It’s been blowing a near gale and the rain has been pelting down for hours. You’re chilled and wet. The dog is gamely marching alongside you as you come down the country lane. Autumnal leaves are grouped in sodden clumps along the way and the hedgerows shudder in the wind. The stormy sky is starting to darken as dusk falls but ahead you see your cottage with its lights twinkling. You unlatch the garden gate and cross through the stone boundary wall. The sodden grass of the garden squelches as your dog trots across it. You open the heavy oak door with its iron handle and step inside to a realm of warmth. The mud room tiles darkening with the drops of water. You glance through the arch to the kitchen and see the aga stove there. A comforting bulk of constant heat. You pull off and hang your coat before scooping up the dog towel and giving the mutt a rub down. Your nose still bright red and cold as the heat warms you. Stepping into the kitchen your wife and child greet you. The baby babbling as your wife hands you a warm mug of tea. The fire crackles next door and the dog has already curled up in her basket. You sit at the old wooden table and strip your wet socks off extending your bare feet towards the warmth of the aga as you bounce your son and listen to his giggles. The storm outside continues, but here you are content and cozy.
Autumn and Winter are the cozy seasons and as we enter into Spring and Summer I often find myself reflecting on the months that have passed. I very much welcome the return of the sun and the lengthening evening hours, the gentle warmth that seeps back into the world as life buds anew. Seasonality is everything to me, despite our disconnect from nature we can still live in harmony with the seasons. Almost everywhere has seasonality of course but there are areas that don’t. European peoples, white people, have always historically inhabited seasonal places. Much is made of the need to prepare for winter and survive the lean early spring in these climes whilst the tropical and equatorial south bask in perpetual good conditions. I’m not interested in re-visiting such ground from an evolutionary pysch perspective here but rather examining the cultural value placed in particular on the autumnal and winter season. The idea of coziness.
The snow has been falling silently all night. The weak morning sunlight drifts into the room slowly waking you. Frost coats the interior of the windows. The duvet and wool blankets cocoon you and your wife. She’s still deeply asleep. Gingerly you move an arm out into the bedroom air. Cold. You withdraw it and adjust yourself ever so slightly. Soon you’ll have to get up and light the fire, get the water boiling and fill the house with the smell of coffee and sizzling bacon. But for now it can wait. As the golden light filters into the world you idly look out the window, through the frost, at the white winter wonderland. The bed is a warm nest for a while longer. You doze gently cozy and content.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt a true sense of coziness outside the winter and autumn months. Good weather and fair skies bring their own unique kind of joy but nothing quite comes close to coziness. Lazing in a hammock in the evening heat with a gin and tonic is its own delight but I’d never use the term cozy. Coziness has become a kind of meme in and of itself. A feeling captured with images of Pepe the frog huddled up with a blanket:
It captures something that we long for. To me it is all about the element of control and mastery of the elements. Coziness is almost a civilizational virtue in this way. It is the ability to construct shelter and aesthetics in such a way as to evoke this secure feeling. It arises from aesthetics as well. For example there are some horrendous modernist projects in the alps that preserve the exterior of a barn or building in wood and then fill the interior with a stark brutalist concrete. Take a look:
It looks kind of cozy, the wood amongst the trees but then the interior is this:
What kind of brutalist nonsense is this? The fur or woolen rugs might be an attempt to retain a sense of coziness but that just isn’t going to be possible is it. The brutalist backdrop is anything but comforting. It is austere. Just compare and contrast:
Not even a fair comparison. This pursuit of brutalism that has driven these people is just so bizarre, so alien to me. It feels so deliberate - such a purposeful rejection of warmth to embrace a coldness. Perhaps they want to play with the contrast of the brutalism and in truth feel liberated by the emptiness of the space. A kind of reaction to the clutter we surround ourselves with. These are interesting avenues of design but they just do not lend themselves to that cozy environment. The cozy environment is something I, and many others, seek out.
Perhaps coziness is a kind of cope - Tom Rowsell better known as Survive the Jive posted the following on his Telegram channel some time ago:
17th century Icelanders had a saying:
Öllu verri er veturinn en Tyrkinn "Winter is worse than the Turk"
By Turk they did not mean Turkish people, but rather Muslims from North Africa - mainly Berbers or other Moroccans who captured and enslaved or murdered Icelanders. Yet they considered Winter to be worse than this. Something for "cosy winter" enjoyers to consider.
Tom’s onto something here - but it’s more about romanticism of elements of the past than about the coziness of winter. It is a sign of our triumph and good living that we now are able to see winter as cozy. We are lucky in that we don’t have food shortages to contend with either. It’s easy to feel cozy when your belly is full. It’s also worth remembering just how much more bitterly cold and miserable the winters of the Little Ice Age actually were. Iceland was settled during a warm period but then as time ground on far worse weather stepped in and it became a more inhospitable place. Accounts of the Little Ice Age in mainland Europe are also brutal.
Where does that leaves us coziness enjoyers? Somehow found out as STJ seems to imply? I don’t think so. Coziness is a moment of enjoyment in creating good conditions against the awful ones. It is speaking to a level of comfort amidst the storm that we value and strive to create. The past is a foreign country and the peasant dwellings in winter were certainly more miserable places than we romanticize but at the same time there is an eternal human element to coming out of the bitter cold inside to a fire. No matter how bleak or hopeless the situation that moment brings an element of joy, a momentary respite from the storm outside.
Cozy.