Monday 13.03.2023

 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...........

.....while yesterday lunchtime the phrase "blue-remembered hills" sprang to mind, though not perhaps as Housman* envisaged them, speaking, as he was, of hills several hundred miles south of here where

 the still air was glacial and the landscape had an icy blue tinge to it under clouds of pale grey and white. 

*A Shropshire Lad

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.

A. E. Housman  1859-1936