A day of ... a cliché?

Definitely. A day of two halves. A cold day, dominated by contrast. We allowed ourselves an extra half hour before the alarm; by the time I was up the sun was shining into my bedroom like a level searchlight. I had a whole row of things I thought I'd do - my Italian, natch; clean the front steps of green moss and other mess using the product which said to do it on a dry day so that said product could dry; take my regular prescription request to drop off at the surgery; clean the corner of the bathroom shelf where the tube of hand cream split and where I only noticed the beastly mess last night; have a thorough re-read of candidate profiles for our church. Maybe we'd fit in a walk on this lovely, sunny, blue-sky day ...

And, inevitably, the last idea won out. I was making the coffee, looking out at the sunny garden, and I thought: let's go now. Let's go when the sun is at its not-very-high highest, so that we're not gazing at yet another sunset and worrying about car drivers not seeing us on a country road. Let's go before lunch. And so we went, driving into the brightness that had us squinting and sitting like meerkats in the car, leaving the car at the Ardyne and setting off up the hill between the farms, talking about church matters. (There's no escape when one is married to someone else who has an equal stake in the outcome.) We talked so much that we didn't think about how far we were going, until we ended up gazing over the ornamental lake at Knockdow, the grand house bought by the son of a Russian oligarch and therefore closed and empty-looking for the past couple of years. And on the way back I wandered down a wee lane towards a field to take this totally dreadful into-the-sun photo because it gives the sense of a world bathed in chilly light, cold and still and full of the sound of distant geese and small birds in the trees around me.

And we went home for lunch an hour later than we usually eat. 

As we arrived in Dunoon, a notification came up on my watch: heavy snow in Dunoon area, 30 minutes. We laughed, decided that an American app maybe didn't get it right all the time ... and I went upstairs to remove my outer layers and saw a great bank of heavy cloud advancing down the glen that houses Loch Eck and Benmore Gardens.

My extra photo is one I took from my upper window maybe two hours after the main. Total whiteout. It lasted for about 90 minutes, than stopped. The sky cleared again. There was a tinge of gold from a sunset somewhere. And then it grew dark, and later the moon rose looking brilliant against a clear sky and the snow, which had lain enough to make the world white. 

And all I accomplished was to clean that corner of the bathroom shelf. 

Ah well...