A bitter day that reminded me of one of my favourite poems: Thomas Hardy's Darkling Thrush. This evening it was a blackbird, not a thrush, that had decided 'to fling his soul upon the growing gloom.'

'I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.'