As it did on 5th January 2025, it snowed, but at least I wasn’t trying to get to London today — nor anywhere else. A quick walk was mandated around lunchtime, though, mainly for photography purposes. I like the way the young trees march up the hillside in their protectors, somewhat mimicking the chimney stacks in front.
Taken while sheltering under the tree on our allotment. Showers like this came in every half an hour or so for most of the day. Nothing else happened, but that’s the way it was planned.
I’m sure birds have just as much of a developed weather sense as do humans. Why wouldn’t they? High winds, for a start, could really screw up that trip they were planning to make to, say, the local household waste centre. These guys may or may not be trying to sort some stuff out before the latest heavy shower comes rolling in, just as we might speed up our journey home from the shops in the face of a cloud like this.
A hundred years ago the town of Burnley had 103,000 people in it; these days it has about 78,000, so around a quarter fewer. They still seem pretty closely packed in, though.
Back home, where it is, of course, raining. (It did seem to be threatening rain on one evening in Dubai but it never fell.) Then again, the sun is shining too, at this point in time. It’s this essential ambivalence that keeps us Britons who we are, I suppose.
From the colour of one specific bit of Manchester yesterday, to this scene of utter grayness. Or is it greyness with an E? I’ve never been sure. Gra/ey it was today though, for sure. Such a gloomy day .
When Clare first looked at this photo as I uploaded and worked on it last night, she thought at first the backdrop was one of stormy skies; but it’s not, it’s the woodland up the side of the valley. The reason that is not catching the sun, and the houses are, is that at this time of year around 2.20pm is the point in the day where the sun is already starting to go down behind the valley wall. Here, you get what you can in the winter.
There was certainly a decent amount of smoke coming out of one of these stacks; but it seems he was satisfied that nothing was particularly amiss. I pray that I never have to get up on our roof, or the roof of any of these overdwellings, for any reason, professional or otherwise. It’s a long way down from five stories up.
The world turns. Bearing in mind that the earliest I have seen the sun reappear at one side of our house in the mornings is around 16th February, and assuming a basic symmetry on each side of the Winter Solstice, that means it’s about to disappear for the winter, an event that is rather less noticeable. But bearing in mind the clocks are going back in a few days, quite soon even this rather wan level of sunlight isn’t going to make it over the chimneys… and we’ll see it in February. (It’s not like winter in Tromsø though, that’s true.)
Being 42 