Winter began in motion but quickly settled into something more introspective. After nearly a month travelling through Southeast Asia, we returned to London in the early hours of December 8th, stepping out into damp, cold air that felt almost theatrical in its greyness. Winter began in motion but quickly settled into something more introspective. After nearly a month travelling through Southeast Asia, we returned to London in the early hours of December 8th, stepping out into damp, cold air that felt almost theatrical in its greyness. Bangkok’s humidity still clung faintly to our skin. London’s winter pressed back immediately.
We were tired in that specific way that only long-haul travel produces, overstimulated yet depleted. December, however, does not allow much time for recovery. Christmas insists on itself. Lights appear, calendars fill, and suddenly you are expected to feel festive whether your body clock agrees or not.
Something is grounding about ritual, especially after extended travel.
Season in Numbers
Flights: 10
Countries visited: 4
States visited: 2
Art exhibitions: 5
Childhood boxes sorted: Countless
Espressos pulled on the new coffee machine: Already too many to count
December — Returning, Rituals, and Revisiting Childhood
Like every year, we had our Christmas Eve dinner just the two of us, followed by presents on Christmas morning, before the day unfolded into its wider social obligations. This year’s shared gift felt particularly symbolic: a new coffee grinder and coffee machine. It may sound small, but upgrading our daily coffee ritual felt like an investment in staying put. The first proper espresso pulled in our own kitchen marked the return to domestic rhythm after weeks of airports and hotel breakfasts.
After various Christmas lunches and end-of-year gatherings, we flew to the United States. The itinerary felt slightly absurd. We landed in Virginia, dropped our checked luggage at my parents’ house, had dinner with my family, and then boarded another plane the following morning to fly to Columbus, Ohio.
We went to university in Ohio, but geography and adulthood make visits rare. Spending that weekend with my best friend from college, her partner, and their sweet baby boy felt restorative in a way that is difficult to quantify. We explored Columbus a little, but mostly we lingered at home, drinking coffee, catching up on details that do not fit into text messages, and watching their son navigate the world with toddler determination. Some friendships stretch effortlessly across time and geography, and this one does.
On the morning of the 22nd, we flew back to Virginia, where the defining project of the winter awaited: sorting through my childhood. My parents are planning to sell the house and downsize somewhere warmer and further south. The practical reality of that decision meant my preserved bedroom, attic boxes, and basement shelves needed attention. What began as a tidy-up quickly became an archaeological dig. Toys I had not seen in decades. School notebooks filled with earnest handwriting. Books with inscriptions from teachers. Old birthday cards. Clothes that once felt impossibly grown-up.
Holding your own childhood in your hands compresses time in a way that feels destabilising. We donated, recycled, trashed, and even sold a few items online. Some objects were easy to release. Others required negotiation with memory. By the end of the process, my childhood had been condensed into a few manageable boxes rather than an entire room. It was physical work, but it was also emotional labour and a quiet reckoning with how much of ourselves we carry forward.
We balanced the intensity with lighter moments, including a first visit to Monticello. Walking the grounds in winter light felt contemplative, the landscape stripped back and subdued. It felt fitting during a week dedicated to confronting history, both personal and national.
January — Art, Barcelona, and Recalibration
Back in London, winter settled into a steadier rhythm. Friends visiting from Barcelona came to stay, and we spent a Sunday together, including a proper roast. January can feel heavy in London, but shared tables soften its edges.
For my birthday in November, my work gifted me a membership to the Royal Academy of Arts, and January finally offered the space to use it properly. We visited Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, an expansive exhibition spanning seventy works. Marshall’s monumental paintings place Black figures firmly at the centre of art historical traditions that once excluded them. His works are layered with references to civil rights movements, comics, science fiction, and personal memory. They reward slow looking. Being members allowed us to linger without watching the clock and to move through the galleries deliberately.
Another afternoon took us to the Tate Modern to see the exhibition of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s work. Her vast canvases, produced in the final years of her life, transmit the life and spirit of her Ancestral Country in Australia’s Northern Territory. Standing before those paintings felt almost meditative. The repeated marks representing seeds, vines, and desert ecologies seemed to pulse with generational knowledge. After spending December sorting through my own past, it felt powerful to encounter art that carried memory forward so confidently.
Later in the month, we travelled to Barcelona for our belated Christmas, New Year, and King’s Day family visit. I worked from the office there for a few days, slipping back into a rhythm that had defined much of 2024. This time, being in the city felt gentler. Walking past familiar cafés no longer carried the sharp pang of autumn nostalgia. Instead, it felt like revisiting a place that remains meaningful without being current.
While there, we visited the Fundació Joan Miró to see Miró and the United States. The exhibition reframed Miró’s artistic development by positioning the United States as pivotal in shaping his trajectory. It traced his exchanges with artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, while also foregrounding the essential role of female artists in redefining abstraction and gestural painting. The show felt expansive and quietly corrective, a reminder that artistic movements are rarely contained by borders.
Back in London at the end of January, we visited the National Gallery for Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists. Seurat, Signac, Van Gogh, and Pissarro appeared in luminous arrangements of colour. Pointillism has always fascinated me. Individual dots seem insignificant alone, but together they create depth and light. Winter often feels similar. Singular grey days accumulate quietly into something cohesive.
Food punctuated the month as well. We had excellent pizza at Ria’s, deeply satisfying arepas at Conuco, and indulgent Sunday dim sum at Royal China Club. January may be marketed as a month of restraint, but warmth and shared meals feel far more appropriate.
February — An Azores Interlude
By February, London’s cold had begun to feel relentless, so we escaped for a week to the Azores. Winter is volatile. The first few days brought heavy skies and rain. Then the weather shifted into clear, luminous afternoons reaching 17 or 18 degrees Celsius. It was not summer, but it was green and alive in a way London was not.
We filled the week with good food, sunset walks along the coast, and long dips in hot springs, steam rising into cooler air. Visiting São Miguel in winter offered a different perspective from our usual stays. The roads were quieter, the viewpoints emptier, the landscape more elemental. Familiar places revealed different moods.
Returning to London after that week felt gentler than December’s arrival. The flat was fully ours. The coffee machine hummed each morning reliably. My childhood had been sorted. Art had been absorbed. Friendships had been revisited.
Winter in London did not feel empty, though. In late January, I went out with a Vietnamese colleague to celebrate Tết / Lunar New Year. We gathered around a steaming hot pot, the broth bubbling steadily between us, plates of thinly sliced meat and vegetables stacked along the table. The air was warm with spice and conversation. Outside, the city was grey and sharp with cold, but inside everything felt communal and alive.
Earlier in the month, we had also attended the preview night for the new Rose Wylie exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Preview evenings always carry a certain quiet buzz. This was the largest exhibition of Wylie’s work to date, bringing together her most iconic paintings alongside brand-new and previously unseen pieces.
If autumn had been about thresholds, winter was about reckoning. It asked for sorting, both literal and emotional. It reminded me that movement is exhilarating, but stillness reveals just as much. Tet, with its emphasis on renewal and reflection, felt like a quiet echo of that—a different cultural rhythm marking the same universal impulse to pause, gather, and begin again.
What did this winter ask you to release — and what did it quietly reinforce?
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