Angles

Arrrr the wind is bitingly cold. Crystal clear limpid air. More snow on mountains extra.

Neve in Marzolino
Dalla sera al mattino

This local saying assuring us that snow in March never lasts. But this northerly wind is set to blow for days.

Reminds me of a long ago day on the granite hills above Zennor in far west Cornwall in such an unremitting wind as I tried to make a nearly full-size football goal using some fishing net I’d bought. It was hard enough but the wind would keep picking up the netting and throwing it out of shape.

Would have made a great opening scene in an offbeat film about living the good and slightly nutty good life: a bloke in a hilltop field, under a harsh blue March sky, shouting at the wind, ranting at its unfairness, and pressing on when anyone with sense would have stopped and waited for still weather (an admitted rarity with three thousand miles of ocean crashing on the cliffs at Gurnard’s Head).

Still the goal was made and many a happy hour was passed at Bramble Lane with P’s shooting skills ever improving and sending Dad back into the net to retrieve the ball with ever greater frequency.

Until a planning officer sent a letter informing us we had built an object outside our ‘domestic curtilage’ (domestic what?!) and I cunningly put the whole goal on hinges so it could be hidden from his piercing forensic gaze. (To be fair there had been terrible planning abuses before us with a shotgun wielded in local legend.)

How the years pass while that wind and its maddening bite stay the same.