From Borea

I woke up today in my new room, the small box room that was Eleanor's. Unheated, 6x6 ft and just big enough to fit a double bed in, nothing else, just the bed. But on pulling up the blinds as I awoke in a fug of fumes from the recently painted white walls, I felt immediately reconciled to the move. The room is west facing with views across the Downs to Chanctonbury and across the Weald to Leith Hill. It being the full moon last, there it was to greet me this dawn, setting in the sky opposite a sun which was as yet hidden behind Truleigh Hill. I opened the window to get a lung full of the air and was hit by three things: the smell of earth which just filled the air, sound of bird song which was chaoticly loud and the colours of the landscape: dark green with a pink hue from the gathering light. All three things owed something to the transformation which had occurred in the night, the frost had left the valley for the first time in over a week.

And this had been no typical Sussex frost frost. For the past week we have had freezing fog every night, with temperatures plunging as low as minus 9, something I've never seen in Sussex as a grown adult. But tneither was this the biting freeze that might come with an artic gale, there was no wind at all this week. Instead it was a benign cold, which started each day in deep thick fogs and then burnt through to pale blue skies over an ice-bound landscape. The lack of wind and the constant below freszing temperatures allowed a thick spiky hoar frost to cover anything which stood still long enough in the air, so that branches began to bow with the unaccustomed weight of the ice. All the trees looked as if they had budded a early blossom, 2cm spikes of pure frost. Jack had been busy this week.

I tried to spend as much time as I could in the cold air this week, running through the cold until the sweat on my eye-brows froze, routinely cracking the ice on the pond each morning and putting out seed and fat for the birds and just taking time to walk in the transformed landscape. This is what you are meant to do in northern latitutdes in winter, experience periods of cold which mark out the seasons. After our appalling non-summer it was really grounding to experience a period of porper winter.

But today it has all gone, colours are back in the landscape, the soil on the surrounding fields, which has been heaved and broken by deep penetrating ice for the past weeks is now breathing again and releasing it's warm fecund gases to the air. The Field Fares and other Scandinavian migrant bird are gone from the feeding table and the resident Sparrows and Black Birds are giving vent to their relief at the passing cold and maybe an early anticipation of spring.

It's Eleanors birthday today, always a coda to our winter celebrations. By the time mine and Sam's birthdays come round the first buds will be brekaing and shoots visible in the garden. Hopefully this year we'll have the seasons in their proper order from here on in.

Pictures of the frst here