The Season With No Name

We know precisely when this stretch begins, because it shows up as a flat spot in everything. Fewer messages. Fewer of the seasonal words in the ones that do arrive. Not unhappiness, just a gap where a season should be — as though several weeks of the year have been left out of the year.

They have not been left out. They are simply the part nobody photographs.

Why nothing is ever made about these weeks

Every other stretch of the year has a look, and a look is what gets a season represented.

Autumn has colour and a smell. Winter has the whole shelter apparatus — snow, lamps, an early dark, a boundary you can put in a frame. Spring has green arriving and an obvious storyline. Summer has light and water. Each of those is easy to draw, easy to photograph, easy to sell something against, and easy to write a paragraph about.

The end of winter has none of it. The snow, if there was any, has gone grey and then gone. The bare trees, which read as elegant in December against a cold sky, read in March as still bare. The light is up to eight or nine hours a day now, which sounds like progress and looks like an overcast car park. There is mud, or the equivalent of mud, and mud is the only unambiguous feature.

So the weeks go unrepresented, and being unrepresented has a real effect: you experience them without any of the borrowed frames that make the rest of the year legible. There is nothing to compare your February to. Every other season arrives pre-narrated.

It is not that these weeks are ugly. It is that nobody has ever bothered to tell you what they are, so you meet them without a description.

We are not going to tell you it is secretly beautiful

This is the paragraph where a piece like this normally turns, and produces a sentence about hidden beauty and the quiet dignity of bare branches.

We are not doing that, because we do not believe it, and because attempting it is worse than leaving the weeks alone. Trying to appreciate something that is not offering much is genuinely tiring — it adds a task to a stretch of the year that is already thin. If you have ever stood in a wet car park in March instructing yourself to find this atmospheric, you already know how that goes.

Some weeks are not for enjoying. They are for passing through, and passing through is a legitimate thing to do with a piece of time. The relief on offer here is not aesthetic; it is being told that the flatness is a property of the calendar rather than a personal failing.

What it does have

Take away the aesthetic argument and the weeks still have properties. They are just properties nobody has made pictures of.

The light is genuinely different — flat, sourceless, shadowless, coming from the whole sky at once. It is unflattering and it is also the reason everything looks weirdly detailed: no shadows means no hiding, so texture comes forward. Brick, bark, grit, wet tarmac. It is the closest the year gets to an X-ray.

The sound outside is at its emptiest. Winter's snow-muffling is gone, the birds have not fully returned, the leaves that soften summer noise do not exist yet. Streets in this period sound hard and far, and the distances feel longer than they are.

And the air does something no other season does: it goes back and forth. One afternoon is warm enough to make you take a coat off, and the next morning takes it back. Nothing is settled. This is unpleasant to plan around and interesting to notice, and it is the only real evidence that anything is happening at all.

Making an episode for a season with no images

We keep trying, and it is the hardest brief we set ourselves.

Everything in our usual toolkit is a contrast device, and this period has no contrast. The window is a problem, because the view through it is the flattest picture of the year. Fire is available but it drags the whole thing back into a January that has already ended, which reads as a lie about the date.

What has worked, on the two or three occasions it has worked, is going small and going close. Interiors so tight that the outside is only a pale rectangle at the edge of frame. Objects rather than landscapes. The palette pulled almost to grey and then one warm thing allowed in — a mug, a lit shade, a hand. And no event whatsoever, because inventing an event for this period would misdescribe it.

They are quiet episodes and they will never be the popular ones. But they are the honest ones for a fortnight of the year that otherwise gets no coverage at all, and it seems wrong to make forty pieces about the beautiful weeks and none about the rest.

The sign hunt

There is one thing worth doing in these weeks, and it is deliberately tiny. Not a project, not a reframe. A hunt for a single early sign per outing, on the understanding that most days you will not find one.

1. 1

   One per walk, and one is enough

   A bud that has thickened. One green thing at the base of a wall. Birdsong at an hour it was not happening in January. The point is not a survey. It is having one specific thing to look for so that the walk has a subject.

2. 2

   Look at the same place twice

   A single tree, a single verge, the corner of a yard. Change is only visible against something fixed, and February's changes are far too small to notice at large scale.

3. 3

   Accept the empty days

   Most days there will be nothing, because nothing is happening yet. An empty day is data, not failure — it is what makes the first non-empty one mean anything.

4. 4

   Write the date beside it

   Three words is plenty. The date is the part that matters, and a line a day here is more than enough to hold it.

There is a version of the year that only counts the photogenic parts, and it is about four months short. These weeks are in it too. They have a texture, they have a light, they have a duration, and none of that requires them to be lovely.

Mark the dates. Let them pass. The season turns properly soon enough, and it turns for real, not because anyone found the right way to look at March.

The evening is warm here.