Keep awake, urges the Gospel messenger in the readings for the beginning of the Christian festival of Advent. That’s not easy in late November when by lunchtime the sun is already fast dropping to the horizon. The propensity to nap, to switch off, can be overwhelming. In Finland it must be so much worse. For two months, from mid-November to mid-January, the sun never rises at all. Everything has to be accomplished in total twilight. The Light in Darkness, a 20-minute short on Radio 3 (Thursday evening), took us inside the ‘dark time’, with an eerie impression of the northern winter that was so sharply evoked you could almost hear the air freezing on your breath, crackle, crunch.
One woman told us how she could deal with the lethargy of winter, those feelings of pointlessness brought on by the eternal gloom, only by taking a daily bath in the ice-cold Baltic. We listened as she trudged through the snow from her house to the sea, drilled a circle through the ice to make a hole, and then splashed in. Aaagghh. But that daily confrontation with the outside forces of nature, that willingness to take on the seasons and not be defeated, helps her to tune back in to her desire to survive. Until at last the day comes when the sun slowly creeps above the horizon for the first time, and shadows begin to appear again on the snow.
Many of those who spoke on the programme believe that it was easier to deal with the dark time before electricity smoothed out the seasons and brought artificial light (and in some places it didn’t arrive until 1973). ‘We cannot survive without light. But nature concentrates the light in food.’ When communities were self-supporting from the land even in winter, cod liver oil provided vitamin D, reindeer meat gave them vitamin C, and there were always plenty of berries with essential vitamins. ‘People were eating sunshine.’
Bleak times are besetting Ambridge as the dastardly Clive Horrobin returns from prison and Bridge Farm is threatened with bankruptcy because of the E. coli alarm. The horrible Horrobins are so much more interesting, and real, than the Archer family, with awful scrounging Tracey, bad boy Clive, and desperately aspirational Susan. Their dramas are both familiar and yet exaggerated enough to make us feel happily divorced from them. Meanwhile Pat Archer is taking us all with her as she plunges down into the depths of despond by looking back to the horrors of 1998.
The daily diet of family ructions and pointless tragedy was so gruesome that I stopped listening overnight and never went back (after decades of dipping in and out). It was like an addict coming clean. But the interests of this column obliged me to tune into it again and now I’m hooked but desperate to get off before the true story behind Sharon Horrobin and John Archer finally unravels. It won’t be good. You can tell that by looking them up on The Archers website. (Yes, I admit, there are better ways to spend your time, but…) Neither of them is listed on the Who’s Who of Ambridge characters, past and present.
We need The Archers to smooth over life’s distresses, without the emotional pain, or to avoid them altogether, as in Lynda Snell and her pantomime antics. Soaps are designed to ameliorate, not aggravate, the daily business of life, so give us a break, team. It’s the ‘dark time’.
Access into other people’s lives, their thoughts and fears, can be an antidote to the seasonal disorder. On Monday morning we heard on Radio 4 from a group of Prisoners’ Women. Most of them had no idea that their partner, husband, child was about to go to prison until receiving a call from the court solicitor. No more information was available. Nothing about which prison, how long for, or how to make contact. They were just left to get on with the mess that was left, the absence, the void.
Now they’ve been brought together by String of Pearls, set up in the south-west by the writer Mary Stephenson after working in prisons and realising that, although there was a lot in place to help prisoners adjust to their experience, there was nothing for their families, their women. A single mother of five sons receives a phone call one night from her middle boy. ‘I’ve stabbed someone,’ he says. She has to tell him to hand himself in to the police. A wife who says her husband committed a ‘white collar’ crime finds herself explaining not just to her children but also telling his parents that their son is in prison.
Every time you visit, they explain, you’re forced to queue up, wait for ages and then go through the Search, which is not at all like airport security. ‘They go through your hair. Look into your mouth…I felt like I was serving my own sentence too.’
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