In October 2024, due to a shortage of university accommodation, I rented a short-term place in the town of Lancaster and travelled by bus each day between my home and the campus. As a coastal town in the north of England, Lancaster remains below 15°C for most of the year. In particular, the period after winter time begins and before the Christmas break—with its steadily shortening daylight, persistent rain, and strong cold winds—is the darkest season of the year, and for me the most oppressive.
During this time, each morning on the bus to school, I wrote on the ticket my personal state at the start of the day, and sometimes also notes on the previous night’s sleep; on the evening journey back, I recorded what had happened that day, along with my emotional or bodily condition. Apart from a small number of journeys for which no ticket was issued due to faults in the fare machine, I ultimately collected 91 tickets.
Most of the tickets are filled with negative emotional outbursts, such as: “Fuck, XX makes noise in front of me every day like a fucking idiot.” These tickets function like a private life archive of an outsider in a foreign place, recording emotional states, patterns of movement, rhythms of work, and more. Within the uniform format of the ticket surface, each one produces difference and variation at the level of detail. For example, the departure time on 20 November is one hour later than on 19 November—this may be read as delayed travel caused by fatigue from the previous day’s work.
This method of introducing subtle variation into a homogeneous structure resonates with Sianne Ngai’s discussion of interestingness: the informational differences between each ticket and the baseline standard of the category produce a series of conceptual gaps in the viewer’s cognition, sparking brief flashes of curiosity and prompting sustained scrutiny and interpretation over time.
Between 2024 and 2025, I successively suffered a TFCC tear in both wrists, a meniscus injury, and a volar plate tear in the finger of my left hand. The prolonged immobilization in splints, the bodily compensation and emotional distress that followed, and the pressure of sustaining my studies in this condition weighed on me throughout. Lancaster After Winter Time Begins is a fragment of my PhD period—a faithful record of a difficult time I lived through.