Photography: Jamie Shipston-Mourn

The wind knives off the estuary; the ground clings like something alive, sodden and resentful, a constant reminder of what’s been left behind. You rise in the dark, while the world sleeps, stacking your work in layers, the ache of an unspoken promise to persist, chasing the faintest sliver of daylight, though more often met with the same grey weight that never quite lets go.

Underfoot, the peat sinks like wet stone, the roads glinting sharp with frost—a quiet, stubborn decay. The effort wears down the edges of comfort, filing you into something sharper, colder, the way rust eats at metal—gradual, unnoticed, inevitable. You build yourself the way winter does: slow, unrelenting, exacting. The rhythm emerges only in hindsight—a pattern carved from repetition, like frost creeping into cracks, slowly marking its territory.

There’s no glory in it, no epiphany. The beauty lies somewhere in the fight.

Don't chase the light, let the darkness shape you.