I can’t remember last time it snowed at Christmas, perhaps only once in the years I’ve lived in this small Warwickshire village. I love winter, but when the white stuff falls, it really is magical like living in a Christmas card. You know, one of those Georgian scenes with cheery coachmen and rosy-cheeked urchins carolling whilst last minute shoppers stride home, she glowing under her poke bonnet, he bearing a hefty goose over one shoulder. Our parish council switches on Christmas lights on 1 December, encouraging us with a Christmas Fayre to festively light up our homes at the same time. So the best bits of the season, the lights, the anticipation and the banishment of the dark gloriously lasts until Epiphany. I love it.
We live opposite a Norman church on the Fosse Way, in a Georgian terrace built around 1780, set back from the main road behind a crescentshaped village green. Our house was once the village shop, then the Post Office, and we made it our studio pottery for many years. Now the shop’s our front room, and – apart from mud that traipses in from a front door that opens onto the street, an aspect where morning sun fades everything it touches and, by afternoon we need lamps to read – I wouldn’t live anywhere else. By an open fire in winter twilight, with geese flying noisily home outside through a darkening pink-tinged sky, it’s the cosiest place in the world.