Love List: December

incurable metaphor | love of letters | old promises

Image from my book Little Stories of Your Life

Every picture tells a story, and secrets gather in the dark trees behind this snowy scene, would you like me to share them?

Firstly, this picture tells the story I was trying to create—the whimsical, fairytale story of a magical, romantic encounter deep in a snow-bound land. A story more questions than answers—a dream-like vision, a wish, a half-forgotten memory—a child’s game come to life.

But there’s also an unseen ‘behind the scenes’ story: an idea for a picture that arrived with me insistently and that I nurtured patiently, waiting for a day the forecast promised snow. This is the story of peering hopefully out the window, waiting for flakes to begin to fall—of going to bed with a dusting of snow and waking up with a blanket. It’s a story of kind friends, who believed without question: the friend who pulled a folding table down from the loft on a cold morning, the friend who offered a Land Rover and drove me up a steep hill through thick drifts, reversing along a footpath that was barely the width of a lane and completely smothered in snow. This friend who helped me carry chairs and the folding table through ditches, and across a frozen field.

It is also the story of a dear, delighted dog—who leaped through the drifts alongside us, his white fur blending with the snow—a dog who was taken on a walk in the snowy woods behind me as I worked. It’s the story of a still-steaming flask of tea, of enamel mugs set down upon my Yorkshire Granny’s tablecloth. And—the truest of all—the story of finding myself standing in the middle of a Narnian landscape, camera in hand as fat flakes fell, and feeling utter joy to have been given the chance to tease a story out of my head and send it into the world.

Here’s what I’ve been reading and loving this month: