Four hours of winter light

At 08:40 this morning it was still properly dark, and by 08:55 the sky over Hornstull had gone the colour of a cheap bedsheet. That is the signal. Sunrise is listed as 08:47 at this time of year, but the number is a formality; what actually happens is that the darkness thins out for a while and then, some time after nine, the city becomes photographable. It stays that way until roughly a quarter to three. Four hours, give or take, and not one of them is what you would call bright.

I spent my first two winters here being annoyed about this. I would get up at a sensible hour, drink coffee, answer some email, look up at eleven and discover that the good part of the day was already half gone. Then I would rush out and shoot badly for ninety minutes in a foul mood. It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out that the problem was not the light. The problem was that I was still running a summer schedule in a city that had stopped offering one.

So now December looks different. The alarm goes at 07:15, which for me is close to violence. Coffee and two slices of rye with butter and a boiled egg, standing at the kitchen counter, because sitting down leads to reading things. Bag packed the night before — one body, the 35, a spare battery kept in an inside pocket where it stays warm, and nothing else, because in gloves you will not change a lens and you should stop pretending otherwise. Out of the door by 08:30. By the time the sky begins to lift I want to already be somewhere, not on my way to somewhere.

Today that somewhere was the stretch of Söder above Slussen, walking east along the cliff with the whole city laid out below and the water flat and dark. Minus three, no wind, air completely still. The kind of cold that is honestly quite pleasant for the first hour and then arrives all at once in your fingers. There was frost on the railings and a man in a high-vis jacket scattering grit with a shovel, one scoop every few metres, in no hurry at all. He nodded. I nodded. This is the full extent of most Stockholm winter conversation and I have grown fond of it.

The thing nobody tells you about a sun that never climbs is that it makes the light very slow and very sideways. In July the sun is overhead for hours and everything is flat and hard and you wait until nine at night for anything interesting. In December there is no waiting. The whole four hours are golden hour, in the sense that the sun sits at the height of a second-floor window and stays there, sulking. Shadows run for thirty metres. Every ordinary building gets a warm face and a cold side. It is, frankly, a gift, and I resented it for two years because it arrived at an inconvenient time of day.

I did lose about forty minutes to my own stupidity, though. Somewhere around eleven I noticed the frames looking a stop and a half dark and blamed the meter, then the snow, then the general injustice of the northern hemisphere. It was exposure compensation. I had dialled it down at some point yesterday, indoors, for a reason I no longer remember and did not write down, and then failed to check the dial before leaving the flat. Twenty-odd frames of a perfectly good frost-lit courtyard, all of them murky. I have been doing this for years. I still do this.

Coffee at half twelve, at the small place on Bondegatan where the tables are too close together and the radiator knocks. Filter, and a cinnamon bun that had clearly been out since morning and was better for it — slightly dry, more cardamom than sugar. The woman at the next table asked if I was working. "Sort of," I said. "It's light until quarter to three, so, yes." She said: "Then why are you sitting down?" She was smiling, but she also had a point, and I finished the coffee faster than I meant to.

The last stretch was Nytorget down towards Vitabergsparken, and this is when December earns itself. From about half one the light starts going amber, then pink along the top of the buildings, then a strange cold blue that sits over the snow for a good half hour after the sun has technically gone. Windows come on one by one. Someone was walking a dachshund in a knitted coat and both of them looked deeply unimpressed. By 14:50 it was over. Not dusk — over. The city switched from photograph to interior.

And that is the part I have come round to. Winter here does not take the day away from you, it just hands you a smaller one and expects you to be organised about it. Four hours of work, then a long dark evening that belongs to editing, soup, and other people. The rest of the year I chase light across sixteen hours and get less done. I would not say I look forward to December. But I no longer arrive at it unprepared, and this year, for the first time, I was outside before the sky changed rather than after.