Look up, all you hear is sky blue bells ringing

Day 7 of our ongoing cold snap.

Unlike snow, where the days are cloudy as often as not, and if it is sunny you spend the day in fear of a depressing thaw, frosty mornings are clear and blue and free of care. The world is quietened, as though someone has spread a thin coat of sparkly whitewash over it. Even the ugliest red brick roof tiles are a muted, silent version of themselves. The sky is lightest, sharpest blue hazing to white at the edges, and the rising sun turns the eastern sky palest mauves and pinks, while the full moon hovers like a ghost on the other side of the sky. In the evening it turns into a harvest moon and hovers, blood-orange and unbelievably huge, on the dusky horizon. Long grass is so heavily frosted that it is almost completely white, and on close inspection sparkles the sunlight at you so perfectly in a way that Christmas glitter would sell its soul to replicate. Cobwebs hang heavy and solid, the spiders nowhere to be seen, and robins everywhere have suddenly decided that this season’s colour is red.

And then there are the human side effects…remembering how lovely scarves are, waking up in the small hours and tucking your nose under the duvet to warm it up, smiling at someone and feeling your lips crack, the smell of car de-icer spray in the mornings, the fantastic shock of walking out of a warm building and taking an unsuspecting lungful of the frozen outside.

Hello winter. I missed you.

Let neither us deluded be with dreame or phantasy

Question of the day: Are stories bad for you?

Well, kind of.

It has recently really dawned on me how much of my waking time is spent considering fictional characters. It has always been a part of my life…watch my dog being silly and ponder what Nighteyes would think, and the like. But of late it has been occupying an impressive proportion of my thought processes, thanks in no small measure to that Whedon guy and a certain JK Rowling. (Curiously I did not find myself lying awake at night stressing over Nevare’s future.)

So part one of today’s enquiry is whether it is detrimental to spend so much of your life in a fictional bubble. I could never ever join the camp that holds that all fiction is useless (the Yay Biography camp?), but I do wonder…would I be somehow ‘better’ if I spent more of my life thinking about real people?

And part two is a question close to all our hearts: are imaginary friends bad for you?

…again, kind of.

I love the fact that I have got to know so many fantastic people through the internet. I love the Hobbling mail system (apologies Em, btw…a reply will materialise shortly, I promise…) and I have thoroughly enjoyed every meet I’ve attended. But, as recently demonstrated on here, I have now reached the point where the person I would describe as my best friend is someone I have actually met a grand total of 6 times. (I am hoping I counted correctly.) Again – I am not complaining! But I just…wonder.

I suspect the answer to both these questions is ‘everything in moderation.’ But…I would be interested to know whether the rest of you worry about this disconnect to the ‘real’ world sometimes too…

Food, glorious food

Isn’t it great?

Imagine having been out walking on a frosty morning. Your cheeks are glowing and the tip of your nose is going numb, and you’re beginning to wish you’d had something more than that Weetabix all those hours ago. Now imagine biting into a bacon sandwich...

Apologies to vegetarians...or bacon-haters. Or bread-haters.

But isn’t food fantastic stuff? The heavenly taste of something truly excellent, the sheer variety of flavours and textures...

Consider something even so simple as cheese. Pure mouldy milk product. But within that one category you can vary from mild, comforting cheddar to rubbery edam you feel must have been manufactured by aliens who’d read about cheese; from gorgeous, milky crumbly wensleydale to pliant, pungent brie; from strongest stilton to most innocuous Philadelphia spread...and a hundred other kinds which are now flocking into my mind but which I will not turn into Clement Freud and list here. All that in just one aisle of the supermarket.

Now ask yourself this: if you had the choice between a) your current life, complete with all the foods, drinks and taste sensations currently available to you or b) a brilliant life, with the job you’ve always wanted (that one where we get paid to read books, for example) and travel the world – BUT you are kept alive through an intravenous drip and do not eat or drink at all...which would you choose?

Did you have to think about it?