don't confuse the narrator

walk on by

In Spain, I lived for many years in a house where the main heating was provided by a log stove, so whenever I went out walking, I was always on the look out for fallen pine cones. When dry, pine cones – or, perhaps, fir cones – are highly combustible and make it so much easier to get a fire started. Now, although I’m living in a house with central heating, the instinct to gather kindling and cones remains, and the recent storms have strewn much temptation in my path.

Today I succumbed.

Well, OK, it isn’t quite a pine cone, but I reckon it would burn just as well.

I should have resisted, but I’m afraid my attention was snagged by all those prickly wooden “petals” and it was impossible to walk on by. So now there’s a rather glorious branch of a monkey puzzle tree about three foot long standing in the corner of my room.

“it was a dark and stormy night”

street lamp refracted through rain drops

Except it wasn’t. At least, it wasnt dark.

For some unknown reason the local council left the street lights on all night last night, so when I woke in the wee small hours I could see just how much damage the wind was doing in the garden. It was not a pleasant sight, but the thistledown street lamp almost made up for it.

red weather, rainbow weather

The weather continues high on the list of conversation topics in the UK: in the last few days, I’ve seen snow, sleet, hail, rain and wind.

Right now, listening to the wind worrying and wuthering outside my window, and knowing this area is by no means the worst hit, I’m really not in the least surprised to hear that the Met Office has issued a red alert for high winds.

Still, in the midst of all this wild weather, we have had a few spells of utterly glorious sunshine. Unsurprisingly, then, we’ve also had rainbows.

A photo snapped through a rain-dotted window can hardly do justice to the one I saw this afternoon, but it will serve as a reminder.

And of course, the Bible tells us that that is precisely what the rainbow is: a token of the covenant between God and earth, a reminder that “the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh.”

This may be hard to believe, given the recent flooding, but there is a certain comfort in re-reading the part of the story after the flood has resided, when God makes the promise to Noah:
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afterwards

empty house
dust on the dressing table
cobwebs in her hair brush

yet more weather

reindeer plush and daffodils — Looks like rain, dear

No one who lives in the UK needs to be told that the weather continues unabated, and I can’t be the only one who’s thinking that surely now February is here we might expect some proper winter weather rather than all this wind and rain.

The phrase February fill dike came to mind. Googling it I found this article from the Guardian two years ago, which reports that “southern, central and eastern regions […] are teetering on the brink of drought”. It also says, somewhat surprisingly, that February tends to be one of the driest months of the year.

Not wanting to get political, I’ll just mention that I was told as a child that “bad governments bring bad weather.”

Well, whether drought or flood, we seem to have been having bad weather for years. The poem below was written in January 2001:
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