Three Seasonal Things #8

A glowing wall; glassy crab apples; SNOW! (not much...)

It’s amazing to me how often there ends up being a theme to your comments, and this week it was ice, snow, the moon and…mountains…specifically Welsh ones, but not solely. Isn’t that good and odd?

Above all though the Full Cold Moon REALLY brought the cold, and lots of you were out crunching frost and snow and gazing upwards at the clear sparkling night skies. Suddenly it was really winter, and I’m really feeling the benefit of this exercise in looking and noting, because if you go back just a couple of weeks on here it is so clear that it wasn’t, and then it suddenly was. Brrr…

Here are some other highlights from your comments last week:

The last lime leaves falling like raindrops; an early morning walk through thick crunchy frost, dawn ahead and the full moon setting behind; the full moon over a lantern lit path in a park dressed up for Christmas; unpacking and rediscovering Christmas decorations with a Christmas playlist on; a cosy afternoon with a Christmas movie on Netflix; the sun glowing orange through the last clinging oak leaves; magical north Wales mountains in proper snow; a flock of talkative fieldfares; crunching barefoot over frosty pebbles after a sunrise full moon sea swim (yikes); the sun appearing over a mountain (southern Snowdonia) for only 45 minutes a day, but bringing gold, silver, glitter and iridescence when it does; glowing peach and pink skies; colleagues crowding around a window and exclaiming at the first thick flakes of snow; red-gold Alpenglühen on rooftops that the frost hasn’t melted all day (Alpenglühen is the pink or golden tint that remains on the tips of the alps when the rest of the mountains are in shadow - new one to me, isn’t that wonderful?); and seagulls dancing behind a tractor as it ploughed through falling snow.

Here’s mine:

A glowing wall

Ok, look, you all know I haven’t been out much this last week…let’s keep our expectations low please! I am much, much better now (thank you for your lovely messages) but there have been no mountains. On this morning there was an incredible peachy dawn and silvery frosted grass and I was still too ill to go out in it. So I went into the garden and I took this, of the silhouette of my veranda on my neighbour’s kitchen extension wall. I kind of love it.

Glassy crab apples

This crab apple is one of the best things I ever planted in our garden. The colour of its fruits is this gorgeous pinky red, and after the hard frost they took on this beautiful glassy look. They stay on the tree far into winter, I think until they are really softened by the weather, at which point a pair of fat pigeons comes and sits on the fence and gobbles the lot in about a day.

SNOW!

I know a lot of you have vastly superior snow pics, but this is Bristol, which seems to have some kind of subtropical microclimate that repels snow. It can be a foot deep in Gloucestershire to our north, and a foot deep in Somerset to our south, and we will be walking around in t-shirts. So we were quite pleased with this.

Please leave me your comments, to let me know what seasonal things you have been noticing and doing and smelling etc… I really love them. And also… if you are looking for any last-minute Christmas gifts then do consider The Almanac 2023! Which has just spent its third week in a row as a Sunday Times Bestseller, whoop!