Today's a bit of a white noise day. One of those days where you are awake, but it just feels like the world is wrapped in transparent cotton wool, so you can see it and interact with it, but you don't feel right there - you know? Behind your thoughts is the buzzing of distraction that prevents thoughts flowing properly. These are days when you hope you can function on autopilot. So I apologise in advance if the words get out of control today.

It's almost as if the world is a copy of itself, exact in every way, but there's a distance about the scenery and all the daily actions seem removed. Baudrillard would've been in his element - or should that be the image of an image of an image of his element? There are times when I wonder if simulacrum is just the philosophical justification of a hangover?

The starkness of the trees now, many bereft of their leaves, adds to this sense of strangeness; a landscape terraformed, pared down to essentials and covered with shades of grey. The landscape has turned alien, bleached by the few hours of sunlight that attack with the intensity of the time limited. What is left takes on a general droopiness, a sense of the forlorn and weary.

These are days to use the whole palette of grey - from frosted silvers through to the bluest black: to see the dying green reflected in the functional concrete; the silver moss that wraps the umber trees; the blend of metal and stone upon the floor of the tracks; and the draining of the pinks and yellows from flesh leaving the streaks of white that lie in the grains of our bodies - Lucien Freud would have loved it.

But use them quickly, for as the day begins, so it scampers away and we are left with a blackness that is more complete than the rest of the year, one that warps time - convincing you that midnight has arrived at five and that the day doesn't begin till noon. This is why we look to candles, to glittering baubles, to fires and to splashes of colour; to burst through the dark, to remind us of the day and the spring, and to bring us together for warmth.

Bells shiver our spines, the clarity of soprano and tenor voices send us skyward, but the comfort of the bases and the altos brings us back to the hearth. This is the season for harmonies, to embrace the year end, reflect of what it has brought us and remind us of what is to come.