The F in fog

After a cold, occasionally sunny weekend, today is the third morning of freezing fog. Three mornings doing the ice-scrape tango to the gentle hum of warming engine.

Out on the back roads, untreated, tyres have occasion for metaphysics. Twice Monday, once today, the car forgot about following the commands from the driver's seat. Not much; enough to be mildly disconcerting, enough to give warning of worse to come.

The air, cold, has gone stale. What air we have has been used already and contains memories of its last user. Traffic smells; the stale stench of burnt pig bedding (transmuted from smokey-bacon flavour to bacony and old smoke). Even indoors there is a lack of freshness: the admin ladies miasma, the unsubtle edge of washroom disinfectant, laser printer ozone and a thousand applications of fabric conditioner. It is unhelpful that I'm recovering the olfactory landscape after a cold last week. Odour returns, only partially welcome.

As bad as Water World?

Living close to the sea, although more than a stone's throw I admit, engenders a poetry of the soul, some of which I try to express here. This afternoon on BBC Radio 4 was a programme whose subject was Philip Larkin, a recognised poet who lived within the influence of the Humber Estuary, which he made a common theme of his work. I was relieved on hearing this programme quote some of his water inspired works, since they sounded exactly like the sort of Bollocks I write. I should be famous; sea?

Waterfall, not

Through agile planning
I'm complicit in my own
micro-management.

Not drowning

Motored a couple of miles on the water Saturday. Far enough to visit the summer mooring, not enough to feel the tug of the rising tide surging East up the Solent. It felt good to be afloat, even without wind; letting the boat battery and our own batteries recharge that little bit.

It's remained mild here, though windy today and mostly overcast with the same front that is dropping wintry showers further North. For three mornings in a row the dawn clouds have had a coral tint, but now, after dusk, there is the full moon that had soaked through my bedroom curtains every time I woke last night.

The turning of the year, the spring tides dragged by the waxed moon, daily rhythms of sun: all slow, low frequency, inexorable waves. The trick is to surf them.

Once again round New Year's buoy

With the shortest day behind I study the unpromising landscape for signs of better. The trees stand bare, as dead as ever they can be except for death itself. Leaf litter sinks to mud. The Forest beasts slink in shelter, moving economically, wearing their thickest; carrying layered ice on the harshest days. People walk heads down; celebrations done, back to the grind mostly. Network television's annual film budget is gone.

Only the birds seem cheered. Mornings I hear them, yes, sometimes fighting, but sometimes singing out the territories they need to raise new young; when the sun comes again.

My brood is overflowing the nest. Fledged, though they don't all know yet. Myself I yearn to sail again; to lay trust in wind and wave and tide but not be bound by time.

Turning

The kitchen light and the washing-up water condensing on the glass hid the dark garden until I switched it off to let the morning glow in, reflected off the translucence of water crystals.
After I closed the front gate I observed the world a moment. Mist hung between the houses, obscuring the view just beyond the end of the close. Each little Christmas light held a halo of vapour in the front gardens.

The car door pulled back slightly as I opened it; ice sticky. The glass looked wet, but a fingertip test revealed cold, texture; water frozen in the moment of running and dripping to a glassy model of itself.
After scraping the outside I sat, engine running, waiting until I could read the number-plate on my neighbour's car through the screen's internal fog.

After five miles I felt some warmth on my feet from the heater; the thermostat must have opened just before. The sky developed a glow where the sun was rising, faint pink, smeared yellow.

As far again and the sun was visible, but still seen through a haze. Misted fields and hedgerows backlit by this spectral star were visible as snapshots between periods of attentiveness to the road ahead; a sequence of Turneresque stills.

Rising up further beyond the river valleys and their fogs, the sun, itself risen, began to cut, to outline and to shadow.

Shortening

Three weeks since was a cold spell that extended over a few days leaving steadily less frost on the morning car as the atmosphere ran out of moisture. Nights skies were a pierced umbrella with Venus brightest and the new moon was earth-lit. Early morning light glittered off frosted surfaces, bearing little enough heat to melt them. Skies stretched between morning and late afternoon greys through all the pale blues, just darker than baby blue at noon.

Then came dampness; pooling in the Forest, misting across the plains and fogging in the shelter of tree-lined avenues. Through occasionally thin cloud, when it could be seen directly at all,  the moon rose to fullness and then set to wane again as its visiting hours were moved to morning.

Last night, Venus was up again until the wispy vapour thickened enough to hide her and our second named storm of winter played amongst the bare boughs of oak and beech, shaking harder the evergreens; fir and holly. Rain fell in sheets that accompanied the night's soundtrack of whispers and vortical moans; windows and gates shook.

The Forest's beauty is muted by the light and cloud; the palette softened and compressed to heavy shades dominated by browns.

The shortest day is upon us.