Hibernation Season (Cecilia Peartree)

I've been conscious for quite a few years of an instinctive desire to hibernate during those months of hardly any daylight and weather that varies between being too cold to go out and too wet to go out. Here in Edinburgh, however, January 2026 has begun with several days of the blue skies and dazzling brightness that sometimes happens after a heavy fall of snow, only until today we hadn’t had the snow, thank goodness. In fact, as soon as I had drafted this post the clouds rolled in and we had a couple of flurries.  Until this happened, it was almost as if the weather was trying to tempt me to go outside, though I am not up to full strength yet for walking, and there are some frosty patches on the roads and pavements. Still, it's a far cry from the last time we had serious snow, when the 'Beast from the East' arrived some years ago. I well remember being sent home from work in mid-afternoon only to find the buses had stopped running and I had to walk all the way, taking what I fondly imagined was a short-cut when I wasn't far from home and falling into a small snow-drift. That was the kind of thing that was quite amusing when I was only a few years younger!

Edinburgh Castle in the snow 2010

This time I took hibernation a little more seriously than usual, stocking up on Christmas-related books and also revisiting some of the many similar books that are already on my Kindle. I often go through phases of reading one crime or mystery book after another, having recently started on the excellent  Marion Todd series set around St Andrews in Fife, a location that is very familiar to me. But this bleak midwinter I am too tired to concentrate on mysteries. I recommend Trisha Ashley's and Sarah Morgan's novels to read at this time of year. They both create satisfying interesting plots and interesting settings, and weave in sub-plots very skilfully. I don't even find myself waiting for the murder to happen, which is a sure sign of dissatisfaction with a non-crime book!

A fairly recent development is that I now have audiobook versions of my favourites, so that if I've spent too much of the day staring at a screen as I write my own novels, two of which are currently in progress, I can rest my eyes by listening for a while instead of reading. Incidentally, every time I get to the point of having two novels in progress at a time, I resolve never to do it again. I know this kind of thing should be under my control, but sometimes it just happens that way. 

During December I also trawled the tv and subscription channels, of which several are available in our household, for good Christmas movies - in many cases a contradiction in terms. I don't always like the ones other people recommend, and I can be put off by ridiculously trivial details. So, for example, I wasn't all that invested in 'The Holiday' almost from the start, because I wasn’t very taken with the characters, the one Jude Law was playing in particular, but what made me really hate it was a sequence near the end where the heroine (played by Cameron Diaz) runs through the fields in the snow, opening gates and leaving them open behind her. I couldn't believe she was being so irresponsible.

Similarly, I was quite enjoying a film set in the Scottish Highlands in winter, but without any of the American heiresses who usually appear in those films - in this case many of the actors were genuinely Scottish, which was more or less a first - when the two main characters got their car stuck on a hill, got out and walked off into the snow somewhere near Glencoe without even buttoning up their coats. No gloves, either. 

Anyway, I have now given up Christmas movies until next December. Hoping to remember at the end of this year which ones were so boring I switched them off before they'd finished and which were just about viewable. I’ve gone back to the BBC for now, so that I can amuse myself on a more intellectual level by shouting out the answers to some of the questions on the Christmas edition of ‘University Challenge’.

Princes Street Gardens, 2010