A few minutes, or more…
The winter solstice live from Stonehenge
As well as hosting visitors from 5.15am, English Heritage are livestreaming the dawn of the winter solstice on YouTube. Sunrise is expected around 8.09am on Sunday 21 December, with crowds of revellers flocking to the Stone Circle. It’s free to visit, but English Heritage runs on donations.
Watch online here or go in person from 5.15am.
An hour
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Harold Offeh: Mmm, Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet
If the bleak mid-winter has you clutching your SAD lamp like a life vest, Kettle’s Yard is hosting works by the Ghanaian-British artist Harold Offeh, an antidote to grey. A wide-ranging visual artist whose work here encompasses Cindy Sherman-esque performance aspects, Offeh takes a lyric from Portishead’s Dummy as his title and runs with it, interrogating popular culture curiously, playfully – he reproduces Grace Jones’s Slave To The Rhythm sleeve art for a series called Covers – and with satirical anger.
Tickets at kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk
Three and a half hours
DoOm Yoga mini midwinter retreat
DoOm yoga specialises in immersive yoga sessions soundtracked by live, left-field musicians. This mini-retreat, on Saturday 20 December at 3pm – 6.30pm, isn’t one of those gigs, but it offers an afternoon of solstice-themed guided meditations and restorative practice, all bathed in penetrative drones; like a gong bath, but way cooler. There’s also some optional tarot card stuff, and a vegan dhal supper.
Tickets available here.Â
An evening
Robert Plant presents Saving Grace; touring until 23 December
Plant’s latest album with this troupe of Black Country musicians underscores just how much the erstwhile rock god has stuck to his creative guns in recent decades. Some carefully curated roots music, from blues to ancient folk – played beautifully by an ensemble that includes Plant’s latest duet partner, the accordionist Suzi Dian – is just the ticket for solstice night at Middlesbrough Town Hall.
Information at boxoffice.middlesbrough.gov.uk
A weekend
Cambrian Mountains stargazing weekend
To truly disconnect from the jingling consumerist high street bells and whistles, this weekend trip to the mountains – part of the Welsh Dark Sky organisation’s calendar of events – is guaranteed to refocus the mind. It’s a two-day programme of lectures on astronomy and astrophotography, starting Friday afternoon, with long sessions of skygazing into the nights. It’ll be a new moon, so perfect conditions; the weather looks OK at the time of publishing. (Oh and if you’re looking at the sky in the early hours of 25 December, the bright thing in the sky is the International Space Station on one of its regular fly-pasts.)
Information at gostargazing.co.uk
Illustration by Charlotte Durance