January 27 + 

Still freezing and blowing. Coming back from the village, though I was tired and hobbling badly, decided to walk up the lane even if it meant crawling home on hands and knees. + 

The sky was a quick-change artist today. Every time you looked you saw a different picture. From the bottom of the hill I looked up and saw above me⁠—it seemed at an immense and windy height⁠—a piece of blue, framed in an irregular edge of white woolly cloud seen through the crooked branches of an Oak. It was a narrow crooked lane, sunk deep in the soil with large smooth surfaces of stone like skulls bulging up in places where the rain had washed away the soil. + 

Further on, the sun was lying low almost in the centre of a semicircular bend in the near horizon. It frosted the wool of a few sheep seen in silhouette, and then slowly disappeared in mist. On the right-hand side was a cottage with the smoke being wrenched away from the chimney top, and on the left a group of stately Firs, chanting a requiem like a cathedral choir. + 