Emily Tellwright Signature Logo

Emily Tellwright

Author, Artist, Publisher

Category: Christmas and New Year

  • Epiphany

    Tall pine trees with sun shining through them casting long shadows surrounded by blue sky and other smaller trees

    So, it is time to take the decorations down and go back to work. (Actually, we take ours down early these days, as no one visits after New Year’s Day and there is a lot more celebrating in the run up to Christmas than there was in the time of the twelve days’ festivities.) The process always reminds me of the Mole in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows when he volunteers to repack the basket after his impromptu picnic with the Rat at the beginning of the book:

    ‘Packing the basket was not quite such pleasant work as unpacking the basket. It never is. But the Mole was bent on enjoying everything…’

    No, taking the decorations down is never such pleasant work as putting them up, but there are things to enjoy. In our small and rather full house, one is the sensation of space: for a couple of days there seems to be more room than there used to be. Another is the lengthening of the days and the distant vista of spring. You might have a holiday booked, or if, like me, you are lucky enough to enjoy your work, it can be exciting to go back to it refreshed after some rest and entertainment.

    This painting is some of my first work of 2025, and it will be available to buy as a greetings card from Castle Sefton Press very soon when the Press’ online art shop opens.

    Finding work that you enjoy and that integrates with the other facets of your life is something that many of the characters in my novel Ghost Train – now available to buy from Castle Sefton Press – are trying to do, not least the central figure Clyde Tranter. The suspenseful supernatural mystery that looms over him throughout the book is not the only problem he has to consider; after all, what we do with our lives and whom we spend them with are two of the greatest mysteries that we all have to solve, and many things about our society today make them harder to crack for many of us.

    Talking of society brings me to something else. This is the time for new resolutions of course, but I know that many people feel overwhelmed by the troubled state of humanity and the planet, and a tragically large number by the difficulties of day-to-day living; they feel powerless to make a difference. But we can. We all can, if we bring just a little more love into our lives this year.

    A lot of generalisations and stereotypes about English people are nonsense, but it does seem to me that most of them find it difficult to talk about love, and I can sense some of them groaning and rolling their eyes as they read my suggestion. Love for family, romantic partners and pets is now widely acknowledged, but what I have said may well seem to many here like embarrassing silliness.

    But it isn’t. If everyone alive on the planet felt enough love this year, most people’s suffering could be immediately eased. And it can start small. Not everyone has family, or a partner, or a pet, but it doesn’t mean that they can have no love in their lives: you could stop to love the song on the radio, or the daffodil shoot poking through the frozen soil, or that old lady who is keeping you waiting in the queue at the Post Office because she’s so slow. Just find something that you can open your heart to.

    It can be a friend. We’re obsessed with the idea of love between two adults meaning something sexual; that’s a great thing, of course, but it doesn’t have to be like that. I love all my friends deeply, and that’s a kind of relationship that was widely accepted until quite recently, from Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to David and Jonathan in the Old Testament.

    The best thing about opening up to a little love is that it is something everyone can do. No one is powerless because they are poor, unwell or judged as insiginificant. It is a practice that will support you in navigating life’s challenges and that can ultimately make a difference to the state of the world.

    You could give your love to a subject or activity for which you have a passion. If you’ve read Ghost Train – obviously I recommend that you do, but it really would make an entertaining, thought-provoking and uplifting start to your year if you haven’t – think of all the characters’ passions and interests. If more people truly loved birds, gardening, books, cookery, theatre, dancing, education, libraries, vintage trains and even true crime, would humanity be in the mess that it’s in?

    Of course it wouldn’t.

    Happy New Year, everyone and love to you all.

  • Merry Christmas

    I’m tired. What with the launch of Castle Sefton Press’ first book – Ghost Train – and preparations for Christmas, I think that’s only natural. And it’s good to be tired from doing productive things. At the last minute too, CSP also had to deal with some new EU legislation, the new General Product Safety Regulation, which means that we have to fulfil various disclosure and traceability obligations and ensure that our books are safe for EU customers. I don’t think there is too much to worry about, unless we come up with something like J K Rowling’s Monster Book of Monsters.

    I enjoy hectic times at this time of year, within reason: being busy, being tired, rushing jobs late at night and trying to cram too much stuff into the fridge. It’s all part of the festivities and builds up the excitement, although this year’s Christmas art work is a reminder that we all need to take a rest occasionally, even at our busiest times.

    It is also a depiction of a very old tradition as I was reminded by Jane Moulder of the excellent Renaisance music ensemble PIVA at their very entertaining Christmas concert last week. It may go back to the Saxon and Viking practice of leaving food out to appease Woden or Odin at this time of year.

    Jane also reminded me what a long season Yuletide used to be, in addition to the specific celebration of Christmas. Many people speak with cynical scorn about early Christmas preparations these days, but it doesn’t have to be commercial. For example, I usually start thinking about Christmas in September when I make preserves to give as gifts, because that is harvest season. I’m sure that’s something Clyde in Ghost Train would like to do. It’s all part of the ideas of work, life and seasonal rhythms that are explored in the book, and some of those are themes that I want to return to in future works.

    Future works are something else I have been busy with. I have been developing a new novel that I hope will become the first of a series set in the fictional region where the Ghost Train story takes place. But Christmas is a wonderful time for short stories too – particularly about magical adventures, mysteries and ghosts – so I have also been working on a few of those. Entertaining by storytelling on dark nights is another ancient tradition, one that has transferred successfully to television particularly in the superb BBC films by Laurence Gordon Clark. If you can’t get hold of a copy of my Ghost Train by Christmas, you can experience a very different one in his film adaptation of Charles Dickens’ story The Signalman, which is showing in the UK on Talking Pictures TV on New Year’s Day.

    Of course, Dickens’ was famous for his Christmas stories; A Christmas Carol remains one of his most famous works of any kind. The week before the PIVA concert, we were entertained by Don’t Go Into The Cellar‘s rendition of the story: actor Jonathan Goodwin dressed as Dickens and presenting it in dramatic monologue, very much as the author used to do. I very much enjoyed seeing a style of acting involving extravagant costume and make-up, pronounced gestures and varied projection of the voice that I had thought totally extinct. It made me think of the magnificently anachronistic screen actor Tod Slaughter in one of his best-known films, The Murder in the Red Barn (1936). If you’re new to that kind of thing, you probably won’t believe it.

    The film is supposedly based on the real-life murder of Maria Marten in 1827, although from what I remember from the excellent permanent exhibition at The Moyes Hall Museum in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk (UK) it doesn’t bear much resemblance to the true story. The exhibition contains one of the most sinister objects I have ever seen close to: a book telling the ‘Red Barn Murder’ story that is bound in the tanned skin of the (supposed) murderer, William Corden.

    A book bound in human skin. I don’t think that would pass the EU General Product Safety Regulation.

    Wishing everyone a merry and festive Christmas season, and looking forward to some engaging new stories in 2025.

  • What will you carry through to the New Year?

    It is once more the time of short, dark days, warm glows and twinkly lights, hearty meals and inward pleasures. Like Clyde in Ghost Train, I have prepared the dark, rich foods of the heart of winter: mincemeat, fruit cake and a round splodge of a Christmas pudding. The first mince pies, a delight enhanced by their long absence, have been baked and eaten, I have rooted out my plastic apron with the holly pattern, and the artwork for this year’s Christmas cards is completed. Outside, the garden has been subdued by the touch of frost and snow.

    The equinox seasons – autumn and spring – inspire work and energy, whilst the solstice ones – winter and summer – demand leisure and indulgence. There is no more welcome feeling I know than the anticipation of Christmas; there is no celebration that is, in our society, so widespread, and no better time than the shortest, darkest days to eat, drink and be merry with friends. Our shopping streets, like Ridgeley’s in Ghost Train, may be scrappy remnants of what they once were, and our excitement may be a mere shadow of that felt in the innocence of a childhood in simpler times, but there remains something life-affirming about that small flame of enthusiasm that flickers into being inside us in December at the thought of the occasion to come. Just a few months ago, the thought of it all stirred nothing except a slightly weary remembrance of all the work involved, and yet now the small spring of seasonal delight is bubbling away. It is a kind of magic.

    There is also the wonder of the stillness of Christmas morning. If you have excited children, visiting family, presents to open and dinner to cook you may find that fanciful, but all that energy and activity sits on top of the peace of a morning when more of us than at any other time have ceased our regular activities. If you have just the space of one breath to pause, you will feel that peace, the quiet as of a landscape muffled in fresh snow; it’s as if the Earth itself had stopped spinning before setting off in a new direction.

    I have no idea what this Christmas will bring to me or to the world. There are trials and suffering all around and I don’t know if more troubles or some relief are coming. But my question is, whatever is coming, what will you carry through it? What is so much a part of you that you will still feel or believe it whatever happens? As we pass through Christmas, the full stop of the year, what things about ourselves will still be with us for the start of 2025? The things that survive will be the things that form our identity, that make us who we are during our life on this planet.

    If you’re interested in how ideas change over time, what we believe and then leave behind and how society changes as a result, you will enjoy my new novel Ghost Train, which is coming out on 13th December. There are also spooky happenings to be explained, some comedy and delicious food along the way, and of course mysterious trains. What could be better entertainment for this time of year?