Frosted

Our turn to be engulfed in fog all day - not a blink of sunshine to be seen. No wind either, and temperature of -1ºC throughout. I'm finding it increasingly hard to get out of bed these mornings; I sit there with the fire on in the bedroom and a mug of tea and feel disinclined to move until it's properly light, though today there was no sense of sunrise, just a gradual lightening of the grey. Even when I was up and clothed I found it hard to get going. Is this what getting older  actually involves? And yet I think of our friend Lady Findhorn going out in the dark to reach a distant beach and the dubious delights of sea bathing in midwinter and realise I'm kidding myself. 

I did, however, wash the entire contents of the linen basket and deploy damp washing wherever seemed sensible - for the outside drying was clearly not on even to me. And I wrote a bunch of Christmas cards that require little notes in them - to people I care about but never see, in person or on social media, like an old school friend, or the friend of my first pregnancy who was a year or so ahead of me in the motherhood stakes and lived just up the road for socialising and advice once I'd gone on maternity leave, or the French friend who has stayed with us and we with her - we even attended her wedding in Brittany - and whom I'd love to see again. Meanwhile, Himself was in the kitchen making a batch of curry for the next few weeks ...

But by afternoon I was stir crazy. Fog, frost, slippy places notwithstanding, I was for going out. Himself clearly had a vision of me falling somewhere in the wild and him having to use my location sharing to find me, so he came too. We went to Benmore Gardens and climbed to the top of the hill, seeing only two other people the whole time other than a gardener who passed in his wee buggy at the end of his day and waved cheerily. It was utterly magical, and grew more so the higher we climbed. Trees, twigs, grass heads, cobwebs - all frosted and gleaming. The frost grew thicker on the open top of the hill, and we sat briefly in the Andean refuge and contemplated our white domain - until we realised the light was fading and hurried down before we were left picking our way in the dark. There was a robin, and random small birdsong, and the distant sound of a mechanical saw, and far away the slight echo of a burn. I didn't want to leave.

But we did, and were home in time for a little more work before dinner, and online Compline, and Shetland on the telly. I would have been less confused had I sorted out characters' names when they first appeared ...

Photo shows Himself as we emerged from the thicker woodland onto the shoulder of the hill and the views started to appear.