Discover the kindness of a Blue Monday snowfall

Waking to a new world, Henna Cundill considers the transformation of more than just the view.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Two small chidlren push a curtain aside to stare out the window at snow.

“Blue Monday” in Aberdeenshire (the third Monday in January) turned out to be a “white Monday” in the end. The snow began on Sunday evening, and it continued on and off throughout the night. It was accompanied by an atmospheric howling wind, which woke me up from time to time. At each waking I peeped through the window to see the world gradually disappear under a thick white blanket.

Monday morning was a liminal place – all of us dressed for work and school but drifting about the house as if it were still the weekend. We live next to a busy road, but there were few cars and what traffic noise there was had become strangely muted. None of us could settle to anything, we simply alternated peering out of the windows with checking online for news about school. Then came the announcement that school would open at 10am (there’s little that really stops for snow in Aberdeenshire) so on went the wellies and the woollies and off we went down the front path, both excited and a little awed to sully the unbroken blanket of white with those first few footprints.

Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

But as we walked, we noticed that our footprints weren’t at all the first. Tiny scratch marks testified that the sparrows, the robin, and the blackbirds had long been out and about, busy with their day’s travail. A slinky line of pawprints revealed the neighbour’s cat had paid us a visit too. All around our house, countless tiny stories of industry and encounter had already been told – (some sliding pawmarks and a few stray feathers suggested a gripping plot twist.) Later that morning, it began to snow again, and all these stories gradually disappeared. By the time my boys came tramping home from school, they were once more tasked with picking out a brand-new path across a fresh unbroken expanse of white.

After dinner I went for my own habitual walk. We’d had yet more flurries, so I had to make new footsteps all over again. By then the wind had dropped, the sky was crystal clear, and the snow had gone from powdery to satisfyingly crunchy underfoot. It felt like an awe-filled privilege to leave my trail of footprints. I walked one of my usual routes, but the white covering had softened both the landscape and the soundscape, making everything seem new and unfamiliar. As I trailed back through the housing estate, I noticed snowmen that had popped up in some front gardens, and neighbours who were chatting as they helped each other to shovel driveways and grit paths. Snow suspends the rule that we have to be standoffish and dour, even in Scotland.

What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new?

All in all, it was difficult to feel blue on a white Monday. The snow made it feel as if nothing was permanent, let alone usual. There was no drudgery, no same-old, same-old. I wondered if I could become like one of those tiny birds, skipping lightly through each day’s work? Even whilst canny to the fact that a certain sneaky cat was prowling about. By the time I got home, there were new prints from him also.

In the Bible, snow appears as a metaphor for forgiveness, for making a fresh start. We read in the book of Isaiah: “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” There is much in this idea that runs counter to how our modern society responds to misdeeds – especially in this age of instant messaging and social media, when photographic evidence of our blunders can travel the world instantly and be preserved for posterity. There is also much that runs counter to how I respond to myself when I mess things up. It is not usually the howling wind that keeps me up with ‘the dreads’ on a Sunday night, but my mind’s hobby of regurgitating memories of the previous week’s mistakes, misspeaks, and misunderstandings. In the pre-dawn hours of a Monday morning, I am usually awake and well occupied with the prospect that, in the week to come, I will almost certainly make many of those same mistakes again. I walk those same old paths, re-tread those familiar footsteps – the inevitability of my own imperfection is ever before me.

But what if I peered out of the window at the daybreak of every Monday morning and found that there was snow? That I was held in a liminal moment – less sure of what the coming week would hold. What if I could always watch yesterday’s path being gently erased, and always have another chance to make new? Ideas such as this are at the heart of the Christian hope. In the Bible, the Psalmist writes that God does not treat us as our sins deserve, nor repay us according to our mistakes. Instead, God takes them away so infinitely that they are: “as far as the East is from the West.” They are gone, from red as scarlet to as white as snow.

I suppose snow every Monday would be inconvenient. But snow on Blue Monday felt like a kindness – a gentle rendering of the familiar into the unfamiliar, allowing me to see things anew, to reflect, to reconsider, to redirect my steps in certain ways. As I write, there is more snow falling. Later I shall have to go out with the shovel and the grit, but I won’t do it yet. If I leave it for now, then when my boys return from school in a few minutes time, they too can tread one more time with awe across a fresh, unbroken expanse of white.

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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.