Happy winter

Hello and welcome to the latest blog from The Olivia Rose Diaries on December 20^th 2025.

It’s been around six weeks since my last blog and I expect some of you are wondering where I’ve been. The answer is simply that I haven’t been anywhere at all, just living quietly and happily at Le Shack, and as this is for the most part meant to be a travel blog I haven’t had a great deal to share. However we left early December and are on the road again, or more precisely on the train, and spending some time back in the UK with friends and family.

Trains are wonderful places to sit and think. (Or at least they are in France. Once you start travelling in the UK you may not have the luxury of a seat at all and it’s not so easy to be philosophical standing up.) Once on the train you are absolved of all responsibility for planning your route, wondering whether you can trust the sat nav or despairing at the long queue of traffic in front of you. Instead you can settle down, indulge in a bit of people-watching, gaze at the scenery flashing past or stick your head in a book. We have taken a reasonable number of trains already on this trip and what strikes me is that almost all my fellow passengers spend the entire journey with their heads bent over their phones. I can’t understand how so many human beings across the entire planet are now so dependent upon such a small gadget, so in thrall to it, that we can hardly envisage a life without it. Michael and I use our phone for travel all the time, an essential tool in our modern world, but I am increasingly resenting it and find myself turning away from an online life. I don’t often make new year’s resolutions but 2026 is going to be a year where I severely limit my use of the phone.

The countryside outside the window of the train is bleak, the skies grey, the trees finally devoid of all their leaves and the ground sodden as many areas in the UK are recovering from huge amounts of rainfall with flooding in parts.

Winter has arrived, one of those guests who outstays his welcome. I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with this time of year. I enjoy those crisp, brisk days when the sky is blue and your feet are itching to get out for a walk, rosy cheeks and woolly hats, coming back to a warm fire and a good book. But so often it’s not like that. Instead, winter jumps at the chance to serve us an alternative menu of dark, cold and miserable weather, two-tone days when the world seems black and white, devoid of all colour, and the skies are low and heavy.

I am currently reading a book called ‘How to Winter’ by Kari Leibowitz, which looks at how winter affects people across the world and how different cultures develop their own ways of dealing with it. She makes the point that many of us expect winter to be a long and difficult time, an expectation that colours our perspective, and in turn it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. She has spent a winter in Norway, the land of the midnight sun, and found that people approach winter differently there. Of necessity they have developed a ‘positive winter-time mindset’, looking at it not as a time of limitation but as a time to do things differently, to enjoy rituals that bring them together for special occasions and as a time to rest. They can’t change the fact that they won’t see the sun for months on end, but they can change the way they react to it.

This may be a simple, eminently sensible idea, but it isn’t always easy to change our perspective, to break old habits and thought patterns. However, life is too short and too precious to wish those winter months away, to waste them in frustration, longing desperately for the spring and so I have decided I am going to make more of an effort to look for the positive, to be more aware of the beauty of winter and every time my subconscious mind starts to grumble at those grey skies I shall push it away.

I need to get outside and walk whatever the weather and I have found in the past that setting myself the challenge to photograph something intriguing or beautiful on that walk will invariably mean that I do find something worthy of a photo, even if I have to work hard to find it. The parameters might need to change in winter, perhaps swap a blue sky for towering cloud formations, or look for the artistic impact of bare branches rather than a riot of summer flowers, but the exercise tends to be a positive one and if it doesn’t always lift the spirits sky high it certainly stops them from falling too low. It also helps just to notice and appreciate things without feeling the need to capture them on film: a buzzard perched on a telegraph pole, the long shadows stretching out across fields and that very particular evening light as the sun sets.

Below are a few winter pictures, taken as we move around the country, some taken by me, some others by friends and family as we have walked with them. Thanks to Antony, Helen and Mike.

Of course there are times when nothing changes the fact that winter gets you down in the end and then I take comfort in two old sayings. They may be clichés, but there is a great deal of wisdom and common sense in them. The first is that tomorrow is another day, blindingly obvious, but the world can feel completely different from one day to the next. And my favourite –  a change is as good as a rest. Justification, if it were ever needed,  to change the scenery. Get on a bike or train and go somewhere. It doesn’t need to be far, just far enough to offer a new perspective.

This will be my last blog of the year so I wish you all a happy winter, an enjoyable Christmas and look forward to seeing you again in January where we shall be house-sitting near Strasbourg for a couple of weeks – another change of scenery.

MJ