savourites #71

candlelight | saying no | unbeatable vegan ragu

On Tuesday I stood in the garden and looked at the moon. Night had fallen, and I’d been finishing some edits in the hut. Catching the moon can be a tricky thing in the city. I always look up for it, but there are buildings in the way. Sometimes this makes it a marvel: over the weekend we saw it rise mid-afternoon, plump and waxing and ghostly against the spire of the neighbourhood church. Most of the time it means you have to leave the house to catch it - our windows are not high enough.

But on Tuesday night I caught it as I headed back in after finishing work after putting the baby to bed after a real day of it, all told. And I stood, and I felt the cold seem into my shoulders and my ribcage and my shins, and I exhaled properly for the first time that day, it felt like. November was a long month. A lot of work, a lot of catching up, a lot of solo parenting and not seeing one another. Earlier that week I told a friend that the full moon always sent me a bit loopy and so it came to be. But my word was it a beautiful moon.

I learned that the final moon in November is sometimes known as the Child Moon, it’s thought - writes Will Dowd, who does a special lunar newsletter - because it rises so early even children will be awake to see it. And while I don’t know entirely what C is taking in, I suspect he may have seen the moon. We go out in the afternoons and catch the last of the light and it’s been there, rising above the park and the trees and the rain cover on the buggy. The days are getting shorter and darker and this is difficult for me to handle, it is every year. But with winter - and we’re not there yet, although by the time the next full moon comes we will be - the moon gets brighter. Even among a sea of Christmas lights, it still wins.

Other good things this week: