December 26 + 

With the dog for a walk around Windy Ash. It was a beautiful winter’s morning⁠—a low sun giving out a pale light but no warmth⁠—a luminant, not a fire⁠—the hedgerows bare and well trimmed, an Elm lopped close showing white stumps which glistened liquidly in the sun, a Curlew whistling overhead, a deeply cut lane washed hard and clean by the winter rains, a gunshot from a distant cover, a creeping Wren, silent and tame, in a bramble bush, and over the five-barred gate the granite roller with vacant shafts. I leaned on the gate and saw the great wisps of cloud in the sky like comets’ tails. Everything cold, crystalline. + 