Major Tom to Ground Control

An acquaintance of mine once got a job in a chocolate factory. She told me they tell you you can eat as much as you like. If you sit there in front of the conveyor belt checking that everything's the right shape or whatever it is you're supposed to do and you get the urge, go for it. Help yourself. By the end of your first week, so the reasoning goes, you'll never want to look at a square of the brown stuff again.

I'm beginning to feel that way about snow. At one time, if I opened the curtains to find that the world outside had turned white, and that all the things I'm used to seeing out there had been transformed into extraordinary shapes, I used to feel my spirit lighten. This was the stuff of snowmen and snowballs. Today would be different. The roads would be blocked and everything I had to do that day put on hold. I'd get on the phone, find that half the places I had to go were closed anyway and that the other half were inaccessible. After that, I could slow down and take my time. Spend all day in my slippers. I could go back to bed if I wanted to. Lounging around quickly gets tiresome if you've nothing else to do but, in my opinion, if you hardly ever get the chance to do it, a day when you've nothing else to do but lounge around is heaven.

Now, when I look out of the window and see that everything is still blanked out under a layer of the white stuff, that another couple of inches have fallen in the night and that the blue tits are still in a frenzy, pecking at the peanuts I leave out for them, desperately trying to eat enough to stay alive, I ask myself, when will it all end? I feel like an astronaut whose ship has crash-landed on the ice-planet lightyears from earth, waiting for the arrival of a rescue mission they know will never come. It will take years for the SOS call to reach mission control and even more years for the rescuers to make the journey. By the time they arrive, the stricken ship will be buried under metres of ice, like a mastodon in the arctic.

Not Snow Again!

 I'm sorry but I can't resist another riff on the nature of snow.

Usually, in the morning, I look out the window and confirm to myself that everything is much the same as it was yesterday. It'll probably -hopefully- be the same tomorrow. I guess we all do this without really thinking much about it.

When you look out in the morning and everything is covered with snow it can change, I think, the way we feel about time. It looks like the last time it snowed. It's a view I've seen most years, for years. It doesn't take me back to yesterday - it takes me back to all those years in the past when I looked out in the morning to see snow.

And it's the same. Made afresh but always the same.

I looked out of the window this morning, saw the sundial and realised that, in  a way,  it explained what I'm trying to say:

I was reminded of the beginning of TS Eliot's Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                                     But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

*

I Know Where I'm Going

Actually dared to start looking at possible holiday destinations the other day. We've thought about it before but never actually looked into it. First choice would be a cottage by the sea in Wales. It will need to have disabled access. We looked online and found one or two. It would be nice to get away again. It'll probably be months before we get vaccinated but such thoughts are good for morale. It would be nice, too, to have people stay again. The record (set the year before covid, I think) was seven. All the spare beds were full here. Someone kipped down in front of the fire, another under the piano. 

I never thought I'd feel nostalgic about queuing for the bathroom.

It's snowing again. This time it shows no sign of stopping.  It looks to be about six inches deep from what I can see from here, the deepest yet. I've been out a couple of times already to feed the birds but  I've no inclination, though,  to go outside again with a ruler just to verify this! 

Watching the snow come and go when you're stuck at home is a bit like watching traffic lights change at night when there's no traffic. I wouldn't say this makes me feel down - rather,  it intrigues me. 

North Stoke was talking about Powell Pressburger films.  This is one of my favourites. If I hadn't had any online work to get on with this afternoon I might have sat down to watch it:

I like their unique quirkiness: perhaps the most obvious example in this film being the telephone box next to the waterfall. The telephone box (on Mull,  I think)  exists and has become something of a shrine for Powell Pressburger fans. 

The view up the Hill

 We woke up this morning to see large flakes of snow falling past the window. 

There's a good couple of inches now. For the first time this winter,  there's a chance it won't just be washed away by the next shower of rain.

We live in a dip in the ground.  Here, when it snows, you feel surrounded, coccooned. It feels like that too,  I'm sure,  because there's usually no need for us to go out these days.  

The snow plays tricks with  time. The day becomes disconnected from yesterday and connects instead with all the other days when it snowed here. It brings back memories of those days - mainly the memory of a feeling that everything you planned on doing will need to be postponed. It's not always possible,  of course.  Some things have to go ahead come what may but with regard to everything else, it's no bad thing, once in a while. 

Not that we had anything planned today,  what with the pandemic restrictions. There have been many times in the last few months when it felt here as if we'd been 'snowed in', without the snow.