Tuesday 3rd January

I find the current warm but overcast and predominantly warm weather a bit wistful, don’t you?  It is almost as if we haven’t even begun to have a Winter yet; it feels far more like Autumn.  ‘And is that a good thing?’  I ask myself, and of course the answer must be no.  It is good for the old-age pensioners, my mother included, who after a lifetime of thrift, where saving money has always taken precedence over actually wanting to spend it, find that the usual winter quandary of ‘eat or heat’ no longer applies.  Not that my mother is particularly hard-up, she still has quite a really large sum in the bank, left over from when we sold the old house in Putney, and has her pension, and no mortgage or rent to pay, but I know that despite my protestations she is saving this up for me, who needs it even less than she does.  But generally with heating bills rocketing in the last year, we should be thankful that we haven’t had a cold snap this Winter.  Also for the poor beleaguered NHS, where the freeze brings with it multiple broken bones and flu-related illnesses, at least this year seems to be giving it some relief.

But for me, despite being no impediment to my daily walks, the lack of snow makes me wistful and I almost yearn for the kind of Winter I love.  You know, those cold frosty mornings where every twig and each blade of grass has its own delicate crystallized pattern etched all over it, and your breath condenses into tiny cloudlets as you breath out, and you come in with damp nose and eyebrows and red red cheeks, and have to sit with your overcoat and scarf still on as you fumblingly make a cup of coffee and sit by the fire,( well the electric coal effect mock wood burning stove that passes for a fire these days) until you feel warm enough to get undressed.  And you look out in the morning across the few square feet of lawn which is now covered by a fine layer of eider feathers, with just a few tracks of hopping robins to show there is any life out there at all.  I miss these signs of a real Winter, in fact I almost yearn for it.  I look out now in the mornings at another drizzly overcast day, with the sun barely visible at all  behind those thick whitey grey massing clouds and the temperature of twelve or even fifteen degrees is absurdly warm, and I get wistful.  Wistful for the real winters I remember from my childhood, and even the one we had last year, but also wistful for the Spring days which followed.  It still feels like Autumn to me, and I have an awful feeling that we may have to wait until late February or even March for snow this year, and so even longer to wait for Spring.

So, yes, while in some ways a mild Winter is welcome, I feel sad for the winter we haven’t had yet.  Maybe it has got lost somewhere mid-Atlantic.