges the Gospel messenger in the readings for the beginning of the Christian festival of Advent. That’s not easy in late November when by lunchtime the sun is already fast dropping to the horizon. The propensity to nap, to switch off, can be overwhelming. In Finland it must be so much worse. For two months, from mid-November to mid-January, the sun never rises at all. Everything has to be accomplished in total twilight. The Light in Darkness, a 20-minute short on Radio 3 (Thursday evening), took us inside the ‘dark time’, with an eerie impression of the northern winter that was so sharply evoked you could almost hear the air freezing on your breath, crackle, crunch.

One woman told us how she could deal with the lethargy of winter, those feelings of pointlessness brought on by the eternal gloom, only by taking a daily bath in the ice-cold Baltic.