🌹🎶 Seasonal Sparkles 3: Lights Up!
A ramble through starry light and song displays in St Albans and London
🌹🎶 Seasonal Sparkle 3: Lights Up!
As the year ripens through autumnal pumpkins and crystallises into midwinter festivals of light, I’ll be sharing a weekly-ish 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.
As the festive season lights up, this week I follow a trail of starry song and light displays across St Albans and London, discovering the rest in play.
Christmas brings nostalgia for my hometown and the flutter of angelic voices in the crystalline air of St Alban’s Abbey. So whilst visiting a dear friend, it was an unexpected delight to come across St Albans Choral Society rehearsing Marcus Duruflé’s Requiem and be stilled by the cascade of human vocal harmonies in this precious anchoring place. Outside, lovers take selfies by the Christmas Tree as the bustling market splinters into closing fragments, and small children stargaze in light baubles.
Arriving back in London, trees are decked with veins of light, their autumnal leaves burning artificially bright amidst a blazing neon landscape at Kings Cross. Dazzled as I am, I wonder how far we’ve wandered from times when their simple beauty, decorated with nothing but moonlight, would have been all the magic we wished for.
The awe formerly commanded by trees lives on in our now highly commercialised Christmas Tree rites and the folkloric tales and songs carried on ancestral breezes. Running three times around the great yew outside St Alban’s Abbey at midnight was believed to make the devil appear, and some people still preserve a respectful silence whilst walking beneath its vast branches.
The tall, silent trees of Sloane Square form the centrepiece of a playground of light where swans ride blue tutus and people stumble through grottos following the glimmer of their phones. Designer clothes hang illuminated in glass boxes alongside manicured trails with multiple posing points in a glittering world mediated by screens. It’s a frenetic feast of light gazing and people-watching. Musing on the theatre of life, I notice the change of human behaviour brought on by props - the difference between the man with a high-vis jacket and megaphone, tasked with clearing the road of dawdling pedestrians, and the man anxiously scurrying along with a bunch of flowers, silhouetted by the glare of department store windows.
Within the sculpted edifice of Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, the voices of Wimbledon Choral Society dance like stars over City of London Sinfonia’s orchestral waves. Grounded by the traditional tones of Elgar and Vaughan Williams, I’m transported by Cecilia McDowall’s ethereal compositions, Ave Maris Stella and the UK premiere of Music of the Stars. Amidst these magical musical summonings of starry seas and skies, I fall in love again with the enchanting capacity of music to untether me from daily life, wash me clean and return me brighter and lighter.
In her latest podcast episode,
, Beth reminds us that having fun is a form of rest. Following the trail of that which lights us up endows the grace of rejuvenation - the lightness of play can refresh us at deep levels. As creatives we need to take rest in our art - I am deeply nourished as a writer by reading and as a musician by listening. In a turbulent world, where we are daily bombarded by fear-driven narratives designed to make us believe the worst of each other, it is both essential self-care and a radical act of resistance to affirm and strive towards the beautiful, magical, creative and basic goodness within ourselves and our world.
Punchdrunk on harmonies and light shows, my musical friend and I pace the pavements, delighting in a city which has witnessed the bursting of many stars, wandering into the bright burning lights and wintery depths of the urban night.