Dancing

As I drove the pothole polka across the village, a flurry of fluffed ice crystals danced out of the slipstream of the car in front, looking like nothing in the cold dry morning so much as the fall-out of a high altitude pillow altercation.

I was reflecting on Monday, as I drove past the Spring gently freezing into sparkling rims round the still puddles, how fortunate we are here. Too Easterly for the South Western snow; too Westerly for the South Eastern. Too far South to enjoy the Northern snow now coating Cumbria and drawing, like a damp unwelcome blanket, as far as the knees of Basingstoke at the weekend. Not, in the bitter wind that has chivvied us back in the door after a single lap of the lunchtime building, in the Goldilocks Zone, by any (except the fevered physicist's) stretch of the imagination, but better off than most.

The distant, pink camellia is showing opening buds down the garden, joining the red in the front now showing its colour all around, not just against the single-glazed window pane's microclimate. Under the busy bird feeder clematis is climbing and blackbirds are building again in the garage ivy.

In the dusk, setting

My neighbour's security light flicks into action at every passing car, themselves shining eye-scorching beams East, but even so, fail to prevent this morning's pony theft of rubbish bags.

At 19:10, bare feet slowly losing heat to the gravelly driveway, just above the nearby chimney, West; C/2011 L4 Pan-Starrs I salute you, and also use my left hand to steady binoculars.