Solstice
Notes on 2024, 2025 and the meaning of the solstice.
Dear Storytime Collective,
As we approach our third annual summer solstice celebration, I wanted to write a short note on the significance of the summer solstice to Storytime and subtly suggest successive sessions over subsequent seasons.
Enough of this utter nonsense!
Why the solstice?
A noted and highly viral poet friend of mine once scoffed and mocked at our marking of the winter solstice.
Great for reach! He mocked, as he gave me a wedgie and attempted to shove my head down the toilet bowl. Why don’t you just call it the Christmas party?
Stop that! I pleaded.
In that case, I partially agreed with him, though I resented the way in which the point had been expressed. The winter solstice is most definitely a more enigmatic and recalcitrant creature, representing as it does the nadir of daylight in a year, a shrunk and withered excuse for the time unit we call a day. The summer solstice a more proud and regal thing, not aloof but most certainly enigmatic, standing discerning at the height of the year, looking over the heads of all the slightly shorter days clustered around it, and the much shorter ones either side in February and November and all those sorts of months.
There is something seductive about the ancient nature of the solstice. But we at Storytime are not especially pagan or of any faith or persuasion other than a commitment to whimsy and delight. The fixation goes further than that and on to the real astronomical and unarguable fact that this is the longest day, when the earth is tilted closest to the burning ball of gas that sustains us. All methods and instruments of measurement (calendars, clocks, abacuses, hourglasses) are absurdly recent by comparison to this mythical fact of the universe.
Long before the species is what it now is, the solstice was itself, and long after we have been reduced to rubble by the chitterings of insecure men, so the solstice will remain. It is an acknowledgment that people of all faiths celebrate many of their own festivals of significance dervised from the same source - the movement of the earth through space and the seasons as we complete our daily rotations through another annual ellipse.
The solstice then allows us to commune and gather with humility in the face of our immense insignificance, tell stories, play music, be together, be silly, be earnest at the true and ancient midway point of another ghastly, wonderful, tremulous year. Insist that all these things are important - deeply, deeply important - as important as anything as ridiculous and impermanent as a human life can be.
The first summer solstice in 2024 was the first time it really felt like we might be building something important - our biggest crowd ever at old beloved Enid Street Tavern and a magnificent assemblage. The summer solstice in 2025 felt like another step. Our first sellout night, and again a tender yet febrile atmosphere in the room with a truly exceptional array of readers from our collective. Diversity is important not only in how people identify and present themselves but also the tone and textures of their voices. We lean towards humorous and absurdist at our nights but the night as a whole is meaningless if we don’t have a wide chorus of different keys, notes and perspectives. This night underscored this perfectly - with a whole range of excellent, moving, hilarious and beautiful stories from across our collective.
On then to Friday 26 June 2026, wherein we have taken on the mantle of wandering bards of London, finding a home wherever we might tell a story. There is a burgeoning poetry and storytelling space in London and we are proud to be a part of that. Anyone who implies that a storytelling night is an original idea devised in the last few years has a fundamental misunderstanding of the human experience. We are not doing anything original or new. Rather, we are the inheritors of an ancient tradition.
We have some familiar voices and many wonderful new ones to join us as we mark the solstice in Peckham on Friday 26 June. I am honoured to be co-hosting the night with my close friend and co-conspirator, Leo Flanagan. It’s going to be a special one.
You can get your tickets here - there is a half-price discount for ten lucky readers who have made it this far in the letter.
Get set.
Love,
Adam
