Snow day

It was a surprise to wake up to snow - and not a welcome one, because I'd been planning on going out birding. But there are no reliable bird sites closer to home than about a fifty minute drive, and it didn't seem sensible to undertake one of those with no idea whether I'd be heading towards better or worse weather, or what the roads would be like.

This was my second idea for a landscape shot - or third, if you count the photos I took of the back garden from the kitchen doorstep. I'd cadged a lift to Offenham Bank with R, who had errands to run in Evesham (and four-wheel drive), hoping to capture an interesting Vale snowscape, but when we reached the viewpoint there was no view: between the falling snow and the enveloping misty murk you could barely see more than a few hundred metres. So then I asked him to loop round to the Cleeve Prior Road, and drop me where I could look down over Middle Littleton Tithe Barn and the parish church.

The problem with this scene, of course, is the intrusive telephone poles and wires, but it does at least give a flavour of the snowy morning. This was pretty much the end of the good stuff though - by the time I'd walked round and down to the church the snow had stopped falling and begun thawing, and was falling off the trees in big, cold, wet gobs onto anyone foolish enough to walk underneath them. Ahem. In the end it was a relief to get home, so I could remove my least-favourite boots, and shake the melted snow out of my hair and clothes.