Yes I have the cold. If I were a man it would be flu. The OH brought it home and sat and sneezed without benefit of a handkerchief or tissue, saying that he was paralysed when sneezing. It took two days of thinking I’d escaped, three days of a throat feeling like a trick razor swallower where the trick had gone wrong and four nights of not sleeping for coughing and now here I am.
My feet are like blocks of ice because I decided I wasn’t well enough for a work out. I nearly coughed until I was sick this morning, however, being female I have managed to empty two bins, clean the sink and feed the birds, despite the freezing fog. I am glad not to be a farmer having to get up and go out to care for livestock.
Outside the freezing fog is clinging to the spider webs, miracles of architecture that they are. If my breath didn’t turn into freezing fog outside, I’d photograph them for you.
I do not understand people who talk about the majesty of winter or the joy of ice. I do not comprehend arctic explorers. I have a well travelled school friend who went to Antarctica to see a penguin colony. She said the smell was so dreadful you could hardly breathe. You don’t get that information on picturesque wildlife films, do you?
I was forced to go skiing with the school in the 1960s. I was not grateful. I had a pair of borrowed wool trousers from my cousin that were half lined. The outside was worn smooth but, as she had skinny legs the inside was in much the same condition as when it came off the sheep. Sheep must be very patient, you never see them jumping around the fields because they are itching, tickling themselves with their own wool. Imagine if you were a sheep and found you have a wool allergy. If we could teach sheep to use scissors, your winter jumper would be acrylic and that would be the choice. I did once interview an Australian doll maker who wandered for very very very many miles along a barbed wire fence, in Australia, collecting wool from sheep who couldn’t wait to get sheared but were rubbing up against the fence. This, of course, is the danger of importing animals to unknown lands. You’d never get this problem with kangaroos. When they leap, sprung up with a boing by those tails, they’re creating a fan of cold air up their nether regions. Adapted by evolution, you see. Built-in air cooling.
I see dog walkers from the upstairs window, they look utterly miserable but the dogs are doing what they are told and being grateful for a trip out. This is the good thing about cats. Next door’s cats come through the garden at speed, this time of year, heading for their cat door. You could never train a guide cat for the blind; if they didn’t want to go shopping they wouldn’t go and if they fancied coming back via the top of the garden wall and flattened under the hedge, they would, dragging a gasping owner at speed as the cat door loomed.
I feel sorry for the birds. If you knew that you would be reanimated as a garden bird after mortality struck, fewer people would be badly behaved. I put out fresh water but it’s so cold it was solid under an hour. I had a delivery of a massive bag of small suet and very good seed which I’m putting on the table and on the ground but the little birds only feed early in the morning. I don’t know what they do as the day wears on, they do like to sit concealed inside the camellia bush.
Thank goodness for the great indoors. That was possibly the greatest human invention ever. The first day someone sat in the cave poking the fire, watching the dinosaurs galumphing past and decided to stay in, that was the start of civilisation as far as I’m concerned. Yes I know, agriculture, Olympic games, black ball in the bag, Julius Cesar, Industrial and various other revolutions all overshadowed, for my money, by William Caxton, cavity wall insulation, and the seventeenth century development of the wing chair, the great heroes of staying in.
Get warm and comfy, pass the tissues and do a bit of reading (there’s sixteen and a half years of reading here, you could do a lot worse, especially with a cold, in the winter.)
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