It is winter ...

Can't think if I've used this title before for a blip, but it slides into my head to the music of - I think - Thea Musgrave; something I sang long ago with the Glasgow University Choral Society, in another life. Anyway, today is apparently the start of meteorological winter and though it wasn't as cold as it's going to be in a couple of days, it was dank and chilly. 

Spent the morning fretting about Christmas presents - though at least I was able actually to order a couple, having had a helpful phone call with one of my daughters-in-law. I failed, however, to make the soup that I had intended, so we had bread and cheese for the second day running. How did mornings become so very short? 

In the afternoon I went a walk in the mist with my pal. We met a couple with the hugest deerhounds I've ever seen; they stood docile in the damp while we chatted to their owners. We then marched up the hill into the mist, both very conscious of computeritis - the combination of aches in back and neck brought on by spending too long at the desk. Robins came and went, and a single red squirrel poured itself across our path. There was the scent of woodsmoke in the air from a fire at the top of the hill, where an orange-clad gardener burned cleared timber in the wood.

Blipping the view from our descent, with the hills above Loch Eck swathed in mist and the smoke rising from the house in the old formal garden below. It's not quite four o'clock, and already dusk is gathering. Our hair is glistening with water, though it is not really raining, and we both feel better after an hour of exercise and talk.

A final, unsettling thing: last night, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I had a mental picture of a grandchild doing something that led to an accident. I remember thinking this was an absurd thing to allow myself to think when I was supposed to be sleeping, but then it developed into a strange limbo where all four grandchildren were with me and I couldn't speak properly to them, couldn't get out what it was I so urgently wanted to say. The words wouldn't form: was I having a stroke? All this time I'd thought I was still awake, but then I woke, in the dark. Could I speak? I tested it out by asking Himself if he was awake ...

Apparently, for the first time in years, I'd been talking in my sleep. All he'd made out were the words "I can't get the words out." And suddenly the concept of bed and sleep as a haven is less certain. The last time I recall this was when I was in Vietnam and having hallucinatory dreams because of the anti-malarials I was taking, and over breakfast I learned that stress is having widespread effects on sleep patterns . 

Question: is knowing why enough to prevent something happening?