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(My maternal Grandfather died recently - this is the reading I gave at his funeral).

Harry was my Grandad. I know he was a lot of things to so many people, but when I was 4 years old, and probably younger, he was my best friend.

I live in the city. The journey through the seasons isn’t always obvious here - not unless you know where to look. It’s in the cracks between paving stones, in the way bare branches catch the light, in the quiet persistence of green things growing against all odds - gardens and pockets of resistance. But this year, the darkness has felt profound. I have felt it settle into my bones, pressing down in a way I don’t remember from other winters. Perhaps it's my age.

Beginnings and endings are so often the same thing. Within the pagan calendar, Samhain is regarded as the 'new year' and the period between October 31st and December 21st almost as a time of 'no-time' - a dead, dormant or sleeping period. These things are often thresholds - liminal spaces between two states of being. The ends and beginnings of chapters, and so it was with me - my first conscious footsteps into this tradition happened as my childhood ended.