The year is winding down… and today, 21 December, is the Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year. The beginning of astronomical winter.
The good news is…the days will start getting longer. It has been an incredibly grey, dismal, drippy, chilly, windy past 6 weeks. I can count the number of days of sunshine on one hand…and still have some fingers left over.
London is located at about the same latitude as Newfoundland…similar to Warsaw. Kiev, Winnipeg and Calgary. So in the winter, the sun kind of goes sideways across the sky. The sun never gets higher than 20 degrees above the horizon. Weird light, and always in your eyes as you walk down the street.
Today we went to a Winter Solstice celebration at the Greenwich Observatory – the first such event ever held. Greenwich is the Prime Meridian, and home of the 18th century astronomical observatory. Interesting place to go, and inside Greenwich Park, a large green space south of the Thames River.
This year, due to a medical issue, we will be spending Christmas in London for the first time. We will miss time in the US with our family. But we’ll make the best of it here in our London home.
And as the Solstice passes, we are looking forward to the days getting longer again. Having sunrise at 8 am and sunset before 4 pm is getting very old. We even have resorted to using a daylight lamp in the house to simulate daylight (particularly as we’ve seen so little of the sun during the past several weeks).
There are still some months of winter left, and probably a fair share of cloudy, misty, windy and cold days. That’s part of living in London. And yes, we are adapting to our adopted home.
Four Years in Japan ... and now Three Years in London 