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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is the author of ‘The Almanac: a Seasonal Guide to 2026’
In a time of deep gloom, it is quietly cheering to read about the sun. This week, as we edge towards the darkest midwinter day, brought news that 2025 has been the UK’s sunniest year on record.
It may be hard to remember this now — and near impossible to feel it in our bones. Not only does the announcement fall in the month with the shortest day (a London day will last 7 hours and 53 minutes on December 21, compared with a whopping 16 hours and 38 minutes on June 21) but our sunny year was heavily frontloaded, giving us a miraculously bright spring and summer before petering out into more natural meteorological territory in autumn. By winter, it was all a distant memory.
Sunday is the winter solstice, the year’s narrowest door of light: the shortest day and the longest night. This much is unchanging. The earth orbits the sun at a tilt of 23.5 degrees and so sometimes (in summer) we in the northern hemisphere are angled towards the sun; sometimes (right now) we are angled away from it and our daily turn on our own axis takes us through more shadow than light. The chilly depths of space fill our skies for a larger chunk of each 24 hours than our own hot star does.
Day length alters to an annual pattern. But this news is about sunshine hours, and so is more concerned with cloud cover or the lack of it. In 2025, we had unusually clear skies — weeks and months of them. Light was generous and spring arrived early and clean edged. Summer lingered, day after day of blue that felt borrowed from somewhere further south.
This amount of sunshine loosens time. Lunch breaks lengthened and late returns were forgiven; evenings felt possible again and a glass of wine in a dusky garden became a whole event. The British body, so accustomed to bracing itself against drizzle, remembered the pleasure of sitting still without shivering. There were packed parks and crowded beaches, the country was full of the smell of warm tarmac and the distant tinkle of ice cream vans. Sunshine altered the pace of life, as we remembered how much easier it is to be human in warmth and light.
But woven through that pleasure was unease. We saw fields dry and crack; rivers thin to threads; gardens bloom out of season. Wildlife, finely tuned to older rhythms, was thrown offbeat, with birds nesting too early and insects emerging before there was enough to sustain them.
The light we welcome and glory in can also unbalance the intricate negotiations of the natural world. We know, even as we bask, that these records are not really meant to be broken. We remember that we live in a clutch of rain-lashed islands on the edge of the Atlantic and not in the Mediterranean — and that perhaps our lands are more suited to a little less of the glorious golden stuff.
Marking the winter solstice has always provided an answer to our fear of the dark: look, the light is already turning back. Perhaps, this is a good moment to hold in our minds our concerns about the light as well.
It is hard to understate the joy that the stretching days bring us. The solstice is a hinge in the dark, the moment the earth begins, however modestly, to lean back towards illumination. On Sunday, the sun will rise at its latest and set at its earliest. From then on the days will lengthen, by seconds at first, so slowly we won’t notice. It works patiently, incrementally, returning us by stealth to those light-filled days.
One evening, only a few weeks from now, we will realise the light has lingered. And in that small noticing will be the enduring comfort of the turning year, that the path back towards brightness has already begun, towards another year and whatever light and sunshine — and accompanying delights and worries — that brings with it.
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