Little blue

IT was two days until Christmas and the afternoon sky was blue and crisp as Lydia’s car pulled up in front of the magnificent Bristol Hotel. Why was it called the Bristol? she wondered. It was nowhere

TOMMY was cold. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t felt cold. His fingers hurt the most. He folded them inside his woollen jumper and squeezed them tightly. Sometimes it eased the tingling pain. So

MAUD had been looking forward to finally getting her decorations out again. And now with a whole afternoon at her disposal she was really going to savour the experience and make it something special.

HER phone pinged with the e-mail while she was lying on the beach. The Greek sun blazed down from – well, being a writer, it was second nature for Amy to think about how she would describe the blue sk

HELLO, little one!” Penny Dauntless greeted a robin-redbreast, who cocked his head as she pushed along her trolley of post on the daily round. “How often is there such a perfect mid-December morning?”

Whether winter-faded ferns, the spindly harvestman or the tyrannical stare of an irate chicken, through-lines from the prehistoric to our modern age are all around us in November, says John Lewis-Stempel