Katherine Swift – Kathleen Jowitt

Slow Time by Waverly Fitzgerald, The Morville Year by Katherine Swift, and a bar of soap garnished with star anise and a dried bayleaf, all on a brightly coloured quilt with baby toys

I don’t know where this year’s gone. (I mean, I know exactly why it’s gone, but that isn’t quite the same thing.) Which is unusual for me, because I usually make a point of being aware of where I am in time.

These last few days, though, it’s all seemed to settle down, though not on account on anything I’ve done myself. The Morville Year, which I’d bought and immediately lost in the extra safe place in which I’d hidden the present I bought at the same time, turned up (as did the present – too late for the birthday for which it was originally intended, but just in time for Christmas). I loved The Morville Hours and the way it moves gently through the cycle of the year, and have been looking forward to reading this, a collection of related articles.

Slow Time is an old friend, a book that’s encouraged me to explore the calendar and the traditions in which I grew up. And one thing that I have already noticed about organised children’s activities is that they are very keen on seasonal themes, so it ought to get easier from here on in.

One last thing. I was amused to note, firstly that I’d run out of my previous soap bar just in time to start the Christmas Spice one – and secondly, that the one I’ve just finished (and had been using all through Advent) was called Wake Up Call. If you know, you know.

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As is often the case, my favourite book of the year is one that was actually published several years ago. Eleven, in this case, and the story begins twenty years before that, when the author moves into the Dower Houses at Morville and begins working on the garden. Or hundreds of years before that, when the monastery is built at Morville. Or decades before that, when she’s born. Or hundreds of years before that, when the monastery is built at Morville. Or thousands of years before that, when the Shropshire landscape is formed.

It’s the story of the landscape and the monastery. It’s the story of the author and the garden and her relationship with the garden. It’s about time, measured in days and sunlight and fruit. It’s about people. It raised in me a powerful nostalgia for the place where I grew up, which was not far away, and it observes the changes in society and agriculture with a clear and sometimes regretful eye, but I don’t think it’s nostalgic in itself. It lives too much in the present, and is too conscious of the constancy of change, for that.