The weather app promised a day of blazing sunshine but fortunately not: the "busy old fool" only shows up the grubby windows and layers of dust after all.
Instead we had something a bit subtler: the sun a pale, more modest, version of itself trying to peep through the blues and greys and white, plenty of still-lying snow and ice, bare branches, winter silhouettes, and snowy garlands. Winter is hanging in there for a bit longer.
Weather. It`s been all about the weather and we`ve had just about everything possible in the last few days, apart from a full on heat wave. Never quite sure what`re going to wake up to. First thing this morning it was pure "dreich" - if that wonderful onomatopoeic word hadn`t existed it would have been necessary to make it up. To summarise: grey cloud, slushy underfoot in the remaining snow, rain/sleet/snow and a bitter northerly wind. occasionally the cloud descends and we are in a whiteout, impossible to tell where the cloud ends and the snow begins.
But! We have had mild weather, we have had winter wonderlands, we have had storms that have brought down yet more trees, we have had still, icy evenings, the occasional blizzard and drifting snow catkins on bare branches, daffodils buried in snow but ready to flower the minute the sun comes out while the gorse just doesn`t care and flowers anyway. Snowy dogs, red sunsets...........
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are
those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
