January - to the sun and back

I think we can all agree that T.S. Eliot was talking out of his neck when he said that April was the cruelest month. Every year, no matter where I am, January is a slow-moving, washed-out nightmare of a month. It's been a little better since I stopped treating Christmas as a 14 day drinking marathon, but I still feel like I carry this month around in my chest as a solid and unwelcome sphere of blue.

Still, the days are already getting lighter here in the far North. The horizonal light appears some time around 10.20 and by lunch time the mountains and fjord are washed in silver. There are touches of pink in the sky and the snow is a cold, cold shade of blue. There's a platform of crystaline ice by the waterside. I know I'd rather be dealing with the year's awkward birth here than sitting on the platform at Streatham Hill station. 

We went away for Christmas this year. We spent it in the sunshine (or at least the daylight) of Madeira, 700km from the coast of Africa, 900 from Portugal. It was a surreal experience to see large butterflies dancing through the air on Christmas Eve. Madeira is a place that takes the season seriously, with illuminations, decorations and music, and the Funchal authorities had organised a lot of street performances by dancers and musicians. The programme was a mixture of local folk styles and Christmas standards. Having these performers playing in the background whenever we passed through town was a real highlight, although I wonder why the warmer countries don't write some alternative Christmas songs. It seems a little weird to sing "May all your Christmases be white," to an audience of people who are hoping the temperature won't drop below 20 degrees centigrade.

The landscape of Madeira is unlike any other I know. It's a volcanic Island and in places it shows. The rocks jut out at the coastal edge as if they were frozen in the act of self-creation, and you can clearly see the different layers of lava. 

And yet it's a lush, green, verdant place. The two botanical gardens above Funchal are both, in their very different ways, spectacular. When you follow the levadas (the man-made irrigation channels) through the valleys between villages you find farms set into mountain sides, the fields staggered in a series of steep steps. Dense masses of banana trees can be seen everywhere.  

Lavadas are often cut into the cliff-face and have a sheer drop on one side.

Botanic gardens

In Funchal there is a yellow coastal fort which is open to the public and part of which has been turned into a contemporary art museum. 

While we were there the museum had a retrospective of prints by Ilda Reis. Reis is dead now, but she had a 30 year career in the late 20th century using a variety of different engraving and printing techniques to make complex, abstract, ink-based print works, many of which take a lot of studying before they open up to the viewer. They are often less abstract than they first seem and they have a broad visual vocabulary. Some seem to reference images taken from microscopes—images of cells, small organisms and the building-blocks of life. Looking at her work is a contemplative and personal experience, like reading poetry. It seemed so far removed from most of the contemporary art I'm accustomed to seeing in London galleries, and it struck me as a different path art could have taken— less to do with performative posturing, more quietly musical.

Coming back from Madeira, we discovered that a storm had torn through Nordreisa and ripped our chimney from the roof of our house, so we can't use our fireplace. To take an optimistic view of this, losing our fireplace has given us cause to be glad about what would otherwise be terrifyingly warm weather for the arctic in deepest winter. It's hardly dropped below minus 4 these last two weeks, so we're in no danger of freezing as yet. 

Spot the chimney. Clue: It's not on the roof.

On returning we also discovered that I had managed to disconnect the freezer before leaving for our holiday. We came back to a metal box full of rotten food. The saddest thing about this was that Marthe spent a lot of time in the autumn picking berries to cook with, and now they are all lost, along with enough food to last several weeks. Bagging up endless amounts of nauseatingly rancid mulch is as dispiriting a start to the year as any, but I thought to myself while we were doing it that ultimately I was obscenely fortunate to be able to lose so much food without fear of starving to death. 
 

Arctic night is more severe when you drop yourself into it suddenly. When it comes on gradually it feels natural, but after 10 days in the sun, coming back to near constant lightlessness was like walking into a wall. I can feel it getting easier already though, as January always does. The fjord is calm outside the cabin window. The sun is close enough that the most distant patch of sky is the colour of day. Though I have work to do, my time is my own.

Here's wishing you a gentle start to the year. There's no reason 2013 can't be a good one.

With love, Vince.