Newsletter: January 2025
Warm New Year greetings to you, and I don’t know how you relate to January. I was speaking to a priest recently who loves January and the space it offers after all the ‘stuff’ of Christmas. This may or may not be true for you, but allowing the season, whatever it brings, is fundamental to our peace of mind. It’s fighting the seasons which is problematic.
Monty Don, the TV gardener, spoke well about this recently on Radio 4. He was asked why gardening matters. Obviously there is the beauty of the flowers or the tastiness of the vegetables. But he felt that the deep truth of gardening – whether a window box, a large estate or something in between – is the seasons it lives by. There is a season for planting, for waiting, for flowering, for stooping, for dying, for clearing and for emptiness.
He feels that a grasp and awareness of the seasons is fundamental to human mental health, and I agree. The ego wants everything to last and everything right now. It is frightened by impermanence and dissatisfied with emptiness. But in truth, nothing in the garden or beyond lasts forever, and everything has its time. Monty suspects no generation in human history has found this idea so difficult or run away from it so determinedly. He feels we have lost touch with the seasons. That we are fearful of impermanence and grabby for everything now.
You’ll have your own sense of these things, but they are big with me at the start of the year. Emptiness is as much a season as plenty; and as necessary in the cycle.
And there’s something of this cycle in a talk I recently gave to 400 15 year-olds.
Read it here: Acornology
But now – cue drum roll – for an offer that no one else is getting. There has to be some benefit in receiving this newsletter, and this, dear reader, is it – an exclusive.
As I have previously mentioned, I have retired from writing. I made it quite clear. But this doesn’t mean I have retired from writing… obviously.
It all started when Jim, a dear neighbour, died of cancer a couple of years ago, showing us all how to leave this earth. He was a former London cabbie and I wanted to write a tribute to him. Also in my mind was a story I had composed as a 16 year-old in which the London landscape – buildings, parks, statues and ghosts – join together to save the city. (Yes, they could talk.) What emerged, almost by mistake, was an illustrated novella, a love-letter to both Jim and London. I miss them both.
The book title is London’s Knotty Pickle. And the opening line of the story sets the scene:
‘A city is its landscape, its people and its ghosts, and this is a story about all three.’
While the back cover blurb reads:
London, the greatest city on earth, is in danger. A cabal of the indecently wealthy and stupidly rich have the most terrible plans in mind; and the power to make it so. Only the London landscape can save itself – its buildings, parks, statues and ghosts… if they can just stop arguing for a moment and listen to a London cabbie called Jim.
It isn’t going to be easy, especially with a traitor in their midst. The danger is real, but so is the courage and laughter which confronts it. Let the adventure begin.
Amy Musgrave, a fine arts graduate, has created the wonderful illustrations. It’s her first job, but it won’t be her last.
Characters include Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Hyde Park, 10 Downing St, the National Theatre, St Paul’s, the statue of Ada Salter, and The London Eye, to name but a few.
You won’t find the book on Amazon. My little ‘Shadow of Hope’ publishing house doesn’t have that reach. But I do have some copies spare and one could be dropping on your doormat shortly, if you wish. The cost is £14.00 including postage and packing, and if you’d like a copy, contact me via my website or by email:
And that’s more than enough of that. As fragile peace breaks out in Gaza for now, and Trump arrives in the White House, for now, and everyone wonders, and many fear, here’s to your health and peace of mind whatever the season you live and breathe at present.
Shine on.
Simon x
