City limits

Another ‘red’ lockdown day. No moving beyond our ‘comune’s’ boundaries. I walked in the steady rain to the limit, strayed daringly beyond, and then scuttled back. It’s a good walk in the wet, burn after burn hurrying under the road, the steady thrum of water, jays, somber tits, chaffinches and hidden away woodcock probing the sodden ground.

I remember reading in the early days of the pandemic a Wuhan nurse saying something like you-cannot-give-up-on-hope. Without-hope-we-have-nothing.

I haven’t. But we have heavy weather yet to get through. Nothing will be over by springtime and false dawns are better eschewed than foolishly embraced. Johnson’s Billy Bunterish boosterism is a terrible sickness exacting a terrible price.

So let’s hope and believe in a better year to come. But also give it time, hold on to our impatience and salute those who risk so much more than we. And when the reckoning is to be made hold those who let us down to account.

Love and thanks to you Blippers who pass by and keep me coming back. And a special shout out to Yoshiko who visits every day from Japan. And to Sara of Birchington who has communicated her frustration at my photos of steps. ‘Enough with the steps already’, she has said. Noted. But I can’t promise to decease as steps are all we have to move forward. And I have more to make yet.

So here’s hoping for a better year.