Monday was another fine day that called for an itinerant route back from the village.
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It offered more opportunities for icicle photos.
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Although I only captured a couple.
According to the long range forecast, next Wednesday the temperature will finally climb above freezing, after first descending to a new low over the weekend. This has been the longest spell of seriously cold weather I can remember.
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Harsh winters are hard for wildlife and for many people, yet I savour them.
Why? People ask.
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It certainly isn’t because I enjoy long dark nights or feeling cold.
Nor have I always liked Winter, but I think I began to regard it differently after I saw the splendid film Dr Zhivago.
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The opening scenes of that film so brilliantly portrayed the cold and who could forget Varykino?
It was the first time I had seen the stark beauty of Winter.
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Then, when my aunt and uncle retired to Maine, I had occasion to experience real blizzards and the beauty of their aftermath.
When my friend Tim used one of his innumerable connections to get us a hugely discounted Antarctic cruise, people thought we were mad. “What will you do in Antarctica?” Some asked.
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Scandalously, some people on that ship chose to play Scrabble.
Once across the dreaded Drake Passage, we were surrounded 24/7 by the most stunning scenery as we cruised the ice floes.
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We encountered many types of penguin and watched out for birds, seals and whales.
We were reluctant to put our heads down at night because the Sun never completely set and we didn’t want to miss a thing.
Yet some played games in the library. Incredible.
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The sheer magnificence of it all was mind-blowing.
And the silence.
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There is something special too about the isolation. It’s the same sort of feeling you get far out to sea (though not on a noisy cruise ship), or in the desert at night under a sky ablaze with stars. It makes you feel like the most insignificant little speck of nothingness which suggests all human struggles matter not in the least.
This, to me, is comforting.
Like soothing music:
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I loved the film adaptation of Dr Zhivago too. In fact the coldest I have ever been was in the Soviet Union, in Leningrad. The sea was frozen in the Gulf of Finland. We went on a 3-city tour (Leningrad/Moscow/Kiev) in the late February/early March of that year and I thought my face would freeze solid, and my ears fall off. I bought an (real fur) ear-flap style hat in Kiev that I still own today. (They said it was sable, but I suspected rabbit) As lovely as it looks in the photos, I am very grateful that it is not so cold here in Beetley.
Best wishes, Pete.
I must say, looking at the photos in this post, it seems like a very cold Winter (but still beautiful). Yes, I love silence in nature – experienced a lot of that during our wild camping adventure on the West Coast of South Africa, but also this past weekend in the Cederberg Mountains (and we even slept outside while watching the stars) … there are few things like this that give me complete contentment.