Drawing Out
I don’t know what’s in your 3pm choccy-biccy, but it’s probably against some sort of substance misuse company policy because, come Happy Hour down the Dog & Duck, your wage is topping £30 per hour.
Happy Friday!
And the nights are officially drawing out — we are rattling lungs-first into the long mosquito summer, people of the northern hemisphere!
Here in Bournemouth, the earliest sunset of the year passed last Sunday, at 16.02. We are already five days into the race for rebirth.
But, David, I hear you roar — what about the winter solstice, isn’t that supposed to be the shortest day in the northern hemisphere on account of the tilt of the earth on its axis?
Keep your macs zipped — it very much still is. In Bournemouth, we’ll scrape a mere 7 hours 57 minutes and 32 seconds out of next Tuesday, a full 54 seconds less in the barrel of time than today. That’s enough time to boil an egg. (And get food poisoning. five minutes, people, five minutes.)
So why, for the love of daylight, do I insist that the nights are drawing out?
Ah. Because, my dear friends, a day is not the twenty-four hours our capitalist calendars would like us to imagine. Twenty-four hours is but an average. (And not a particularly accurate average either, hence leap years.)
An average?
Yeah, I know. It’s like learning that you don’t get paid £13 for every hour you work, but rather on a pay schedule designed by Byzantine Emperor Justinian ‘the slit-nosed’:
Okay, so when you clock in, you’re on about £10 per hour, but that quickly drops to nothing until the caffeine from your first three mugs of tea have kicked in. By lunchtime, however, you’re cock of the roost at £16 per hour, before getting whacked by the dreaded afternoon slump.
I don’t know what’s in your 3pm choccy-biccy, but it’s probably against some sort of substance misuse company policy because, come Happy Hour down the Dog & Duck, your wage is topping £30 per hour.
Unlikely as it seems, this rollercoaster of a wage structure averages out to about £13 per hour and, frankly, HR works off that figure because, by this point, they need a lie down.
Anyway. That’s what days are like.
Solar days are measured as the time between the solar noon of one day and the solar noon of the next.
Because of the elliptical shape of the earth, these solar noons are pretty much never exactly twenty-four hours apart. In fact, the precise ‘time’ of solar noons fluctuates throughout the year. Right now, solar noon in Bournemouth is 11.56 — and every day it’s getting later.
That explains why, even though the amount of daylight in a day is still going down, the exact time of sunset is already drifting out, following the later solar noon.
For the first time this winter, the minutes and seconds being shaved off our daylight hours are not being taken from earlier sunsets, but only from later sunrises.
In fact, dawn lags more than two weeks behind: the latest sunrise of winter doesn’t roll around until New Year’s Eve. It’s almost as if the sun wants us to stay under the covers a little longer.
So celebrate our later sunsets, celebrate (on Tuesday) the returning of our star from the Tropic of Capricorn, and ignore the astronomers who say that winter is yet to begin…
Seven Superb Books I Read Despite 2021
I’ve read 43 books so far this year, 21 fiction and 22 non-fiction. This is a slight decline on last year, but still the second highest total since records began in 2013.
For some bone-headed reason, I always finish the fiction I start reading, but there are 4 other non-fiction titles that I started and gave up part-way through.
14 of the books I’ve read this year were by female or non-binary authors, another was by a collective of non-binary, female and male authors. 6 of these female or non-binary-written books were fiction; 8 were non-fiction.
All of the books I gave up on were written by men. Make of that what you will.
The stand-out worst book I read all year was the horribly racist and sexist Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson. If you were being generous, you could say that it was ‘of its time’. In the same way that slavery or the guillotine was ‘of its time’.
Moving rapidly on.
The meaningless average year of publication was 1994 — meaningless because I read zero books published in 1994. (But a stunning hattrick from 1995: Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby and Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Wonderful.)
The mode (most frequent) year of publication was, surprisingly, 2021. I don’t think of myself as a hot-off-the-press kinda guy, but this is a symptom of my lockdown habit of buying books instead of waiting for the library to open, as well as an attachment to certain authors, including friends.
Here are the seven books I’ve read that were published this year:
Abolishing The Police, a collection of essays by various authors and published by a friend of mine
A World Without Email by Cal Newport
Careless by Kirsty Capes, a fellow student from a writing course I took in 2017
History by Miles Jupp, who stars in our sitcom Foiled
This Is Your Brain On Plants by Michael Pollan
Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick
Wild Nights Out by Chris Salisbury (actually, I haven’t quite finished this one)
Although all were highly enjoyable and/or instructive, only one of these books also appears in my list of seven absolute corkers that I read this year. Tension.
So here, finally, is that list.
The Chinese zodiac might insist that 2021 was the year of the ox, but for me it was the year of the wolf, as I devoured To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Woolf and Feral by George Monbiot.
Naturally I had to follow that pack of wolves with the splendid The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd.
Heimat by Nora Krug taught me history, A World Without Email by Cal Newport taught me technology and Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez taught me perspective.
You could do a lot worse than putting any of those seven books on your Christmas list, but, in the generous spirit of overdelivering, this year I also re-read two books that I remember enjoying decades ago, way back, before I had a beard.
I was relieved to discover that both A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson are indeed appealing and enduring works of the highest order.
Dare I re-read Catch-22 in ‘22?
100 Days of Adventure
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Only 8 more to go! If you have any ideas or invitations for adventures in the final 13 days of the year, please reply or comment. Thanks!
That’s it from me. Treasure these weekending moments. I’m hoping to get some walking done along the Slow Ways network.
Big love,
dc: