🌹🎶 Seasonal Sparkles 2: Cackles & Crackles

A ramble through the cackles of Samhain as the first days of November crack open.

🌹🎶 Seasonal Sparkle 2: Cackles & Crackles

As the year ripens through autumnal pumpkins and crystallises into midwinter festivals of light, I’ll be sharing a weekly sparkle from my seasonal rambles. Celebrating the restorative power of natural highs and following whimsical moments of inspiration, I’ll sketch sights, sounds and stories to mark the turning of the season.

Do let me know what the season is sparking for you in the comments. You’re also warmly invited to come and sparkle at my Winter Sparkle Concert on 6th December.

This week we ramble through the cackles of Samhain as the first days of November crack open.

Autumnal colours are nature’s consolation for the loss of light. The grey skies of November crackle with scorched leaves, fizzing fireworks, defiant Guy Fawkes bonfires and twinkling Diwali lights. Seasonal nutrition bursts in crinkled cabbage leaves, red-blooded beets, creamy turnips and smile-sculpted pumpkins.

On All Hallow’s Eve, my leaf-bronzed street was transformed into a hubbub of cackling children in capes carrying crackling treat bags, pursued by pram-pushing parents in fluorescent wigs and overseen by pumpkins on postboxes. This gleeful little people street takeover echoes centuries of ‘soulers’ - poor children who went door to door, offering prayers and soul cakes to free the souls of the dead. Soulers’ songs accompanied young cake carriers from the Middle Ages until the 1950s and are baked into contemporary renditions by artists including Sting.

The Halloween spooks are still in evidence during an All Souls Day riverside ramble from Greenwich to the Thames Barrier, as a giant spider clambers across Anchor & Hope, a Charlton pub thought to have been pulling pints for river workers and travellers since the sixteenth century.

As the veil between light and dark thins, the passageway through Samhain/ Halloween/ Día de Los Muertos has long been believed to heighten communication between the living and the dead. The sounds of Ghanaian slave forts percuss the waves at Greenwich Pier, emitted from speakers within Tribe and Tribulation, a totemic sculpture forged from Ghanaian driftwood by Serge Attukwei Clottey. As over 3,000 slave ships sailed from this stretch of river, it’s hard to imagine how many soul cakes would be needed to honour those whose lives were devastated.

Beyond the crackling festive colours, a gritty tenacity is required to tease out silver linings from the endless greys of rain-swelled skies and tangled industrial landscapes. Today’s crowning clouds contain blue bruises and white powder puffs, silvering the river ripples and the hooded gates of the Thames Barrier. “The love of bare November days” expressed by Robert Frost in his atmospheric poem My November Guest, is a labour whose rewards are all the more precious for being hard-won.

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