The sun has stalled. Solstice is from the Latin Sol and sistere, meaning to stand still. In December, the hiatus is around our star’s southernmost rising and setting points, and appears to last about two weeks to the naked-eye observer. In the northern hemisphere, it brings us the shortest of daylight hours. There weren’t enough today and we finished our afternoon walk in gathering dark to the sound of avian roosting rituals, and the nightly round of blackbird pseudo-alarm calls – the passerine equivalent of crying wolf to startle others into vacating favoured spots. By 10 o’clock, the cold is clean and sharp as a surgical blade, and frost dazzles like diamond dust by torchlight. Nothing stirs in branch, briar or bracken, and the moon is yet to appear, but the night is vivid with something larger than life. The Milky Way is visible as the faintest smudge, aligned with our lane. My beloved Sirius, Technicolor glitterball and jazziest light in the sky, has risen in the south-east. Mars dazzles gold over Taurus. Orion lurches like a festive drunk, and above them all, the seven sisters of the Pleiades dance their deep time, nuclear ring-a-roses. Earlier this year in the British Museum, I saw them crafted in gold alongside the sun and moon on the astonishing Nebra sky disc: the world’s oldest known depiction of astronomical phenomena. A golden arc on the rim of the disc appears to accurately represent the 82-degree angle between the summer and winter solstices at the latitude where the disc was found. My breath catches when a new light streaks east to south, scoring the night with white gold. The ensuing meteor shower (the Geminids) includes several of the brightest, longest-lived, longest-tailed I’ve ever seen. I mention it on social media and discover others are gazing up too, from bedroom windows and gardens, and most enviably, one from a riverside firebath. I think I’ll mark this as the turning of my year. By January, we’ll be moving again, out and up. Better to call it now, while I have time to do so, and there are these lights in the dark to remind me that, across time and space, the stars are ours.