The winter solstice has crawled past, and with it, the absolute zenith of The Boss's annual descent into darkness. Not metaphorical darkness. The other kind — the sort where a grown man stands in a hallway at seven in the morning, feeling for his jacket in the pitch black, grumbling.
It begins around May. The complaints start. The walks get shorter and start a little later. The voice gets quieter. By the solstice, he has morphed from a cheerful companion into a brooding, solar-obsessed druid.
I gather humans have been rattled by the solstice since at least the Neolithic period, when people who had nothing better to do built enormous stone circles and pointed them at the sunrise. Stonehenge. The Ring of Brodgar. And The Boss’s kitchen, where the mood tracking is roughly equivalent in sophistication.
Hearing him wrench open the back door in pitch darkness, you'd think he was an ancient Scot at Brodgar, howling at the stones. The sun god is dead. We have forgotten to slaughter the ceremonial pig.
His descent into gloom reaches Roman proportions. The ancient Romans observed a festival called Saturnalia — a week of joyous, chaotic role-reversal in which masters were required to serve their slaves. I could thoroughly get behind this arrangement. Instead, what I get is a Boss who refuses to throw a stick in the river because “the last thing I need right now, General, is you shaking all over me”.
The Norse called this time Jólnir — the season when Odin’s wild hunt rode through the dark skies, collecting souls. Sensible people stayed indoors.
The Boss stays inside. He checks his weather app. The sun does not respond to the weather app.
In Persia, they lit fires and stayed up until dawn at Yalda to keep the dark at bay. Every civilisation has noticed the same thing: this time of year is hard, and the correct response is fire, food and community, of course. But not here.
I bear this with what I believe is uncommon grace. I endure the sighing. I endure the weather app. I do not point out that I, a hound bred for cold-water retrieving in bleak winter marshes, am constitutionally more suited to the season than he will ever be.
Nor do I remind him that the Dalai Lama, whose wisdom I have heard The Boss quote on numerous occasions, reportedly greets each morning with gladness — regardless of what the calendar says.
But then something happens.
The solstice passes. The days, by barely measurable fractions, begin to lengthen. The sun rises a minute earlier. Then two. Then three.
He notices things again. He brings in wood with purpose rather than resignation. He makes a little extra porridge — for guess who. He uses my name as a statement rather than a complaint. He mentions, for the first time in weeks, that it might be nice to walk to the next bend downriver.
The thing is, The Boss doesn’t suffer from winter exactly. He suffers from the idea of winter — the retreating light, the closing in, the vague glumness of a sun that seems to have lost interest. When the sun turns and starts coming back, the idea lifts before the weather changes at all. The mornings are still dark, the days still short. But something has been resolved.
I felt it myself on Tuesday morning. He came outside before seven, looked up at the sky, and said: “I think we’ve turned the corner.”
He was talking about the season. I was thinking about the walks.
Same thing, really. Woof!
8°C