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.