Journal

Two rooms for winter

The sun is about 25 degrees lower in the sky now. In summer it would be above the house entirely, but here in the six weeks either side of the winter solstice, it shines directly through my bedroom window for about an hour each morning, creating shadow shows on the wall behind my bed.

I know to pay attention to this. By February it won’t be happening anymore for another year.

This month in the Studio, one of our weekly prompts has been light-seeking. It’s been interesting how many members have talked about shadows—seed head shadows, the way light comes into their kitchen, patterns on the pavement. Once you start looking for it, it becomes one of the joys of this time of year. The low angle of the sun creating wonders.

The beginning of the day

I spend about an hour in my bedroom every morning. I have an autoimmune condition and take a slow-acting steroid medication that needs about an hour to kick in. Through trial and error, I’ve learned that I get so much more out of the day if I deliberately keep the start slow. If I lean into what my body wants—sitting with a cup of tea, maybe some knitting or a book, watching the birds on the bird table—I start slowly, and everything else follows better.

I’m naturally a very messy person. A floor person, a chairdrobe person. If I wasn’t intentional about this space, it would be full of heaps of things. But because I want it to be the ideal place to wake up and spend time, I put a lot of effort into keeping just this room clean and calm and free of clutter. I don’t always manage it, but about 70% of the time.

The room was made from what was originally the garage, so we could plan it. There’s a big window to the front and French doors at the side. In summer we can open everything and it becomes part of the outside. In winter, obviously, we’d freeze, so it becomes very different.

The window has my bird feeder stuck to it—a gift from my daughters. Because it’s next to the hedge, the birds feel quite safe. They stay in the hedge and then come down to feed, or stand on the windowsill. I can see the blue tits with their swivel heads, the chaffinches who are really the boldest in our garden, the goldfinches, and dozens of sparrows who fly around in the hedge.

 Wonderful things.

One of the best things about waking up is a painting by my friend Christine MacArthur. I met Christine when I grew cut flowers and had a gate shop in my drive. Every week she’d come and buy flowers to paint. After a year she put them all together in an exhibition in Glasgow called Friday Flowers. After the exhibition, she gave me this painting of pink tulips—long-stemmed, all colours of pinks and cream and green, parrot tulips and lily tulips. Glorious.

When Christine gave it to us, we couldn’t afford to get it framed. So I hung it without a frame, thinking I’d get one later. But now I just love it that way. It feels light and bright and casual, and it’s the first thing I see when I wake up. It’s that promise of spring.

If you have a piece of art that you really love, I’d say hang it where you’re going to see it first thing. Hang it just for you. Start your day with something beautiful.

Over on the chest of drawers, I have a big jug of branches from an ash tree. A limb fell off during Storm Amy and was moved to the verge. On one of my walks I dragged it home—we chopped up the bits that could go in the wood store, and I took the twigs for the bedroom. They’ve got these black ends, a bit like cloven hoofs. Gorgeous. At night, if I put a tealight underneath, those branches spread shadows all over the ceiling.

For an hour every day, the hedge shadows are on the bed head. Sometimes they’re really crisp because it’s a bright day. Other days they’re much softer if it’s cloudy. Sometimes I can see the birds in the hedge. Sometimes it’s just the leaves trembling in the wind. It’s different all the time. Just something so relaxing to watch.

You might not have a hedge, but it’s possible to put something in your window where you know the sun’s going to hit it—seed heads or some twigs, just something that will allow that wonderful interplay of light.

So that’s what this room does. It starts me off with soft attention, with beauty, with nature coming in, with the play of light as the day begins. It starts me off with things that are ephemeral, that fill me up, that allow me to pay attention.

The end of the day

My living room is quite a different space. Until relatively recently, we didn’t use it very much. It’s the biggest room in the house, and we’d painted it off-white like the rest of the house. It had the television and a couple of sofas, but it never felt warm. It never felt cosy. It never felt somewhere you’d want to spend time. And that seemed ridiculous.

So we changed it. The first thing we did was repaint it—got rid of all the off-white and went for this really beautiful dark, slightly greenish navy blue. It’s matte and looks like the colour of the night sky.

Then we shelved the whole room with reclaimed scaffolding boards from a firm in Glasgow, right the way around, to turn it into something that felt more like a library. I didn’t want a room dominated by the television. I don’t watch much television, and I find that the less I watch, the more other things I get to do. So we wanted the television to shrink in importance, and things like books to become more important. A space where you could read or write or do mindful sewing or knit, chat with friends. That kind of cosy, interactive space.

We went for task lighting and dark walls and a room full of books.

We didn’t buy anything new. It’s still got the same sofas and my dad’s piano. I got a mantelpiece made from a piece of scaffolding board—I’ve always wanted a mantelpiece and I don’t know why we didn’t do it earlier. It’s got an amazingly bad picture of a prize bull which I rescued from a skip. And candlesticks, because it’s a nice safe place for candles. I love candles—the candlelight is such a treat. There’s an old brass candlestick and a beautiful lion candlestick made by Charlotte Salt, a British ceramicist. I got that to celebrate one million views on YouTube, because it felt surreal and as though it should be marked.

What this room has done for me is give me a space with lower light—and if you have low light in the evening, it starts that production of melatonin which gets you into your circadian rhythm to go to bed. If you’re not on a phone or tablet or computer with that blue light, if you’re reading a book or sewing or knitting or just sitting listening to an audiobook, it allows the natural rhythms to work. This room has given me a period of wind-down so that when I go to bed I’m actually much more likely to fall asleep. I’m less wired. And when I get to sleep, I sleep more soundly.

So where my bedroom is optimised for waking up, this living room is optimised for winding down and cosying up. Making the most of these dark evenings with firelight and candlelight, just curling in to end the day.

Two bookends

I’ve been thinking about how I’ve set up these two rooms to be the bookends of my day—the thresholds, the markers. Very different rooms, but very intentionally arranged. And it turns out there are actual physiological reasons why the things I’ve done work. The soft attention and natural light in the morning. The low light and warmth in the evening.

This is the kind of thing we discuss a lot in the Studio—how to work with the dark months rather than against them.

Let me know if this time of year is a difficult one for you, and if you’ve got any tips for getting through it.

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