Snow came

Early this morning wet snow teemed down around us at 500m elevation.
Later we took a walk and gave a pre-Epiphany greeting to neighbours. Their son gave us a jar of his honey.

A strange shifting world of low cloud, fog rising up and clinging to the slopes and forest and snow in between, The distant sound of the plough scraping up and down the road to the pass at 1000m.

If you look carefully in the olive grove in the photo taken across the valley from us you can just make out Pieter Bruegel the Elder trudging through the snow with his hunting dogs. 

Thank you for the Blipday greeting yesterday. It was such a grim day with the confirmatory news from the UK on the lockdowns that had to come and came to late in England.

We're in red lockdown today with the rest of Italy. On Thursday we go yellow and then back up to orange at the weekend and then each region gets classified on 21 criteria (hospital beds and ICU capacity percentages, R rate, ice cream consumption in last five saints' days, alcohol intake per head, hours of crap TV watched etc).

Lovely to see the snow and The Boss is much enjoying her new super-duper binoculars which finally arrived by DHL from Cardiff. The Fed Ex parcel is still languishing in a small town in the Abruzzo for reasons that remain obscure.