Dan Richards reflects on a year of sharing stories of darkness and light.
2025 was a strange old year, quite a lot of which I spent on tour with Overnight, a book which sought to shine a light on the work, care, dreams and wildlife afoot whilst most of us sleep.
It’s weird touring a non-fiction hardback because, inevitably, things change – the world doesn’t stop or remain in place just as and because you wrote it down – so as I went around having conversations and telling stories, I was constantly having to tweak and update my narrative.
Some things came to an end, even before the book was published.
In Autumn last year, Royal Mail ceased operating mail trains. The final East Coast mainline service ran on June 14th 2024, piloted by driver Keith Buckley, in whose cab I rode as part of my Shadows & Reflections of 2023.
The age and increasing maintenance demands of the trains, the difficulty to obtain spare parts, and the cost of electricity were all flagged as key factors in Royal Mail’s decision to move away from rail transport in favour of road and air. ‘Only 3% of mail is transported by rail’, a press release explained – as if that wasn’t a decision Royal Mail had made – before noting that no jobs will be lost because rail staff would be redeployed driving lorries; all of which rather suggests that Royal Mail is aiming for Net Zero in the same way I daydream about a Nobel Prize. Altogether, a rather abject slipshod end to a historic storied service after 194 years.
In happier news, 2025 marked 100 years of the BBC’s Shipping Forecast. Announcers Ron Brown and Viji Alles came along to Overnight’s London launch and Ron read from the Late Ships chapter to a spellbound Brick Lane Bookshop. I also had the pleasure of sharing a stage at Hay with Meg Clothier, whose book celebrating a hundred years since the first broadcast is a maritime marvel.
Sadly, in a very BBC move, perhaps anticipating jollity and anxious to both-sides-it, as of April 1st, 2024, the Shipping Forecast was cut from four daily broadcasts to two on weekdays (00:48 and 05:20) and three at weekends – the daytime long wave-only transmissions at 12:04 and 17:54 are no more; a loss to listeners of Test Match Special and analogue sea dogs alike.
Bat numbers at Buckfastleigh crashed shortly after my first visit – at which point, I really did begin to feel like a nocturnal Jonah. Although the cause turned out to be more Strigiform than Cetacea.
‘Owls moved into the roost in 2024,’ explained Pam to a packed-out room at the East Gate Bookshop, Totnes, on the evening of Overnight’s publication. ‘They disturbed the breeding females who tried to move to nearby roosts, but were there too disturbed by owls, so fled.’
Most of the main South Devon roosts are monitored but no substantial increase in numbers was detected, so nobody knows where the bats went or where a large number may still be. At one point only 12 bats were counted in Buckfastleigh on a summer night when several hundred might have been expected.
Thankfully, numbers have since increased. Speaking to me in September 2025, Pam reported ‘seeing about 500 in our usual spot, so I’m estimating that 1,200 have returned to the roost’, which is great news.
Many other good things have happened, fresh dawns.
2025 is the 80th anniversary of Tove Jansson’s first Moomin story so I was doubly delighted to publish an account of ice fishing on the twilit Baltic with Marie Kellgren and her father, Viking, in a recent issue of Scotland’s excellent Gutter Magazine.
‘Some big changes’ Marie emailed me last month, ‘I’m not fishing anymore, dad still does with Grandpa [but] I got the opportunity to work for Martha.’ – The Martha Association, a Finnish non-profit citizens’ organization founded in 1899 with the aim was to promote public education among women across Finland – ‘So I’m now working with a Smartfish project teaching kids in school how to prepare and make food out of fish. It’s been really interesting and I get to see some more of Finland as well.’
Congratulations to you! I wrote back. Your knees and sleep patterns must be thrilled. Good luck!
Once I’d hit SEND, I sat for a while recalling the bite of the Finnish winter, the roar of Viking’s chainsaw cutting holes in the ice. Hard work, long days through the sunless Winter months; the blinking lights far out at sea, the trees of Pellinge doubled-over with snow in the blue-dark of January.
The crews of Anstruther RNLI and HM Coastguard helicopter Rescue 912 continue their 24 hour vigils, ready to deploy and race to those in peril and distress.
The outreach teams of St Mungo’s are out every night of the year as ever more people turn up on the streets needing help. The front page on their website is frank about the UK’s current homeless situation: ‘Rough sleeping is on the rise. With the increased pressures of the cost of living crisis, we need to prepare for this to continue.’
No light without darkness.
Following a book talk in Bristol, I received message:
When I read about the book, the excerpts and descriptions resonated so much with my life (night owl, working in A&E, a trainer for those working in sleep studies) … we aren’t the heroes everyone thinks but real people who struggle to find worth and peace in a chaotic world. I was a classicist who left to become a medic so I could be useful to the modern world. It’s made the pandemic (and memories of it) manageable. Good luck on your tour.
Last week, after a Manchester event with the brilliant Jean Sprackland, another:
I just wanted to send you a message to say how much I appreciated you sharing your experiences while in critical care at the event this evening. I’m an anaesthetist and have a lot of those kinds of conversations & it’s so valuable to hear and be reminded how it feels from the other side. I’m so sorry that it felt lacking in comfort – for some people we’re the last person they ever speak with & the weight of that is something I think about often…
These are two of many.
What can we all do with these memories, this trauma carried by people within and without our creaking systems of care?
The news cycle that rolls on and over us all – the deathly euphemisms, lack of accountability; the way people talk of the end of the world like it might be avoided, might never happen, when it’s happening every day and night to someone, someone’s family.
With this in mind, in 2025 I’ve tried to find and celebrate the good and humane, help those helping even though it sometimes felt futile, and find and share stories of connection rather than schism – because it’s all fun and games pointing out how fucked everything is, quite another to soothe and unify, amplify a sense of belonging.
I’ve found strange and galvanising connections in all sorts of odd places but perhaps the most affecting occurred after an Overnight event with the brilliant Rozie Kelly in Ripon, North Yorkshire, I stood with a small crowd of onlookers to witness a hornblower ‘set the watch’, an ancient ceremony dating back to AD886 when Saxon King Alfred the Great presented Ripon with a horn after granting the city a Royal Charter.
At 9 o’clock every night of the year, without fail, a horn is blown at the four corners of the obelisk in Ripon’s Market Place to announce that a watch has begun against crime and disorder. The horn is then sounded three times outside the mayor’s house to confirm that the watch has been set. The tradition commemorates the time in the Middle Ages when Ripon’s first citizen, the Wakeman, was responsible for crime prevention in the city from 21:00 until dawn – an early law enforcement officer who pledged to ensure the peace, enforce a city-wide curfew and compensate any victims of burglary on his watch. At 1139 years and counting, this continuous act of observance has a good claim to be the longest unbroken human ritual there is.
So I’ve been thinking about that – benevolent acts, the solidarity manifest in looking out for each other, especially as the nights, already dark, grow colder.
Who wrote that hope is a verb? I don’t know. Somebody wise. I remember that Bob Hoskins said it was good to talk, and I’ve seen this past year how folk love stories about lights in the dark, kindness generates kindness and ‘Thanks’ is a word best said aloud.
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‘Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark’ is out now and available here, published by Canongate.